On that warm winter’s afternoon in Lyon, Aulas told us, ‘We will invest better than Chelsea, Arsenal or Real Madrid. We will make different strategic choices. For instance, we won’t try to have the best team on paper in terms of brand. We will have the best team relative to our investment.’ Here are Lyon’s rules of the transfer market:
Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon was thinking of signing a player, a group of men would sit down to debate the transfer. Aulas would be there, and Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like centre-forward for Lyon and France, who served from the late 1980s until 2017 as the club’s sporting director and then Aulas’s ‘special adviser’. Lacombe was known for having the best pair of eyes in French football. He coached Lyon from 1997 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club long term rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.
Whoever happened to be Lyon’s head coach at the time would sit in on the meeting, too, and so would four or five other coaches. ‘We have a group that gives its advice,’ Aulas explained. ‘In England the manager often does it alone. In France it’s often the technical director.’ Lacombe told us that the house rule was that after the group had made the decision, everyone present would then publicly get behind the transfer.
Like Lyon, the Oakland A’s sidelined their manager, too. Like Lyon, the A’s understood that he was merely ‘a middle manager’ obsessed with the very short term. The A’s let him watch baseball’s annual draft. They didn’t let him say a word about it.
Lyon’s method for choosing players is so obvious and clever that it’s surprising all clubs don’t use it. The theory of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to bet on, say, the outcome of a presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too. (Gambling markets have proved excellent predictors of all sorts of outcomes.) The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough. This is often the case in American sports. But in European football, opinions tend to come from many different countries, and that helps ensure diversity.
Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the traditional decision-making model in English football is not ‘wisdom of crowds’, but short-term dictatorship. At many clubs the manager is still treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide everything until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor’s signings at a discount. Lyon, noted a rival French club president with envy, never had expensive signings rotting on the bench. It never had revolutions at all. It understood that the coach was only a temp. OL won its seven consecutive titles with four different coaches – Jacques Santini, Paul Le Guen, Gérard Houllier and Alain Perrin – none of whom, judging by their subsequent records, was exactly a Hegelian world-historical individual. When a coach left Lyon, not much changed. No matter who happened to be sitting on the bench, the team always played much the same brand of attacking football (by French standards).
Emmanuel Hembert grew up in Lyon supporting OL when it was still in the second division. Later, as head of the sports practice of the management consultancy firm A. T. Kearney in London, he was always citing the club as an example to his clients in football. ‘A big secret of a successful club is stability,’ Hembert explained over coffee in Paris a few years ago. ‘In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe.’
Even a club run as a one-man dictatorship can access the wisdom of crowds. Ferguson at Manchester United would regularly consult his players on transfers. When he was thinking of buying Eric Cantona from Leeds in 1992, writes Michael Cox, he ‘asked centre-backs Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce for their opinion after Leeds’s visit to Old Trafford. Both men suggested he was a difficult opponent because he took up unusual positions.’ Ferguson bought Cantona. A year later, after United’s players unanimously vouched that Nottingham Forest’s Roy Keane was top-class, Ferguson broke the British transfer record to sign him too. And most famously, in 2003, on the plane home from a friendly in Portugal, United’s defenders told Ferguson what a handful Sporting Lisbon’s little-known teenage winger had been. The manager promptly forked out £12.24 million for Cristiano Ronaldo.
The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. Aulas said, ‘We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old.’ It’s almost as if he has read Moneyball. The book keeps banging away about a truth discovered by Bill James, who wrote, ‘College players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.’
Baseball clubs traditionally preferred to draft high school players. But how good you are at seventeen or eighteen is a poor predictor of how good you will become as an adult. By definition, when a player is that young there is still too little information on which to judge him. Beane himself had been probably the hottest baseball prospect in the United States at seventeen, but he was already declining in his senior year at high school, and he then failed in the major leagues. Watching the 2002 draft as the A’s general manager, he ‘punches his fist in the air’ each time rival teams draft schoolboys.
It’s the same in football, where brilliant teenagers tend to disappear soon afterwards. Here are a few winners of the Golden Ball for best player at the under-seventeen World Cup since the 1980s: Philip Osundo of Nigeria, William de Oliveira of Brazil, Nii Lamptey of Ghana, Scottish goalkeeper James Will, Mohammed al-Kathiri of Oman, Sergio Santamaria of Spain and the Nigerian Sani Emmanuel. Once upon a time they must have all been brilliant, but none of them made it as adults. (Will ended up as a policeman in the Scottish Highlands playing for his village team, while Emmanuel seems to have drifted out of professional football aged twenty-three.) The most famous case of a teenager who flamed out is American Freddy Adu, who at fourteen was the next Pelé and Maradona. Ben Lyttleton, our partner in the Soccernomics consultancy, points out in his book Edge: ‘It can be a challenge for a youngster who is suddenly successful – maybe even harder than coping with failure.’ Many gifted teenagers are probably destroyed by acclaim and money. Liverpool is now trying to deal with the problem by capping salaries for first-year professionals (who are typically seventeen years old) at £40,000 a year.
Yet there’s a converse to all these early flameouts: some ugly ducklings become swans. When Helmut Schulte was head of Schalke 04’s youth academy, he had to decide over the futures of the teenaged Manuel Neuer and Mesut Özil. He remembers the fourteen-year-old Neuer as ‘a totally normal keeper’ who, moreover, was small. Schalke’s coaches and scouts recommended getting rid of him. Schulte agonized over the decision, and finally decided to keep him. ‘I overruled the others on three or four occasions during my time at Schalke, and it never worked out, except with Manuel.’
Soon after Neuer’s narrow escape, he had a growth spurt, and got better. By the time he was about eighteen, he was playing for German national youth teams. Schulte recommended that he be given a senior contract. Schalke’s general manager, Rudi Assauer, came to watch the kid at training. It happened that the session was a passing exercise, and Neuer could pass as well as any outfield player. Assauer, whose main criterion was skill on the ball, decided instantly to give him a contract.
The teenage Özil was even skinnier than Neuer. Nor did he seem particularly brilliant. Schalke soon let him go to the smaller local club Rot-Weiss Essen. Later, Schalke was asked whether Özil could train with their youth players in the mornings. ‘As long as he doesn’t disrupt training, he can join in’, was the verdict. Like Neuer, Özil belatedly got better. However, when his dad announced, ‘Mesut isn’t a player for Schalke. He’s a player for Barcelona or Real Madrid,’
