Soccernomics (9 page)

DRUNKS, GAMBLERS, AND BARGAINS:

CLOUGH AND TAYLOR AT FOREST

“Cloughie likes a bung,” Alan Sugar told the High Court in 1993.

Sugar’s former manager at Spurs, Terry Venables, had told him so.

A “bung” is British slang for an illegal under-the-table payment to sweeten a deal. The court heard that when Clough bought or sold a player for Nottingham Forest, he expected to get a “bung.” In a perfect world, he liked it to be handed over at a highway rest stop. Clough denied everything—“A bung? Isn’t that something you get from a plumber to stop up the bath?”—and was never prosecuted. Yet what seems likely is this: “Old Big Head” (as Clough called himself ) was so good at transfers, making profits even while turning a little provincial club into European champions, that he felt he deserved the odd bonus.

More than anyone else in his day, Clough and his right-hand man, Peter Taylor, had succeeded in gaming the transfer market.

Clough and Taylor met while playing in a “Probables versus Possibles” reserve game at Middlesbrough in 1955. They seem to have fallen in love at first sight. Pretty soon they were using their free time to travel around the North of England watching soccer and coaching children together. Taylor never became more than a journeyman keeper, but Clough scored the fastest two hundred goals ever notched in English soccer until, at the age of twenty-seven, he wrecked his right knee skidding on a frozen field on Boxing Day in 1962. Three years later he phoned Taylor and said, “I’ve been offered the man-agership of Hartlepools and I don’t fancy it. But if you’ll come, I’ll consider it.” He then immediately hung up. Taylor took the bait, though to get in he had to double as Hartlepools’ medical department, running onto the field with the sponge on match days. It was the prelude to their legendary years together at Derby and Nottingham Forest.

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David Peace’s novel
The Damned United
—and Tom Hooper’s film of it—is in large part the love story of Clough and Taylor. The men’s wives have only walk-on parts. As in all good couples, each partner has his assigned role. As Peace’s fictional Clough tells himself, “Peter has the eyes and the ears, but you have the stomach and the balls.” Taylor found the players, and Clough led them to glory.

The relationship ended in “divorce” in 1982, with Taylor’s resigna-tion from Forest. It seems that the rift had opened two years before, when Taylor published his excellent but now forgotten memoir,
With
Clough by Taylor.
More of this in a moment, because it is the closest thing we have to a handbook to the transfer market.

But clearly the couple had other problems besides literature. Perhaps Clough resented his partner because he needed him so badly—not the sort of relationship Clough liked. Indeed, the film
The Damned United
depicts him failing at Leeds partly because Taylor is not there to scout players, and finally driving down to Brighton with his young sons to beg his partner’s forgiveness. He finds Taylor doing the gardening. At Taylor’s insistence, he gets down on his knees in the driveway and recites: “I’m nothing without you. Please, please, baby, take me back.” And Taylor takes him back, and buys him the cut-price Forest team that wins two European Cups. For whatever their precise relationship, the duo certainly knew how to sign players. Here are a few of their coups:

• Buying Gary Birtles from the nonleague club Long Eaton for $3,500 in 1976, and selling him to Manchester United four years later for $2.9 million. A measure of what a good deal this was worth to Forest: United forked out about $500,000 more for Birtles than they would pay to sign Eric Cantona from Leeds twelve years later, in 1992. Birtles ended up costing United about $175,000 a goal, and after two years was sold back to Forest for a quarter of the initial fee.

• Buying Roy Keane from an Irish club called Cobh Ramblers for $80,000 in 1990 and selling him to Manchester United three years later for $5.6 million, then a British record fee.

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• Buying Kenny Burns from Birmingham City for $250,000 in

1977. Taylor writes in
With Clough by Taylor
that Burns was then regarded as “a fighting, hard-drinking gambler . . . a stone [fourteen pounds] overweight.” In 1978, English soccer writers voted Burns the league’s player of the year.

