of excellent pass-interceptors. STATS ranked Manchester City’s Nicolas Otamendi first in the league for improbable interceptions, but Leicester’s Christian Fuchs was third and N’Golo Kanté fifth.
Kanté in midfield was clearly crucial. Steve Walsh, Leicester’s then assistant manager and chief scout, famously remarked, ‘People think we play with two in midfield, and I say “No”. We play with Danny Drinkwater in the middle and we play with Kanté either side, giving us essentially 12 players on the pitch.’ The next season at Chelsea, Kanté ran more miles than any other player in the Premier League except Tottenham’s Christian Eriksen. He won another league title, and was voted England’s Players’ Player of the Year.
In other words, excellent players win titles, and they rarely need managers to inspire them. Ranieri himself recognized Kanté’s importance at Leicester’s very first training session. He later told the Players’ Tribune website, ‘He was running so hard that I thought he must have a pack full of batteries hidden in his shorts. … I tell him, “One day, I’m going to see you cross the ball, and then finish the cross with a header yourself.”’
We won’t be betting on Leicester to shock the world again. The team just doesn’t spend enough. True luck (i.e. statistical randomness) tends to even out over the years. So if you track each club’s performance over a longer period – fifteen or twenty years, say – then salaries explain about 90 per cent of the variation in league position. Leicester was an exception.
Simon’s colleagues at the Financial Times ranked sixty-nine clubs from Europe’s biggest leagues by how well they did relative to their wage bills from 2011 through 2015. Atlético Madrid emerged from the exercise as ‘Europe’s “smartest” spending club,’ while Everton, Spurs, and Southampton also excelled. Among the worst underachievers were Cesena, Queens Park Rangers and the two Milan clubs. Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain also ranked in the FT’s bottom fifteen, largely as an effect of ‘the sheer size of their wage bills’.
But on the whole, the market for players’ wages is pretty efficient: the better a player, the more he earns. By comparison – and this is our focus in this chapter – the transfer market is inefficient. Much of the time, clubs buy the wrong players. Even now that they have brigades of international scouts, they still waste fortunes on flops like Blissett.
As a case study of bad transfer policy, let’s take Liverpool from 1998 to 2010. The club’s managers in this period, Gérard Houllier and Rafael Benitez, kept splashing out on big transfer fees, yet Liverpool hardly ever even threatened to win the league. Jamie Carragher, who played for Liverpool throughout these years, provides a dolefully comic commentary on some of the club’s misguided signings in his excellent autobiography, Carra:
‘Sean Dundee was not a Liverpool footballer.’
‘The signing I didn’t rate was Sander Westerveld. … I thought he was an average goalkeeper who seemed to think he was Gordon Banks.’
‘What about Josemi? He struggled to find a teammate six yards away. Djimi Traore had the same weakness.’
‘To be blunt, [Christian] Ziege couldn’t defend.’
‘The names El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao now make the legs of the toughest Liverpudlians shudder in fear. … The first concern I had with Diouf was his pace. He didn’t have any. … Do you remember being at school and picking sides for a game of football? We do this at Liverpool for the five-a-sides. Diouf was “last pick” within a few weeks.’
‘“You paid ten million for him and no one wants him in their team,” I shouted to Gérard.’
‘If Diouf was a disappointment, Diao was a catastrophe. … But even he wasn’t the worst arrival of this hideous summer [of 2002]. Houllier also signed Bruno Cheyrou.’
On the expensive French striker Djibril Cissé: ‘He was supposed to be a strong, physical target man who scored goals. He was neither one nor the other.’
‘The greatest disappointment was Fernando Morientes. … He was a yard off the pace.’
When Benitez replaced Houllier in 2004, writes Carragher, the Spaniard encountered ‘a host of poor, overpaid players and expectations as great as ever’. But the new man didn’t do much better than his predecessor. Carragher’s book is gentler with Benitez than with Houllier, presumably because the Spaniard was still his boss when he wrote it, but the waste of the Benitez years is remarkable. Most strikingly, perhaps, in 2008 Benitez handed Tottenham Hotspur £20 million for the twenty-eight-year-old forward Robbie Keane. The much-touted fact that Keane was a lifelong Liverpool fan turned out not to help much. Six months after buying the player, Benitez decided that Keane wasn’t the thing after all and shipped him back to Tottenham (who themselves would soon regret buying him) at a loss of £8 million. Virgin Trains took out newspaper advertisements that said, ‘A Liverpool to London return faster than Robbie Keane’.
For all the spending, most of Liverpool’s best performers during the Houllier–Benitez years were home-grown players who had cost the club nothing: Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen and Carragher himself. Another stalwart for a decade, centre-back Sami Hyppiä, had come for only £2.6 million from little Willem II in the Netherlands. In short, there didn’t seem to be much correlation between transfer spending and quality.
In October 2009, after Benitez’s sixth and last summer masterminding Liverpool’s transfers, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper calculated the damage. It found that in those six years at Anfield, Benitez had spent £122 million more than he had received in transfer fees. Alex Ferguson’s net spend at Manchester United in the same period was only £27 million, yet in those years United had won three titles to Liverpool’s none. Arsène Wenger at Arsenal had actually received £27 million more in transfer fees than he had spent during the period, the newspaper estimated. From 2005 through 2009, Benitez had outspent even Chelsea on transfers. Yet at the end of this period he had the nerve to complain, ‘It is always difficult to compete in the Premier League with clubs who have more money.’ Ferguson later commented that he hadn’t been able to see any ‘strategy’ in Benitez’s buying. ‘It amazed me that he used to walk into press conferences and say he had no money to spend,’ Ferguson wrote in his 2013 autobiography. ‘He was given plenty. It was the quality of his buys that let him down. If you set aside Torres and Reina, few of his acquisitions were of true Liverpool standard. There were serviceable players – Mascherano and Kuyt, hard-working players – but not real Liverpool quality.’ (Mind you, with hindsight, Ferguson’s assessment of Mascherano wasn’t perfectly judged either.)
Benitez’s failure at Liverpool was partially disguised by one night in Istanbul: the victory in the Champions League final of 2005, after having been 3–0 down to Milan after 45 minutes. However, as we’ll discuss later in the book, a large chunk of luck is involved in winning knockout competitions – even leaving aside the fact that Benitez got his tactics wrong going into the game and had to turn his team upside down at half-time. The most reliable gauge of a team’s quality is its performance in the league, and here Houllier and Benitez failed. Their expensive transfers didn’t bring commensurate results. If you add in agents’ fees, taxes on transfers and the constant disruption to the team, all this wheeling and dealing helps explain how Liverpool got left behind by Manchester United. To quote Carragher, ‘As I know to my cost at Anfield, having money is no guarantee of success. The skill is spending it on the right players.’
The question, then, is what clubs can do to improve their status. If you are Liverpool now, owned by the American commodities trader John Henry, who understands statistics, and you have this knowledge of the relative importance of wages and unimportance of transfers, how can you win more matches? The obvious
