1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and [American gridiron] football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts – each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved.’
In football, these smart men (it’s still part of the game’s own ‘ridiculous hokum’ that they have to be men) have even begun taking key roles at some of Europe’s biggest clubs. European football, professional on the field for over a century, is finally creaking into professionalism off the field, too. Given the global obsession with the game, there could come a time when some of the best and brightest young people are working in the front offices of football clubs. Already the rising generation of club executives understands that in football today, you need data to get ahead. If you study figures, you will see more and win more.
One early harbinger of the Jamesian takeover of football was the Milan Lab. Soon after it began work, AC Milan’s in-house medical outfit found that just by studying a player’s jump, it could predict with 70 per cent accuracy whether he would get injured soon. Later the Lab began testing, almost day by day, each player’s muscle weaknesses, the movement of his eyes, the rise and fall of his heart-rate, his breathing, and many other obvious and less obvious indicators. Jean-Pierre Meersseman, the Lab’s cigarette-puffing director, was given a power of veto over the club’s prospective signings. ‘The last signature on the contract before the big boss signs is mine,’ he told us in 2008. By 2013 the Lab had performed 1.2 million physical tests on Milan’s players, collected millions of pieces of data on computers, logged even the slightest injury to every player, and in the process had stumbled upon the secret of eternal youth.
Most of Milan’s starting eleven who beat Liverpool in the Champions League final of 2007 were thirty-one or older: Paolo Maldini, the captain, was thirty-eight, and Filippo Inzaghi, scorer of both of Milan’s goals, was thirty-three. (After the final whistle, Inzaghi still had enough juice to kick a ball around on the field for fun.) In large part, that trophy was won by the Milan Lab and its database. It is another version of the March of the Geeks story. In the last few years, cash-strapped AC Milan have reduced the Lab’s funding and power. However, other big clubs all over Europe now lead the data-driven quests to reduce injuries, and to predict which twelve-year-old will grow up to be the next Xavi. Meersseman says data-driven scientists seem to be better than experienced youth coaches at making those predictions. He told us: ‘In football, they say, “You know about football or you don’t.” And when you go and test the ones who “know”, it’s surprising how little they know. It’s based on the emotion of the moment.’
What started in Istanbul in 2007 as a book idea has turned into a long-term collaboration. These days our contact is transatlantic: Simon is still in Paris, but Stefan is now at the University of Michigan. Together with Ben Lyttleton we have also founded the Soccernomics consultancy. On its website, Soccernomics-agency.com, we publish an occasional blog with our thoughts on football. And we have kept rewriting and updating this book. It has sold a total of about 250,000 copies in over two dozen languages. We’ve had the chance to influence the opinions of lots of people, some of whom work in the game.
All the while, we have continued to distrust every bit of the game’s ancient lore, and tested it against the numbers. As Meersseman says, ‘You can drive a car without a dashboard, without any information, and that’s what’s happening in football. There are excellent drivers, excellent cars, but if you have your dashboard, it makes it just a little bit easier. I wonder why people don’t want more information.’ We do.
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDS: HOW TO AVOID SILLY MISTAKES IN THE TRANSFER MARKET
In 1983 AC Milan spotted a talented young black forward playing for Watford just outside London. The word is that the player the Italians liked was John Barnes and that they then confused him with his black teammate Luther Blissett. Whatever the truth, Milan ended up paying Watford a ‘transfer fee’ of £1 million for Blissett.
As a player Blissett became such a joke in Italy that the name ‘Luther Blissett’ is now used as a pseudonym by groups of anarchist writers. He spent one unhappy year in Milan, before the club sold him back to Watford for just over half the sum it had paid for him. At least that year gave football one of its best quotes: ‘No matter how much money you have here,’ Blissett lamented, ‘you can’t seem to get Rice Krispies.’ More on the beloved British breakfast cereal later.
In summer 2017 alone, clubs worldwide spent $4.71 billion on transfers (about £3.6 billion), reported FIFA Transfer Matching System (TMS), the department of FIFA that oversees international transfers. The sum includes the world record fee of £198 million that Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona for Neymar.*
Unfortunately, much of the money thrown around in the transfer market is wasted. Newcastle have long been a particularly humorous example, but in fact the net amount that almost any club spends on transfer fees bears little relation to where it finishes in the league. We studied the spending of forty English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their net outlay on transfers (i.e. each club’s transfer fees paid minus transfer fees received) explained only 16 per cent of their total variation in league position. In other words, taken over many years, the mere fact of being a ‘buying club’ in the transfer market didn’t help a team perform significantly better than being a ‘selling club’.1
By contrast, clubs’ spending on salaries was extremely telling. The size of their wage bills explained a massive 92 per cent of variation in their league positions, if you took each club’s average for the entire period. That correlation shows little sign of going away. We show almost exactly the same result below using data for the Premier League and the Championship for the decade to 2016. In that period, wage spending still explained more than 90 per cent of the variation in league position. It seems that over the long term, high wages help a club much more than do spectacular transfers.
Obviously we don’t believe that if you took a random bunch of players, and doubled their salaries, they would suddenly play twice as well. It’s not that high pay causes good performance. Rather, we think that high pay attracts good performers. Chelsea can afford to pay Eden Hazard’s wages, whereas Burnley cannot. And if you have Hazard and other good players, you will win lots of matches. Rich clubs pay high salaries to get good players.
Premier League and Championship teams 2007–2016 performance and wage expenditure
THE MORE YOU PAY YOUR PLAYERS, THE HIGHER YOU FINISH: 2007–2016
| Club | Wage spending relative to the average | Average league position |
| Manchester United | 3.40 | 3 |
| Chelsea | 3.97 | 3 |
|
Arsenal
|