Why football clubs no longer flock to the January sales

Ajax Amsterdam’s general director recently tallied his club’s transfers, and came up with this estimate: only 8.3 per cent of the footballers Ajax had bought in the past decade had succeeded. Ajax’s Dutch rivals, he said, had done even worse.

This January European clubs spent barely anything during the “transfer window”. English clubs forked out about £30m ($48m, €34m) on new players, their lowest for any January since 2003. German, Spanish and French clubs spent even less. The credit crunch has bitten soccer in the leg. But more than that, transfers are going out of fashion. Here’s what the January sales taught us:
●Even football is deleveraging. English and Spanish clubs alone have debts of more than €7bn between them. In the credit crunch, banks and local governments belatedly grasped that football clubs were a huge credit risk, and stopped lending. Now Spanish banks won’t let a club such as Valencia add to its probably unrepayable debt of €423m. In England, bankers have asked Portsmouth and even Liverpool for repayments.
●Clubs that pursue profits, such as Liverpool and Manchester United, can rarely buy players. Footballers are overvalued: they usually cost more than their likely contribution to the club’s bottom line. Clubs such as Real Madrid disdain profits and will pay whatever it takes to buy a player. So club owners who aspire to be businesslike cannot compete.
●Crucially: transfers are going out of fashion. Ever fewer football officials believe that buying players improves their teams. That is partly because Europe’s most successful clubs – Barcelona, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United – are wary of transfers.

Chelsea and United have barely changed the core of their teams since 2006, other than United’s sale of Ronaldo. Chelsea officials like to say that 99 per cent of recruitment is deciding who not to sign. Mike Forde, the club’s performance director, cites the Boston Red Sox baseball team, which once gave their scout of the year award to someone who had not sent them any players.

Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s chief executive, notes that transfers disrupt teams. Arsenal dislikes buying players who will need time to adjust, he says, and who “might or might not be 5 or 10 per cent better than the players we already have”.

Similarly, a Barcelona official argues against transfers by invoking the “one-second rule”. He says: “If a player needs one more second to discover which player is waiting for the ball, that’s the difference between winning and losing.” Settled sides perform better, and so Barcelona rarely buys players.

Instead, it is the less successful clubs that are obsessed with transfers. Real Madrid, Manchester City, Spurs and Newcastle make hilarious blunders that educate everyone else.
●Transfers rarely help teams. Stefan Szymanski of Cass Business School in London analysed 40 English clubs between 1978 and 1997 and found that their outlay on transfers explained just 16 per cent of their total variation in league position. It was their spending on salaries that determined where they finished in the league. Increasingly, football officials crunch data. They spot these correlations.
●The media are educating fans in economic reality. Clubs used to buy players partly in order to buy good coverage. Snaps of the chairman with his arm around some reassuringly expensive foreign signing signalled a club’s ambition. But now sports pages offer almost hourly coverage of clubs’ finances. So the need to save is penetrating fans’ consciousness. Supporters are learning to think like business analysts.

Yet most media pretend that transfers still matter. All winter, football websites purveyed the traditional “transfer rumours”: who was about to buy whom. These stories curiously resembled the old stories of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Newspapers have traditionally used the transfer market to sell copies. Now they are losing even that crutch.

simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com