selling older players.
The master of that trade for many years was Wenger. Arsenal’s manager is one of the few people in football who can view the game from the outside. In part, this is because he has a degree in economic sciences from the University of Strasbourg in France. As a trained economist, he is inclined to trust data rather than the game’s received wisdom. Wenger is obsessed with the idea that in the transfer market clubs tend to overvalue a player’s past performance. That prompts them to pay fortunes – in transfer fees and salaries – for players who have passed their prime. FIFA TMS analysed the pay of players who moved internationally to Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany, Italy and Portugal in 2012, and found, remarkably, that the average man earned his peak fixed salary at the ripe old age of 32.
Seniority is a poor rationale for pay in football (and probably in other industries). All players are melting blocks of ice. The job of the club is to gauge how fast they are melting, and to get rid of them before they turn into expensive puddles of water. Wenger often lets defenders carry on until their mid-thirties, but he usually gets rid of his midfielders and forwards much younger. He flogged Thierry Henry for £16 million aged twenty-nine, Patrick Vieira for £14 million aged twenty-nine, Emmanuel Petit for £7 million aged twenty-nine and Marc Overmars for £25 million aged twenty-seven, and none of them ever did as well again after leaving Arsenal.
The average striker has peaked by age twenty-five, at least as measured by goals scored, as the French economist Bastien Drut has shown – think of Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler, Fernando Torres and Patrick Kluivert. Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Didier Drogba, who improved after their mid-twenties, are exceptions, probably because they never relied much on pace in the first place. Yet many clubs still insist on paying for past performance. Forty per cent of players bought by Premier League clubs from 2010 to 2016 were signed after passing their prime age, says Blake Wooster, chief executive of 21st Club, which advises football clubs. Manchester United’s hiring on loan of the twenty-eight-year-old Colombian striker Radamel Falcao just after severe injury was an especially bad decision, as was Chelsea’s repetition of United’s mistake a year later. English clubs particularly overvalue Premier League experience, says Wooster – it just isn’t that important.
The same overvaluation of older players exists in baseball, too. The conventional wisdom in the game had always been that players peak in their early thirties. Then along came Bill James from his small town in Kansas. In his mimeographs, the father of sabermetrics showed that the average player peaked not in his early thirties, but at just twenty-seven. Beane told us, ‘Nothing strangulates a sports club more than having older players on long contracts, because once they stop performing, they become immovable. And as they become older, the risk of injury becomes exponential. It’s less costly to bring a young player. If it doesn’t work, you can go and find the next guy, and the next guy. The downside risk is lower, and the upside much higher.’
Finally, Clough and Taylor’s third rule: buy players with personal problems (like Burns, or the gambler Stan Bowles) at a discount. Then help them deal with their problems.
Clough, a drinker, and Taylor, a gambler, empathized with troubled players. While negotiating with a new player they would ask him a stock question, ‘to which we usually know the answer,’ wrote Taylor. It was: ‘Let’s hear your vice before you sign. Is it women, booze, drugs, or gambling?’
Clough and Taylor believed that once they knew the vice, they could help the player manage it. Clough was so confident of his psychological skills that in the early 1970s he even thought he could handle Manchester United’s alcoholic womanizing genius George Best. ‘I’d sort George out in a week,’ he boasted. ‘I’d hide the key to the drinks cabinet and I’d make sure he was tucked up with nothing stronger than cocoa for the first six months. Women? I’d let him home to see his mum and his sisters. No one else in a skirt is getting within a million miles of him.’
Taylor says he told Bowles, who joined Forest in 1979 (and, as it happens, failed there), ‘Any problem in your private life must be brought to us; you may not like that but we’ll prove to you that our way of management is good for all of us.’ After a player confided a problem, wrote Taylor, ‘if we couldn’t find an answer, we would turn to experts: we have sought advice for our players from clergymen, doctors and local councillors.’ Taking much the same approach, Wenger helped Tony Adams and Paul Merson combat their addictions.
All this might sound obvious, but the usual attitude in football is, ‘We paid a lot of money for you, now get on with it,’ as if mental illness, addiction or homesickness should not exist above a certain level of income.
It should be added that often the shrewdest actors in the transfer market are not managers at all, but agents. Raiola told us that he tries to decide which club a player should join, and then sometimes persuades the club to make the move happen. In his words, ‘I always try to formulate a goal with a player: “That is what we want. We’re not going to sit and wait and see where the wind blows.”’ For instance, in 2004, when his client Zlatan Ibrahimovic was a wayward young striker at Ajax, Raiola decided that the best place for him to learn professionalism (while earning good money) was Juventus. Juve may believe that it chose Zlatan, but that ain’t necessarily so. In 2006 Raiola told his player that Juve’s ship was sinking and it was time to join Inter. In 2009 he moved Ibrahimovic to Barcelona, then to Milan, and in 2012 (very much against the player’s will) to Paris Saint-Germain. There the Swede earned €14 million a season in a top-class team while underfunded Milan sank.
In 2016, Raiola brought Ibrahimovic, Pogba and Henrikh Mkhitaryan to Manchester United. Why join a club that hadn’t qualified for the Champions League and had underperformed for three years? Raiola told us: ‘Because I think: you have to go to the club that needs you. This club needed them.’
He claims to have foreseen United’s need as early as 2015, when the club signed the young forwards Anthony Martial and Memphis Depay. Raiola insists he knew they wouldn’t succeed. ‘Not if you have to perform now,’ he says, slapping a fat fist into a fat hand. ‘Martial and Depay come in and say, “We have to carry Manchester United, a giant institution?” So already last year [2015] I told the people at United, “You’ll have to put in a guy like Zlatan to restore the balance. Then the attention goes to Zlatan. He has the experience, and he dares to take the responsibility.”’
Raiola continues, ‘At clubs that understand me, I have three or four players. Now at United, and before at Juventus, Milan, Paris Saint-Germain.’ In these cases, he says, he becomes a club’s ‘in-house consultant’. He then effectively shares a seat with the club’s top management. No wonder that in 2017, Manchester United paid Everton £75 million (plus potential bonuses) for his client Romelu Lukaku.
Some readers may be surprised to hear us praise agents, who are always accused of breaking laws and sucking money out of the game. True, some of them are criminals (who often act in cahoots with clubs) but most agents get an unfair rap. We understand why clubs wish they didn’t exist. A club would love to be able to tell a twenty-year-old player from a poor background who hasn’t had any financial education, ‘Here’s your contract, congratulations. Now run up and see the chief executive, and he’ll tell you your salary.’ This sort of talk plays well with the fans. However, football needs professional agents, who will take a closer long-term interest in their players’ wellbeing than any club ever will.
RELOCATION, RELOCATION, RELOCATION: THE RICE KRISPIES PROBLEM
Clough and Taylor understood that many transfers fail because of a player’s problems off the field. In a surprising number of cases, these problems are the product of the transfer itself.
Moving to a job in another city is always stressful; moving to another country is even more so. The challenge of moving from Rio de Janeiro to Manchester involves cultural adjustments that just don’t compare with moving from Springfield, Missouri to Springfield, Ohio. An uprooted
