Soccernomics (11 page)

Polls suggest he is right: in Sport+Markt’s survey of European supporters in 2008, Lyon emerged as the country’s most popular club just ahead of Olympique Marseille. This popularity was a new phenomenon. In 2002, when Lyon first became champion of France, the over-riding French emotion toward the club had still been: “Whatever.” The editor of
France Football
magazine complained around that time that when Lyon won the title, his magazine didn’t sell. But from 2002 to 2008 the club won the title every year—the longest period of domination of any club in any of Europe’s five biggest national leagues ever—

and many French fans began to care about it.

With more fans, Lyon makes more money. On match days now you can get a haircut at an official OL salon, drink an OL Beaujolais at an OL café, book your holiday at an OL travel agency, and take an OL taxi to the game—and many people do. Lyon uses that money to buy better players.

The club now survives the winter in the Champions League almost every season, which makes Lyon one of the sixteen best clubs in Europe. Aulas says it is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. “We know it will happen; we don’t know
when
it will happen. It’s a necessary step to achieve a growth in merchandising.”

The cup with the big ears would cap perhaps the most remarkable rise in soccer history. And for all Aulas’s “OL mineral water,” what made it possible was the transfer market. On that warm winter’s afternoon in Lyon, Aulas told us, “We will invest better than Chelsea, Arsenal, or Real Madrid. We will make different strategic choices. For instance, we won’t try to have the best team on paper in terms of brand.

We will have the best team relative to our investment.” Here are Lyon’s rules of the transfer market:

Use the wisdom of crowds
. When Lyon is thinking of signing a player, a group of men sits down to debate the transfer. Aulas is there, and so is Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like center forward for Lyon and 68

France, and for most of the past twenty years the club’s “technical director.” Lacombe is known for having the best pair of eyes in French soccer. He coached Lyon from 1996 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club forever rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.

Whoever happens to be Lyon’s head coach at the moment sits in on the meeting too, and so will four or five other coaches. “We have a group that gives its advice,” Aulas explains. “In England the manager often does it alone. In France it’s often the technical director.”

Like Lyon, the Oakland A’s sidelined their manager, too. Like Lyon, the A’s understood that he was merely “a middle manager” obsessed with the very short term. The A’s let him watch baseball’s annual draft.

They didn’t let him say a word about it.

Lyon’s method for choosing players is so obvious and smart that it’s surprising all clubs don’t use it. The theory of the “wisdom of crowds”

says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to bet on, say, the outcome of a presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too. (Gambling markets have proved excellent predictors of all sorts of outcomes.) The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough. This is often the case in American sports. But in European soccer, opinions tend to come from many different countries, and that helps ensure diversity.

Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the typical decision-making model in English soccer is not “wisdom of crowds,” but short-term dictatorship. At most clubs the manager is treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide everything until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor’s signings at a discount. Lyon, notes a rival French club president G E N T L E M E N P R E F E R B L O N D S

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with envy, never has expensive signings rotting on the bench. It never has revolutions at all. It understands that the coach is only a “temp.” OL

won its seven consecutive titles with four different coaches—Jacques Santini, Paul Le Guen, Gerard Houllier, and Alain Perrin—none of whom, judging by their subsequent records, is exactly a Hegelian world-historical individual. When a coach leaves Lyon, not much changes. No matter who happens to be sitting on the bench, the team always plays much the same brand of attacking soccer (by French standards).

Emmanuel Hembert grew up in Lyon supporting OL when it was still in the second division. Now, as head of the London sports practice of the management consultancy A. T. Kearney, he is always citing the club as an example to his clients in soccer. “A big secret of a successful club is stability,” explains Hembert over coffee in Paris. “In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe.”

Another Lyon rule:
the best time to buy a player is when he is in his
early twenties
. Aulas says, “We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old.” It’s almost as if he had read
Moneyball
. The book keeps banging away about a truth discovered by Bill James, who wrote, “College players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.”

Baseball clubs traditionally preferred to draft high school players.

But how good you are at seventeen or eighteen is a poor predictor of how good you will become as an adult. By definition, when a player is that young there is still too little information to judge him. Beane himself had been probably the hottest baseball prospect in the United States at seventeen, but he was already declining in his senior year at high school, and he then failed in the major leagues. Watching the 2002

draft as the A’s general manager, he “punches his fist in the air” each time rival teams draft schoolboys.

