Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them creators – Pelé, Maradona, Rooney, Lionel Messi, Cesc Fàbregas – reach the top by the age of eighteen. Most players get there considerably later. Almost all defenders and goalkeepers do. You can be confident of their potential only when they are more mature.
Beane knows that by the time baseball players are in college – which tends to put them in Lyon’s magical age range of twenty to twenty-two – you have a pretty good idea of what they will become. There is a lot of information about them. They have grown up a bit. They are old enough to be nearly fully formed, but too young to be expensive stars. FIFA TMS analysed international transfers to England in 2013, and found that players moving aged twenty to twenty-two were 18 per cent cheaper than players aged twenty-five to twenty-seven. Moreover, the younger players tended to have lower salaries, and higher future resale values.
Lyon always tried to avoid paying a premium for a star player’s ‘name’. Here, again, it was lucky to be a club from a quiet town. Its placid supporters and local media didn’t demand stars. By contrast, the former chairman of a club in a much more raucous French city recalls, ‘I ran [the club] with the mission to create a spectacle. It wasn’t to build a project for twenty years to come.’ A team from a big city tends to need big stars.
Football being barely distinguishable from baseball, the same split between big and small towns operates in that sport, too. ‘Big-market teams’, like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, hunt big-name players. Their media and fans demand it. In Moneyball, Lewis calls this the pathology of ‘many foolish teams that thought all their questions could be answered by a single player’. (It’s a pathology that may sound strangely familiar to European football fans.) By contrast, the Oakland A’s, as a small-market team, were free to forgo stars. As Lewis writes, ‘Billy may not care for the Oakland press but it is really very tame next to the Boston press, and it certainly has no effect on his behaviour, other than to infuriate him once a week or so. Oakland A’s fans, too, were apathetic compared to the maniacs in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium.’ But as Beane told us, English football is ‘even more emotional’ than baseball. ‘It’s the biggest sport in the world,’ he said. ‘And that’s the biggest league in the world, and then you put in sixty million people and a four-hour drive from north to south, and that’s what you have.’
That’s why most English football clubs are always being pushed by their fans to buy stars. Happy is the club that has no need of heroes. Lyon was free to buy young unknowns like Michael Essien, Florent Malouda, Mahamadou Diarra or Hugo Lloris just because they were good. And unknowns accept modest salaries. According to L’Equipe, in the 2007–2008 season Lyon spent only 31 per cent of its budget on players’ pay. The average in the English Premier League was about double that. Like Clough’s Forest, Lyon for many years performed the magic trick of winning things without paying silly salaries.
Try not to buy centre-forwards. Centre-forward is the most overpriced position in the transfer market, perhaps simply because centre-forwards are the players who score most and therefore end up on TV. Strikers in general also cost the most in salaries. In Italy’s Serie A between 2009 and 2014, forwards earned an average of €1.1m, midfielders €820,000 and defenders €700,000, calculates French economist Bastien Drut.
Admittedly Lyon ‘announced’ itself to football by buying the Brazilian centre-forward Sonny Anderson for £12 million in 1999, but the club mostly scrimped on the position afterwards. Houllier left OL in 2007 grumbling that even after the club sold Malouda and Eric Abidal for a combined total of £23 million, Aulas still wouldn’t buy him a centre-forward.
By contrast, goalkeeper is the most underpriced position in football’s transfer market. Keepers also earn less than outfield players (according to a study by German economist Bernd Frick), even though they make a very large contribution to results and have longer careers than strikers.
Help your foreign signings relocate. All sorts of great Brazilians have passed through Lyon: Sonny Anderson; the long-time club captain Cris; the future internationals Juninho and Fred; and the world champion Edmilson. Most were barely known when they joined the club. Aulas explained the secret: ‘Ten years ago [in 1997] we sent one of our old players, Marcelo, to Brazil. He was an extraordinary man, because he was both an engineer and a professional footballer. He was captain of Lyon for five years. Then he became an agent, but he works quasi-exclusively for OL. He indicates all market opportunities to us.’ As a judge of players, Marcelo was clearly in the Lacombe or Peter Taylor class.
Marcelo said he scouted only ‘serious boys’. Or as the former president of a rival French club puts it, ‘They don’t select players just for their quality but for their ability to adapt. I can’t see Lyon recruiting an Anelka or a Ronaldinho.’
After Lyon signed the serious boys, it made sure they settled. Drogba noted enviously, ‘At Lyon, a translator takes care of the Brazilians, helps them to find a house, get their bearings, tries to reduce as much as possible the negative effects of moving. … Even at a place of the calibre of Chelsea, that didn’t exist.’
Lyon’s ‘translator’, who worked full time for the club, sorted out the players’ homesickness, bank accounts, nouvelle cuisine, and whatever else. Other people at the club educated the newcomers in Lyon’s culture: no stars or show-offs.
Sell any player if another club offers more than he is worth. This is what Aulas meant when he said, ‘Buying and selling players is not an activity for improving the football performance. It’s a trading activity, in which we produce gross margin. If an offer for a player is greatly superior to his market value, you must not keep him.’ The ghost of Peter Taylor would approve.
Like Clough and Taylor, and like Billy Beane, Lyon never got sentimental about players. In the club’s annual accounts, it booked each player for a certain transfer value. (Beane says, ‘Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it.’) Lyon knew that sooner or later its best players would attract somebody else’s attention. Because the club expected to sell them, it replaced them even before they went. Ferguson at United also pursued a strategy of early replacement: ‘I did feel sentimental about great players leaving us. At the same time, my eye would always be on a player who was coming to an end. An internal voice would always ask, “When’s he going to leave, how long will he last?” Experience taught me to stockpile young players in important positions.’
Bringing in replacements before they are needed avoids a transition period or a panic purchase after the player’s departure. Aulas explained, ‘We will replace the player in the squad six months or a year before. So when Michael Essien goes [to Chelsea for £24 million], we already have a certain number of players who are ready to replace him. Then, when the opportunity to buy Tiago arises, for 25 per cent of the price of Essien, you take him.’
Before Essien’s transfer in 2005, Aulas spent weeks proclaiming that the Ghanaian was ‘untransferable’. He always said that when he was about to transfer a player, because it drove up the price. In his words, ‘Every international at Lyon is untransferable. Until the offer surpasses by far the amount we had expected.’
Don’t worry too much about buying or keeping superstars. Media and fans tend to obsess about the team’s best player (as Essien was) but in fact you can usually let him go without damaging performance too much.
In general, most clubs don’t spend their transfer budgets very rationally. Here, as a free service, are the thirteen main secrets of the transfer market in full:
1 A new manager wastes money on transfers; don’t let him.
2 Use
