PROFILE THE PREMIER LEAGUE FOOTBALLER:AROUND LUNCHTIME last Monday an outlandish rumour began to take hold, the sort of thing that goes around Twitter and Facebook, then dies away when people come to their senses and realise it's just someone somewhere having a laugh, trying to get a topic trending.
The story was that Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool’s caretaker manager, was going to sign Andy Carroll, a promising 21-year-old centre-forward, from Newcastle. The rumour had it that Dalglish had paid £25 million(€29.6 million) for Carroll. But this was soon found to be nonsense. King Kenny had done nothing of the sort. He’d paid £35 million, plus a contract guaranteeing that Carroll’s wages jumped from £28,000 a week to £80,000. This for a man who has played 21 Premier League games and been selected just once for his country, in a friendly.
“It’s like paying 20 quid for a Pot Noodle just as the cafeteria shutters are closing,” concluded one unkind Twitterer. But then this was no ordinary Monday in January. It was the final day of football’s transfer window, which, if we didn’t know better, could have been created by bankers to make them look relatively good with money.
At 11pm the window closed, the music stopped and the relationship between Premier League football and real world was laid bare: there isn’t one.
For a few short hours football demonstrated a head for figures every bit as irrational as those responsible for budget deficits and bank bonuses. In all, £225 million was spent on players in the Premier League, the largest total for a January transfer window since it was introduced, in 2003. The figure eclipsed the previous record total of £175 million, in 2008, and was £195 million more than the £30 million spent in last year’s January window. This splurge comes at a time when the 20 clubs that form the Premier League owe a collective £3 billion to their owners or the banks. Fourteen Premier League clubs have managed to make large losses despite the league earning £2.3 billion in revenue.
January merely takes this fiscal incompetence and distils it. The time limit imposed by the window removes any veneer of sophistication from the transfer process. Seven- and eight-figure sums are wagered on little more than a hunch or a line from an agent. In boardrooms up and down the country, mad-eyed panic trumps long-term team-building strategies as managers scour the land for a big bloke with a ponytail.
On Monday afternoon, as Andy Carroll was boarding a helicopter on his way to complete the deal with Liverpool – Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, was so keen to get his hands on the money he lent Carroll his own chopper – the £35 million required to pay for him was being agreed by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, whose own manic Monday was a game of two halves. That morning the oil billionaire’s personal fiefdom, Chelsea FC, announced a loss for the financial year of £71 million. Extremely rich men do not let such gloomy news ruin the whole day, however, and that very afternoon Abramovich gave the green light for a further £75.2 million to be splashed out on just two players.
The bulk of this went on Fernando Torres, valued at a British record of £50 million. As he drove into a rainswept London Torres was pictured wearing a multi-denim outfit that paid a knowing homage to Status Quo, and a grin that seemed to mean: “I won’t say anything if you don’t.”
The money received by Liverpool meant that they were able to pay for both Carroll and Luis Suarez, a well-rated Uruguayan, for a net outlay of just £1.8 million.
This version of the trickle-down effect was of little consolation to Shaun McCormack, a Liverpool supporter and father of four from Lincolnshire, who returned to work after Christmas having changed his name by deed poll to Fernando Torres. The former Ireland international John Aldridge, meanwhile, called Torres a “fake and a fraud who has spat in the faces of the Liverpool supporters who idolised him”.
The irony of Liverpool’s involvement in this high-stakes merry-go-round is that the club’s new owners came into British football last year intent on telling a different story. The new regime, led by the Boston billionaire John Henry, was reportedly going to bring the Moneyball approach to football. Michael Lewis’s brilliant book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game tells the story of Oakland Athletics head coach Billy Beane’s attempts to buck the market for player transfers by applying the rules of Wall Street to the process. The Oakland As have one of the best winning records in major-league baseball, and have achieved it with the lowest wage bill. Beane did this by buying players cheaply, identifying skills that were undervalued by the market. He succeeded in the ultimate transfer-window aim: paying for future, not past, performance.
Attempts to apply Moneyball directly to football are flawed, but, as this latest transfer window demonstrates, the market for football talent could do with a modicum of science. The market says Moneyball overvalues randomness. Goals per season, for example, is the most obvious way of judging the worth of a striker, but this ignores how the goals have come about. How many of Carroll’s Newcastle goals was he really responsible for? How many were lucky? How many were served up on a plate for him by skilful team-mates?
Moneyball was a feature of the boom years, when listening to bankers was deemed a good thing to do. When I spoke to Beane in 2005 he told me that Wall Street was “always the most innovative place because they had the most to gain. They had immediate satisfaction from their decision-making, sometimes in a minute, sometimes at the end of the day, and that’s the greatest incentive to do things right or do things for change. Sport has been left behind in this regard.”
But banking and football are tied together in other ways too. Below the headline-making Torres and Carroll deals lies an even deeper malaise: a sense of entitlement that runs through the game, fuelled by a system in which averagely talented people are outrageously rewarded.
Here’s a quote that seems to sum up football’s problem: “The star quality, as it were, seems to filter down to people who don’t seem so star quality. There is, if I can use the expression, a sort of gangmaster cultural phenomenon in this, that you recruit top people who really do make a difference, who . . . are really high achievers. But the disparities between the top stars in the team and some of the journeymen players is probably not as marked as it should be.”
Wise words indeed. But they don’t come from a football club owner or manager; they come from Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of RBS, the bank that two years ago posted a loss of £3.6 billion.
Like their derivative-trading equivalents, football’s journeymen make little difference to their teams, nor do they lift the spirits of the fans for whom football is a welcome distraction from job losses and austerity budgets. But, like bankers, footballers are the poster boys for the most despised group in today’s society, the undeserving rich. The distance between the players and the people who pay to watch them has grown to grotesque levels. Earlier in the January transfer window Manchester City announced that the club had spent £27 million on the striker Edin Dzeko; only a few days before, Manchester City Council had announced 2,000 redundancies.
There’s the real world, and then there’s Premier League football.
Curriculum vitae
Who is he?A monster created by money and ego.
Why is he in the news?Manic Monday, the last day of the transfer window, resulted in €265 million of spending on players.
Most appealing characteristicHe's nicer than his agent.
Least appealing characteristicKissing the badge of his latest employer.
Most likely to say"Because I'm worth it."
Least likely to say"Can I borrow your Corsa?"