It’s the same in soccer, where brilliant teenagers tend to disappear soon afterward. Here are a few recent winners of the Golden Ball for best player at the under-seventeen World Cup: Philip Osundo of Nigeria, William de Oliveira of Brazil, Nii Lamptey of Ghana, Scottish 70

goalkeeper James Will, and Mohammed al-Kathiri of Oman. Once upon a time they must have all been brilliant, but none of them made it as adults. (Will ended up a policeman in the Scottish Highlands playing for his village team.) The most famous case of a teenager who flamed out is American Freddy Adu, who at fourteen was the next Pelé and Maradona.

Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them creators—Pelé, Maradona, Wayne Rooney—reach the top before they are eighteen. Most players get there considerably later. You can be confident of their potential only when they are more mature.

Beane knows that by the time 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 are old enough to be nearly fully formed, but too young to be expensive stars.

Lyon always tries to avoid paying a premium for a star player’s

“name.” Here, again, it is lucky to be a club from a quiet town. Its placid supporters and local media don’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.

Soccer 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 players with names. 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 soccer 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 behavior, 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.”

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Happy is the club that has no need of heroes. Lyon was free to buy young unknowns like Michael Essien or Mahamadou Diarra just because they were good. And unknowns accept modest salaries. According to the French sports newspaper
L’Equipe,
in the 2007–2008 season Lyon spent only 31 percent of its budget on players’ pay. The average in the English Premier League was about double that. Like Clough’s Forest, Lyon performs the magic trick of winning things without paying silly salaries.

Here are a few more of Lyon’s secrets. First,
try not to buy center forwards
. Center forward is the most overpriced position in the transfer market. (Goalkeeper is the most underpriced, even though keepers have longer careers than outfield players; in baseball, the most overpriced position is pitcher.) Admittedly Lyon “announced” itself to soccer by buying the Brazilian center forward Sonny Anderson for $19 million in 1999, but the club has scrimped on the position since. Houllier left OL

in 2007 grumbling that even after the club sold Florent Malouda and Eric Abidal for a combined total of $45 million, Aulas still wouldn’t buy him a center forward.

Second,
help your foreign signings relocate
. All sorts of great Brazilians have passed through Lyon: Sonny Anderson; the current club captain, Cris; the future internationals Juninho and Fred; and the world champion Edmilson. Most were barely known when they joined the club.

Aulas explains the secret: “Ten years ago we sent one of our old players, Marcelo, to Brazil. He was an extraordinary man, because he was both an engineer and a professional soccer player. 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 is clearly in the Lacombe or Peter Taylor class.

Marcelo says he scouts 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 signs the serious boys, it makes sure they settle. Drogba notes enviously, “At Lyon, a translator takes care of the Brazilians, helps 72

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 works full-time for the club, sorts out the players’ homesickness, bank accounts, nouvelle cuisine, and whatever else. Other people at the club teach the newcomers Lyon’s culture: no stars or showoffs. By concentrating on Brazilians, the club can offer them a tailor-made relocation service. Almost all the other foreign players Lyon buys are French speakers.

Finally, sell any player if another club offers more than he is worth.

This is what Aulas means when he says, “Buying and selling players is not an activity for improving the soccer performance. It’s a trading activity, in which we produce gross margin. If an offer for a player is greatly superior to his market value, you must not keep him.” The ghost of Peter Taylor would approve.

Like Clough and Taylor, and like Billy Beane, Lyon never gets sentimental about players. In the club’s annual accounts, it books each player for a certain transfer value. (Beane says, “Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it.”)

Lyon knows that sooner or later its best players will attract somebody else’s attention. Because the club expects to sell them, it replaces them even before they go. That avoids a transition period or a panic purchase after the player’s departure. Aulas explains, “We will replace the player in the squad six months or a year before. So when Michael Essien goes [to Chelsea for $43 million], we already have a certain number of players who are ready to replace him. Then, when the opportunity to buy Tiago arises, for 25 percent of the price of Essien, you take him.”

Before Essien’s transfer, Aulas spent weeks proclaiming that the Ghanaian was “untransferable.” He always says that when he is about to transfer a player, because it drives up the price. In his words, “Every international at Lyon is untransferable. Until the offer surpasses by far the amount we had expected.”

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As a free service to clubs, here are the twelve main secrets of the transfer market in full:

A new manager wastes money on transfers; don’t let him.

Use the wisdom of crowds.

Stars of recent World Cups or European championships are

overvalued; ignore them.

Certain nationalities are overvalued.

Older players are overvalued.

Center forwards are overvalued; goalkeepers are undervalued.

Gentlemen prefer blonds: identify and abandon “sight-based prejudices.”

The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties.

Sell any player when another club offers more than he is worth.

Replace your best players even before you sell them.

Buy players with personal problems, and then help them deal with their problems.

Help your players relocate.

Alternatively, clubs could just stick with the conventional wisdom.

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Why Soccer Clubs Don’t

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