Hello, of course you expect us to talk about Hazar, Bale, Coutinho, Pogba and others, and the pampered people who charge for all your dreams every week for sitting on the bench or changing the haircut every 5 minutes, and we promise that we will talk about all that, but let's ask you an important question first: do you see that drawing?
Roger Sheppard's "Cognition Test" tables. (Shutterstock)
Two tables that appear to be designed by a 5-year-old carpenter. Of course, you know what we're going to say now; these two tables are perfectly regular, have right side angles, and, most importantly, their size and dimensions are exactly the same. (1) (2)
90% faith. 53% chance
The venue is the famous statistics company Statsbomb's annual conference, the date is 2021, and the event is the speech of Ian Graham, Liverpool's director of data science, and the man to whom a fair amount of the club's success in recent years is credited. The word is about the methodology of signings in the transfer market, and the surprise is two tables of a different kind, or rather, 6 tables. (3)
Graham, who holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, has been a Liverpool fan since his childhood by the way, believes there are 6 main factors that could cause any new signing for any club to fail:
- 1- The player himself is not as good as you think.
- 2- The player's potential does not suit the team's style of play.
- 3- The coach is not a fan of the player.
- 4- The player suffers with injuries and/or personal problems.
- 5- The player does not play in his original position or a position suitable for his capabilities.
- 6- There is a better player than him already available in the market.
You can easily notice the wisdom in choosing words and words in the third factor for example: the coach is not a fan of the player. This does not necessarily mean that the player is not impressive, but it may be personal or social, and then you may have to choose between a successful coach, who enjoys a good relationship with almost all his players, like Klopp, and risking it all for one player. (3)
All of the above is self-evident and does not require an annual conference, statistics company or PhD from Cambridge. What's not so is that Graham tells you that if your score on each of the six factors is 90%, which is very rare in football signings, this gives you a 53% probability of success according to the simple law of probability. (3)
Everyone in the hall must have been silent at the time, with the exception of data scientists, which simply means that success in the transfer market is theoretically impossible, knowing that most clubs do not follow this methodology in the first place, and even if they do, they do not reach this degree of certainty before concluding a deal.
34% success. 66% failure
Last year, for example, Italian journalist Gabriele Marcotti has tracked big deals in the top five leagues since 2010, and with the help of data science and football consultancy Twenty First Club, he has set simple criteria for identifying big deals first, and then judging how successful they are second. (4)
Marcotti has counted 73 big deals since 2010, and a "big deal" here means that its price exceeded 50 million euros, and the criterion for the success of each of them was the percentage of minutes played in the league since the completion of the contract, and the minimum 70% of the minutes were chosen to be considered a successful deal, which of course is a very lenient limit.
Because it is a very lenient criterion, Barcelona have been at the forefront of successful clubs in the transfer market with five successful big deals since 2010 after Neymar, Luis Suarez, Frenkie de Jong, Antoine Griezmann and Ferran Torres were considered successful deals because they had played 70% of the minutes or more since they joined.
This criterion is not only leniency, but probably very superficial as well, not only because Griezmann has become a fantastically paid alternative that the club is looking to get rid of in any way, not only because Torres followed him to a similar fate later, but also because the criterion did not take into account any other factors, such as the accumulation of debts on Barcelona in that period due to the deals themselves, or the fact that Ernesto Valverde, his coach at the time, was practically forced to involve these deals in his formation. Or the extent to which those deals have been added after they have actually been shared, and about 32847650 other variable that cannot be deduced from the percentage of minutes of participation alone. Let us tell you, for example, that Maguire was among those who exceeded 70 per cent of the minutes of play at the time of Marcotti writing his analysis, while Kevin De Bruyne has failed to achieve the same percentage since joining City in 2015.