• Twice buying Archie Gemmill cheaply. In 1970, when Gemmill was playing for Preston, Clough drove to his house and asked him to come to Derby. Gemmill refused. Clough said that in that case he would sleep outside in his car. Gemmill’s wife invited him to sleep in the house instead. The next morning at breakfast Clough persuaded Gemmill to sign. The fee was $145,000, and Gemmill quickly won two league titles at Derby. In 1977 Clough paid Derby $35,000 and the forgotten goalkeeper John Middleton to bring Gemmill to his new club Forest, where the player won another league title.

If there is one club where almost every penny spent on transfers bought results, it was Forest under Clough. In the 1970s the correlation must have been off the charts: they won two European Cups with a team assembled largely for peanuts. Sadly, there are no good financial data for that period, but we do know that even from 1982 to 1992, in Clough’s declining years, after Taylor had left him, Forest performed as well on the field as clubs that were spending twice as much on wages. Clough had broken the usually iron link between salaries and league position.

It’s hard to identify all of the duo’s transfer secrets, and if their rivals at the time had understood what they were up to, everyone would simply have imitated them. Taylor’s book makes it clear that he spent a lot of time trying to identify players (like Burns) whom others had wrongly undervalued due to surface characteristics, but then everyone tries to do that. Sometimes Forest did splurge on a player who was rated by everybody, like Trevor Francis, the first “million-pound man,” or Peter Shilton, whom they made the most expensive goalkeeper in British history.

Yet thanks to
With Clough by Taylor
we can identify three of the duo’s rules. First, be as eager to sell good players as to buy them. “It’s as 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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important in soccer as in the stock market to sell at the right time,”

wrote Taylor. “A manager should always be looking for signs of disintegration in a winning side and then sell the players responsible before their deterioration is noticed by possible buyers.” (Or in Billy Beane’s words: “You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you’re fucked.”) The moment when a player reaches the top of his particular hill is like the moment when a stock market peaks. Clough and Taylor were always trying to gauge that moment, and sell. Each time they signed a player, they would give him a set speech, which Taylor recorded in his book: “Son, the first time we can replace you with a better player, we’ll do it without blinking an eyelid. That’s what we’re paid to do—to produce the best side and to win as many things as we can. If we see a better player than you but don’t sign him then we’re frauds. But we’re not frauds.” In 1981, just after Kenny Burns had won everything with Forest, the club offloaded him to Leeds for $800,000.

Second, older players are overrated. “I’ve noticed over the years how often Liverpool sell players as they near or pass their thirtieth birthday,”

notes Taylor in his book. “Bob Paisley [Liverpool’s then manager] believes the average First Division footballer is beginning to burn out at thirty.” Taylor added, rather snottily, that that was true of a “running side like Liverpool,” but less so of a passing one like Forest. Nonetheless, he agreed with the principle of selling older players.

The master of that trade today is Wenger. Arsenal’s manager is one of the few people in soccer who can view the game from the outside. In part, this is because he has a degree in economic sciences from the University of Strasbourg in France. As a trained economist, he is inclined to trust data rather than the game’s received wisdom. Wenger sees that in the transfer market, clubs tend to overvalue a player’s past performance. That prompts them to pay fortunes for players who have just passed their peak.

Probably because Wenger was one of the first managers to use statistics to assess players, he spotted that older players declined sooner than was conventionally realized. When Dennis Bergkamp was in his early thirties, Wenger began to substitute him late in games. If Bergkamp complained about it afterward, Wenger would simply produce the match statistics: 58

“Look, Dennis, after seventy minutes you started to run less. And your speed decreased.”

Wenger often lets defenders carry on until their midthirties, but he usually gets rid of his midfielders and forwards much younger. He sold Patrick Vieira for $25 million (age twenty-nine), Thierry Henry for $30

million (age twenty-nine), Emmanuel Petit for $10.5 million (age twenty-nine), and Marc Overmars for $37 million (age twenty-seven), and none of them ever did as well again after leaving Arsenal.

Curiously, precisely the same overvaluation of older players exists in baseball, too. The conventional wisdom in the game had always been that players peak in their early thirties. Then along came Bill James from his tiny town in Kansas. In his mimeographs, the father of sabermetrics showed that the average player peaked not in his early thirties, but at just twenty-seven years old.

