player is considered in the industry to be about a year. Normally those players are in a hotel for the first three months. We were able to get from agreeing a fee to Sergio living in his house within two weeks, with a Spanish sat-nav system in his car, linked to the Spanish community in Manchester. We had our prize asset ready to go from day one.’
Then there was City’s signing of Kevin De Bruyne from Wolfsburg in 2015. The Belgian was flown to Manchester in a private jet. ‘It was like in a film,’ his agent Patrick De Koster later recalled. ‘We thought we’d have a lot of work finding a new house, opening a bank account, phone cards, a car. But everything was sorted in three hours. Incredible.’
Raiola says, ‘In England the clubs have kept getting better at it. But it’s just that in Italy it’s done in a very Italian way, human: “Lovely, and we’ll go and get a bite to eat, and how are the children?” In England it’s much more businesslike. There’s something to be said for both ways.’
Still, a few clubs continue to undervalue or even neglect relocation. One player care officer in the Premier League told us, ‘Some very well-known managers have said to me they can’t understand why you can possibly need it. They have said, “Well, when I moved to a foreign country as a player I had to do it myself.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. You probably had to clean boots, too, but nobody does that now.’
THE NICEST TOWN IN EUROPE: HOW OLYMPIQUE LYON BOUGHT AND SOLD
If you had to locate the middle-class European dream anywhere, it would be in Lyon. It’s a town the size of Oakland, about two-thirds of the way down France, nestled between rivers just west of the Alps. On a warm January afternoon, drinking coffee outside in the eighteenth-century Place Bellecour where the buildings are as pretty as the women, you think: nice. Here’s a wealthy town where you can have a good job, nice weather and a big house near the mountains.
Lyon also has some of the best restaurants in Europe, known locally as bouchons, or ‘corks’. Even at the town’s football stadium you can have a wonderful three-course pre-game meal consisting largely of intestines or head cheese, unless you prefer to eat at local boy Paul Bocuse’s brasserie across the road and totter into the grounds just before kick-off. And then, for a remarkable decade or so, you could watch some very decent football, too.
Until about 2000 Lyon was known as the birthplace of cinema and nouvelle cuisine, but not as a football town. It was just too bourgeois. If for some reason you wanted football, you drove thirty-five miles down the highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Étienne. In 1987 Olympique Lyon, or OL, or les Gones (the Kids), was playing in France’s second division on an annual budget of under £2 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. From 2002 to 2008 Lyon ruled French football. The club’s ascent was in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe, for a while Lyon worked out how to play the market.
In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president. Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.
‘I didn’t know the world of football well,’ he admitted to us in 2007 over a bottle of OL mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he was already aiming to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he wrought? ‘No.’
Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. ‘We tried to abstract the factor “time”,’ he explained. ‘Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It’s like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you.’ Others in France preferred to liken Aulas to ‘un bulldozer’.
In 1987 even the local Lyonnais didn’t care much about les Gones. You could live in Lyon without knowing that football existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Étienne was the ‘miners’ club’ that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s. Saint-Étienne’s president at the time said that when it came to football, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Étienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon’s domination began, les Gones’ fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Étienne supporters, ‘We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines.’
Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domenech’s first season, OL finished at the top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas recalled, ‘At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route.’
It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent football club. The Lyonnais were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren’t immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that the president or manager or half the team be gotten rid of. Nor did the French media track the club’s doings hour by hour. It’s much easier to build for the long term in a place like that than in a ‘football city’ like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they got up to in Lyon made it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon’s advantages: the locals had money. ‘It allowed us to have not just a “popular clientele”, but also a “business clientele”,’ said Aulas.
Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you’re never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Football, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run football club humourless, practically American.
It therefore irritated them that Aulas talked about it so unabashedly. He might have invented the word ‘moneyball’. Aulas’s theme was that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to football. (And to baseball. As Moneyball describes it, Beane believes that winning ‘is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability. … To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines.’)
In Aulas’s view, rationality in football works more or less like this: if you buy good players for less than they are worth, you will win more games. You will then have more money to buy better players for less than they are worth. The better players will win you more matches, and that will attract more fans (and thus more money), because Aulas spotted early that most football fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there. He told us in 2007, ‘We sold 110,000 replica shirts last season. This season we are already at 200,000. I think Olympique Lyon has become by far the most beloved club in France.’
Polls at the time suggested that he was right: in Sport+Markt’s survey of European supporters in 2006, Lyon emerged as the country’s most popular club just ahead of Olympique Marseille. This popularity was a recent phenomenon. In 2002, when Lyon first became champions of France, the overriding French emotion towards the club had still been, ‘Whatever.’ The editor of France Football magazine complained around that time that when Lyon won the title, his magazine didn’t sell. But as the club won the title every year from 2002 to 2008 – the longest period of domination by any club in any of Europe’s five biggest national leagues ever – many French fans began to care about them.
With more fans, Lyon made more money. On match days you could get a haircut at an official OL salon, drink an OL Beaujolais at an OL café, book your holiday at an OL travel agency and take an OL taxi to the game – and many people did. Lyon used that money to buy better players.