Sky Sports News viewers have been picking their transfer window XI... Have they made the right calls for this side? 👇💬 pic.twitter.com/3CI3NNDVq8
— Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) August 5, 2022
The almost opposite happened with other successful deals that were not picked up by the Marcotti criterion, either because they did not have enough time to adapt, such as Militão at Real Madrid, Osimhen at Napoli, who became the league's top scorer in the season following the Marcotti report, or because the team had a large number of additional options, such as Bernardo Silva, Joao Cancelo and Riyad Mahrez at City, all of which the standard considered a failure, or because the purposes of the deal itself had nothing to do with football in the first place, such as Pjanic is at Barcelona, so the judgment from the perspective of the minutes of play was not accurate. In fact, Marcotti could not have found a logical benchmark against which to measure the success of the Artur Pjanic swap no matter how much he searched.
Therefore, this was not the most important discovery in Marcotti's attempt, but the fact that even with such lenient and superficial criteria, only 34% of the 73 deals made by the top five league clubs since 2010 – 13 strikers, 4 midfielders and one goalkeeper you often know.
In fact, we don't need to go back to 2010; months ago, in January, the economic institution Deloitte released a terrifying report on Premier League clubs' spending in the winter transfer market, in which Chelsea alone (£280 million) exceeded the total spent by the Spanish league, Serie A and the German Bundesliga combined, and even small clubs such as Leeds and Southampton completed relatively large signings such as Jorginho Rutter from Hoffenheim and Kamal Eddin Suleymana from Rennes for 35. and £22 million respectively. (5)
The first did not feature much, the second did not score a single goal in Southampton's inevitable march towards the Champions League, and overall, the Premier League may be one of the worst examples in this context. Of course, it has become almost the only example in recent years in this context, given the decline in the ability of the Spanish giants and the top Italy to spend, but let's say that nothing will save you from feelings of regret once and for all for any action you have done in your life like the list of the 10 most expensive signings in the history of the Premier League.
100% vision. 0% Edraak
Ironically, the previous list brings you back to the 53% that Graham suggested in his speech. This is roughly the percentage of successful deals out of the 10 most expensive in the history of the Premier League, of course, with two important observations: the first is that this percentage may rise or fall according to the likes of Anthony, Enzo Fernandes and Sancho in the future, and the second is that some of them did not fail completely, but did not live up to expectations, such as Jack Grealish and Lukaku at United.
Does that make sense? The answer is no. This is the second paradox; the convergence of the two ratios was nothing more than a coincidence, for the simple and obvious reason that most of these deals were not subject to Graham's methodology in the first place.
Take Hazard's deal for Real Madrid as an example: Hazard was an excellent player and was one of the best wingers and playmakers in the world at one point, but logically, there was no tactical drawing he could accommodate with Benzema and Vinicius, or with Ronaldo and Benzema before. This is something that any coach is aware of at the beginning of his career, because the areas of activity of the trio are close, and their roles are also in carrying the ball and landing to receive and control the course of play, while in the same period Real Madrid struggled on the opposite front to find a winger who could balance the matter a bit, and cause a real constant and regular danger, without prejudice to their defensive duties.
What this means is that Hazard could have succeeded at Real Madrid in another context in other circumstances at another time, and this is precisely the idea of Roger Sheppard's two "cognitive test" tables.
In the following section, it is clear how Sheppard manipulated the vertical spaces and planes that do not appear on paper to suggest that the two tables are different, when in fact, the main difference was in our perception of them, and therefore our perception of their reality.
Neuroscience differentiates between two concepts that most humans do not distinguish: vision, in the sense of looking at things, and perception, in the sense of recognizing the reality of those things, and the two are completely different, just as Maguire's performance at Leicester and his performance at Manchester United. (6) (7) (8)
The first takes into account the tactical and technical context, the player's relationship with the coach, with his teammates, the stages in which he excels with and without the ball, and dozens of other factors that cannot be completed without comparing them to what will be asked of him at Manchester United.