Finally, Clough and Taylor’s third rule: buy players with personal problems (like Burns, or the gambler Stan Bowles) at a discount. Then help them deal with their problems.

Clough, a drinker, and Taylor, a gambler, had empathy with troubled players. While negotiating with a new player they would ask him a stock question, “to which we usually know the answer,” wrote Taylor.

It was: “Let’s hear your vice before you sign. Is it women, booze, drugs or gambling?”

Clough and Taylor thought that once they knew the vice, they could help the player manage it. Taylor says he told Bowles, who joined Forest in 1979 (and, as it happens, failed there): “Any problem in your private life must be brought to us; you may not like that but we’ll prove to you that our way of management is good for all of us.” After a player confided a problem, wrote Taylor, “if we couldn’t find an answer, we would turn to experts: we have sought advice for our players from cler-gymen, doctors and local councilors.” Taking much the same approach, Wenger helped Tony Adams and Paul Merson combat their addictions.

All this might sound obvious, but the usual attitude in soccer is, “We paid a lot of money for you, now get on with it,” as if mental illness, addictions, or homesickness should not exist above a certain level of income.

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RELOCATION, RELOCATION, RELOCATION:

THE RICE KRISPIES PROBLEM

Clough and Taylor understood that many transfers failed because of a player’s problems off the field. In a surprising number of cases, these problems are the product of the transfer itself.

Moving to a job in another city is always stressful; moving to another country is even more so. The challenge of moving from Rio de Janeiro to Manchester involves cultural adjustments that just don’t compare with moving from Springfield, Missouri, to Springfield, Ohio.

Yet European clubs that pay millions of dollars for foreign players are often unwilling to spend a few thousand more to help the players settle in their new homes. Instead, the clubs typically tell them: “Here’s a plane ticket, come over, and play brilliantly from day 1.” The player fails to adjust to the new country, underperforms, and his transfer fee is wasted. “Relocation,” as the industry of relocation consultants calls it, is one of the biggest inefficiencies in the transfer market.

All the inefficiencies surrounding relocation could be assuaged.

Most big businesses know how difficult relocation is, and do their best to smooth the passage. When a senior Microsoft executive moves between countries, a “relocation consultant” helps his or her family find schools and a house and learn the social rules of the new country. If Luther Blissett had been working for Microsoft, a relocation consultant could have found him Rice Krispies. An expensive relocation might cost $25,000, or 0.1 percent of a large transfer fee. But in soccer, the most globalized industry of all, spending anything at all on relocation is regarded as a waste of money.

Boudewijn Zenden, who has played in four countries, for clubs including Liverpool and Barcelona, told us at his latest stop, Marseille: It’s the weirdest thing ever that you can actually buy a player for 20

mil, and you don’t do anything to make him feel at home. I think the first thing you should do is get him a mobile phone and a house.

Get him a school for the kids, get something for his missus, get a 60

teacher in for both of them straight away, because obviously everything goes with the language. Do they need anything for other family members, do they need a driving license, do they need a visa, do they need a new passport? Sometimes even at the biggest clubs it’s really badly organized.

Milan: best club ever. AC Milan is organized in a way you can’t believe. Anything is done for you: you arrive, you get your house, it’s fully furnished, you get five cars to choose from, you know the sky’s the limit. They really say: we’ll take care of everything else; you make sure you play really well. Whereas unfortunately in a lot of clubs, you have to get after it yourself. . . . Sometimes you get to a club, and you’ve got people actually at the club who take profit from players.

In soccer, bad relocations are the norm, like Chelsea signing cosmopolitan Ruud Gullit in 1996 and sticking him in a hotel in Slough, or Ian Rush coming back from two bad years in Italy marveling, “It was like another country.” Many players down the decades would have understood that phrase. But perhaps the great failed relocation, one that a Spanish relocation consultant still cites in her presentations, was Nicolas Anelka’s to Real Madrid in 1999.

A half hour of conversation with Anelka is enough to confirm that he is self-absorbed, scared of other people, and not someone who makes contact easily. Nor does he appear to be good at languages, because after a decade in England he still speaks very mediocre English. Anelka is the sort of expatriate who really needs a relocation consultant.