In short, wages buy success (something Stefan has been banging on about since his first published article on football in 1991). We have yet to see anyone produce a credible alternative theory. Did Manchester City or Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea hire great managers who won titles, but then also decide out of the goodness of the owners’ hearts to pay the players exorbitant wages? No, they had to hire players whose pay predicted their ability to win games.
True, some players are paid either more or less than they are worth. In fact, it’s an agent’s job to persuade clubs to pay excessive salaries. The former Dutch defender Rody Turpijn has written up a lovely vignette showing how this works. In 1998, the young Turpijn’s career at Ajax Amsterdam was falling apart. The player had only one thing going for him: he was represented by Mino Raiola, a chubby little Dutch-Italian former pizza restaurateur who was becoming one of Europe’s most powerful agents.
Raiola and Turpijn drove to a motorway hotel (classic venue of football deals) to meet the chairman of the small Dutch club De Graafschap. Raiola kicked off by impressing the chairman with some gossip about Juventus’s Pavel Nedved. Then the chairman wrote on a piece of paper the salary he was offering Turpijn. It was more than Turpijn earned at Ajax.
But to Turpijn’s surprise, Raiola shouted: ‘Do you know what he earns at Ajax? This isn’t a serious offer! Come, Rody, we’re not going to waste our time on this.’ Raiola stood up as if to walk out, so Turpijn hesitantly rose too. The chairman anxiously persuaded them to sit down. Twenty minutes later, Raiola had negotiated a lucrative four-year contract. As Turpijn wrote years later in the Dutch literary magazine Hard Gras, that meeting secured his future ‘for just about the rest of my life’.
So Turpijn was overpaid. However, the overpayment didn’t last. Over his four years at De Graafschap it became clear that he wasn’t worth the salary. When his contract ended, the club let him go. Rather than joining another club at a lower and more rational wage, he retired from football aged 25 and happily went off to university. The salary market had corrected itself.
Conversely, in 2012, the teenage Paul Pogba was underpaid at Manchester United, relative to what he could be earning at other clubs. Raiola, who represented him too, went to Alex Ferguson to negotiate a higher salary. One afternoon at his little office in the Dutch town of Haarlem, where Raiola had grown up working in his immigrant family’s pizza restaurants, he reconstructed the pay talks for us:
Ferguson to Raiola: I don’t talk to you if the player is not here.
Raiola: Get the player out of the locker room and sit him here.
Enter Pogba.
Ferguson to Pogba: You don’t want to sign this contract?
Pogba: We’re not going to sign this contract under these conditions.
Ferguson to Raiola: You’re a twat.
Raiola was unfazed, partly because he didn’t know the word.
Raiola: This is an offer that my chihuahuas – I have two chihuahuas – don’t sign.
Ferguson: What do you think he needs to earn?
Raiola: Not that.
Ferguson: You’re a twat.
Ferguson’s published verdict on Raiola: ‘I distrusted him from the moment I met him.’ Pogba left for Juventus, who paid him what he was worth. Once again, the salary market had corrected itself – but in this case upwards rather than downwards.
And so, over the long run, most footballers earn what they deserve, at least measured by their contribution to winning matches. (If you measured their contribution to society, you might end up with very different salaries, but that’s true of almost every profession from bond trader to nurse.) Generally, a player’s salary is a good gauge of his ability to play football. The same is true at a team level: the higher the total wage bill, the better the squad, and the higher the team will finish in the league.
At this point the reader is probably jumping up and down and shouting, ‘But what about Leicester?’ In 2016, the club defied odds of 5,000–1 against (for the handful of punters who bet on this outcome pre-season) to win the only title of its 132-year history with the Premier League’s fifteenth-highest wage bill. To find a comparable achievement you would need to go back to Brian Clough and Peter Taylor’s triumphs with Derby County in 1972 and Nottingham Forest in 1978.
The popular theory of Leicester’s title at the time was that it was mostly down to the manager, Claudio Ranieri, who had supposedly instilled the players with the self-belief and will to win, but was too modest to claim any credit. Later in the book we will attempt to demolish this theory but, anyway, you hear rather less of it since Ranieri was sacked six months into the next season with Leicester fighting relegation.
Rather, we would identify two main causes of Leicester’s victory: 1) a very good goalkeeper and defence; 2) luck.
Let’s start with luck. Leicester won the title without performing exceptionally. The team’s goal difference that season was +32 (scored sixty-eight goals, conceded thirty-six). On average over the previous ten seasons, the English champions had a goal difference of +53. Only one champion in the previous thirty-nine years had scored fewer goals than Leicester: Manchester United in 1992/93, with sixty-seven goals.
So Leicester didn’t perform as well as the typical champions. The team’s goals for and goals against were both two standard deviations better than its expected performance, which is a fancy way of saying: much better than expected, but not amazing. Nobody might have noticed Leicester except for another random event: all the usual title contenders had bad seasons simultaneously. That allowed an overachieving mid-table team to end up champions. It’s reasonable to expect an outcome like that once every fifty years or so. In technical terms, Leicester’s triumph was an extreme random event. These things happen. In a single season, the correlation between salaries and league position is weaker than over the long term. That’s because in such a short period, luck plays a big role in performance. Injuries, dodgy referees, poor form and a host of other factors cause big swings in performance from year to year. For any one given season, clubs’ wage spending explains only about 70 per cent of the variation in league position.* A team can therefore get a big extra lift from luck.
Yet the human mind tends to resist the notion of luck, of stuff just happening. Even Einstein said, ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ Instead, most people like to seek explanations in human actions. Hence the view that Ranieri suddenly revealed himself as a genius.
Still, the fact remains that Leicester played remarkably well that season. Patrick Lucey, of the data science company STATS in Chicago, has written a good paper pinpointing exactly why. He says that while Leicester’s attacking stats were unexceptional, the team ‘had by far the most effective defense’. In fact its defensive numbers were the best of any team in the previous five Premier League seasons. STATS calculates that the keeper, Kasper Schmeichel, saved about 4.6 goals more than expected over the season – better than any other keeper in the division except Watford’s Heurelho Gomes.