This systematic process, which Graham summarizes in the six factors, did not simply take place, and the result was a square horizontal defender who, by contrast, seemed to be a vertical rectangle, because whoever hired him only "saw" him, and made little effort to "perceive" his truth.
The main problem here is that trying to "perceive" often leads to factors that constantly hover around football and do not seem to belong to it completely, and this is what makes sports directors, coaches and administrators in clubs unable to realize it, because, as former players mostly, they were not interested in it, did not know how to deal with it, and may have hated it as mentioned in many biographies such as "The Secret Footballer" and others. (9)
100% promotion. 0% Protection
On top of these factors comes the most changing-up element in recent years, which is simply and clearly: communication.
The impact of social media platforms in changing the perception of large deals is evident from the fact that there is a clear difference in the success rate between the deals that followed 2010 and those concluded in the nineties and the beginning of the millennium.
Of course, there have been factors that have been very influential in modern deals, the most prominent of which was personal crises and repeated injuries that thwarted 18 of the 48 transfers made in the last decade according to Marcotti's analysis, but even those crises and injuries turned with the impact of inflated communication into snowballs that rolled until they gained huge sizes that ran over everything in their path, including the player's ability to recover psychologically and organically, and his performance under pressure after returning, in addition to the obvious dilemma that comes with Pushing a large number puts the player under the microscope even though – practically at least – he didn't have a big role in it. (10) (11)
In fact, some deals are doomed to failure as a result of the club's methodology in concluding them, and in recent years, the most notable of which was ironically the panic deal that Liverpool completed in the last days of the summer by signing Artur Melo from Juventus, as a result of the constant public pressure to sign a creative midfielder who can contribute to offensive operations more effectively than the current elements.
Add to this the prior stimulus that accompanies any deal that takes a long time to negotiate, and the immersion of followers and supporters in countless legal and financial details, related to image rights, additional incentives, resale and purchase conditions, etc. Of course, all of them are circumstances that the player does not control alone, but raise expectations and ambitions to illogical levels, which plague his career later.
This is a space where football clubs are still taking their first steps. It is remarkable that the clubs themselves have made huge strides in promoting themselves and their successes on the same platforms, but they have not yet succeeded in deciphering the expectations of their fans and supporters, nor protecting their players from continuous pressure and continuous bullying and targeting campaigns, which was not half this severe in the nineties and the beginning of the millennium, as it was possible for the coach to "protect" his players and isolate them from the conditions of the matches and the chants of the fans in moments of decline and personal crises, and it was possible on the other hand for the fans to forget the presence of a player for a period of Time until it regains its natural state, instead of being chased online at the push of a button.
In the same year, 2010, ironically, English economist and football researcher Simon Cooper uttered his famous phrase that still resonates whenever a big club makes a similar deal:
"Anyone who follows the insides of football clubs and the way they are managed, immediately realizes that stupidity is part of the industry of this game, just as petroleum is part of the petroleum industry."
Why would a club spend €50m or more on a player, and then not bother to study his case in detail and make sure he is suitable for his style of play and coach, as part of a comprehensive methodology to make sure that money is not in vain? Only Simon Cooper and Roger Sheppard may know the answer to this question, waiting for a new round of crazy deals to begin in a few weeks.
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Sources:
1. What do you actually know? These tables will test you! – Dan Tromatter
2. Vision is Believing – Psychology Today
3- Why do so many big deals fail in football? – ESPN
4. Are big deals worth the money you pay for? – ESPN
5- Not everyone understands the idea of "winning the transfer window". Most big trades don't bring real returns! – The Athletic
6- What is the vision? – Very Well Mind
7- Vision is not the truth! – Psychology Today
8- Diverse Vision – Psychology Today
9- The Guardian Secret Player Series
10- How do the best footballers work to gain an advantage in the transfer market? – The Athletic
11. The Mystery Behind Failed Football Deals – Soccer Net
12- Why are most big deals in football failing? – HITC SEVENS