Soccernomics. Simon Kuper
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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. (It seems that the richest English clubs had been missing some tricks on the goalkeepers’ transfer market.) Meanwhile Leicester’s defence did a very good job of forcing opponents to try difficult passes from wide areas. And Leicester had a couple 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