type (like Newcastle buying fragile Michael Owen from Madrid for £17 million in 2005) are best understood as marketing gifts to a club’s fans, its sponsors and the local media. (It’s hugely in the interest of Marca, the Spanish sports newspaper, for Real always to be buying players, or else hardly anyone would bother reading the paper over the three-month summer break.) As Ferguson explained Real’s purchase of Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009: ‘Madrid paid £80 million in cash for him, and do you know why? It was a way for Florentino Pérez, their president, to say to the world, “We are Real Madrid, we are the biggest of the lot.”’
In 2013, Madrid’s purchase of Gareth Bale for £85 million (a bit more than the club admitted to) made the same statement. Probably nobody at Madrid believed that the Welshman was twice as good a player as Mesut Özil – sold to Arsenal for half Bale’s transfer fee – but he was deliciously new. His record fee only enhanced his glamour. There was a high risk that the money paid would not bring commensurate reward, but Real probably didn’t care very much. The club is not a business. It’s a populist democracy. Few football clubs pursue bean-counting quests for return on investment.
Raiola is so wary of Real’s tendency to buy a player just for his name that in 2016 he advised Pogba not to move there. Real Madrid had just won the Champions League, and Raiola realized that although the club was keen to sign Pogba, it didn’t actually need him. ‘Another player for the cabinet. A trophy player, I call it.’ By contrast, United needed Pogba.
Buying a big name (even if you don’t need him) makes every person in the club feel bigger. Christoph Biermann, in his pioneering German book on football and data, Die Fussball-Matrix, cites the president of a Bundesliga club who said his coach got very excited whenever the club paid a large transfer fee. Biermann explains, ‘For this coach it was a status symbol to be allowed to buy players who cost many millions of euros. My car, my house, my star signing!’ In short, it’s conspicuous consumption. The very pointlessness of the purchase emphasizes that the purchaser is a prestigious high roller who can afford to waste money.
Buying names also gives supporters the thrill of expectation, a sense that their club is going somewhere, which may be as much fun as actually winning things. Buying big names is how these clubs keep their customers satisfied during the summer shutdown. (And some managers buy players to make themselves some illicit cash on the side, as George Graham did when he signed Jensen, but that’s a subject for Chapter 5.)
Yet it turns out that the superstar isn’t necessarily the player who has the biggest impact on a team’s performance. (Note that Spurs didn’t obviously suffer from losing Bale.) Nor is the decisive player the team’s weakest link. Chris Anderson and David Sally argue in their book The Numbers Game that the best way to improve a team is to replace the worst player. But when Stefan and his University of Michigan colleague Guy Wilkinson looked at which players in the team had the biggest impact on results, they found it was neither the best nor the worst. Instead, it was the transfer fee of the second-best player that was most decisive. Here, they argue, is the best way to allocate a club’s transfer budget across the eleven starters:
Best-paid player: 25.76%
Number two: 25.76%
Three: 18.41%
Four: 9.80%
Five: 9.80%
Six: 9.80%
Seven: 0.14%
Eight: 0.14%
Nine: 0.14%
Ten: 0.14%
Eleven: 0.14%
In other words, they found it would make sense for a club to spend almost nothing on its five cheapest players, since they have very little impact on results, and instead to devote about 70 per cent of the budget to the three best players. But in fact, clubs don’t do this. Clubs in the Premier League in 2012–2013 typically spent more than 1 per cent of the budget even on the team’s cheapest player, and about 8 per cent on the seventh cheapest. In short, they spread the money around more equally than they should. This might be because they think that massive differences in status within a team could unsettle the locker room. It might be because they want to keep some good players in reserve in case the best get injured. Or perhaps there just aren’t enough stars in the sport to go around, especially not for smaller clubs, so relatively little money is spent on the top players. Still, we think an innovative club could do well by concentrating its budget upwards. Chris Anderson recently added an interesting nuance, saying that rather than target scarce superstars, clubs should try to assemble productive combinations of two, three or four players. ‘Who plays well with whom?’
Clubs will pay more for a player from a ‘fashionable’ football country. American goalkeeper Kasey Keller says that in the transfer market, it’s good to be Dutch. ‘Giovanni van Bronckhorst is the best example,’ Keller told Christoph Biermann. ‘He went from Rangers to Arsenal, failed there, and then where did he go? To Barcelona! You have to be a Dutchman to do that. An American would have been sent straight back to DC United.’
For decades the most fashionable nationality in the transfer market was Brazilian. As Alex Bellos writes in Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life: ‘The phrase “Brazilian footballer” is like the phrases “French chef” or “Tibetan monk”. The nationality expresses an authority, an innate vocation for the job – whatever the natural ability.’ A Brazilian agent who had exported very humble Brazilian players to the Faroe Islands and Iceland told Bellos: ‘It’s sad to say, but it is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival. Irrespective of talent, it is very seductive to have a Brazilian in your team.’
That sentiment may have been dented by Brazil’s 1–7 defeat to Germany in the semi-final of the 2014 World Cup in a Belo Horizonte. In recent years Belgians have been coming into fashion, and after the 2014 World Cup Costa Ricans suddenly became the hot new items in every self-respecting club’s wardrobe. After the little country got within a penalty shoot-out of reaching the semi-final, the total value of transfer fees for Costa Rican players moving internationally rose from $922,000 in 2013 to almost $10 million in 2014, said FIFA TMS. A wise club will buy unfashionable nationalities – Bolivians, say, or Belorussians – at discounts.
One big English club noticed that its scouts who watched youth matches often came back recommending blond players. The likely reason: when you are scanning a field of twenty-two similar-looking players, none of whom yet has a giant reputation, the blonds tend to stand out (except, presumably, in Scandinavia). The colour catches the eye. So the scout notices the blond boy without understanding why. The club in question began to take this distortion into account when judging scouting reports. We suspect the bias towards blonds disappears when scouts are assessing adult players who already have established reputations. Then the player’s reputation – ‘World Cup hero’, say, or perhaps ‘Costa Rican’ – guides the scout’s judgement.
Similarly, Beane at the Oakland A’s noticed that baseball scouts had all sorts of ‘sight-based prejudices’. They were suspicious of fat guys or skinny little guys or ‘short right-handed pitchers’, and they overvalued handsome, strapping athletes of the type that Beane himself had been at age seventeen. Scouts look for players who look the part. Perhaps in football,
