Soccernomics. Simon Kuper
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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,’ Schalke’s coaches laughed at him. In short, when it comes to teenage footballers, the famous phrase of the Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman applies: ‘Nobody knows anything.’
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.