Transfers, then: caveat emptor

[Uilleam 6,572]

He's transfer crazy,

He's transfer mad,

And the transfer windae's robbed him

O' the wee bit sense he had.

And it wid tak' a dizen Yahoos

Tae estimate the dough

That thae Yanks hiv brought to Ibrox

Fur tae make that wasteland grow.

 

 

 

JONATHAN NORTHCROFT

Fans beware: Half your club’s transfers will fail

Former Liverpool stats guru Ian Graham’s research – and success at Anfield – suggests wheeler-dealer approach does not work and less is more when it comes to buying talent

Füllkrug, Riccardo Calafiori and João Félix have all failed to live up to their billing

 

Jonathan Northcroft

Saturday May 31 2025, 8.20pm, The Sunday Times

 

Fans beware: Half your club’s transfers will fail

 

The Grand Hyatt, Hong Kong, July 2007. Portsmouth were staying there while contesting the Premier League Asia Trophy and Harry Redknapp did his press briefing by the rooftop swimming pool.

His theme was Portsmouth’s urgent need for reinforcements. Said Harry, with utmost solemnity: “We’re down to the bare bones, you see.”

It was hard not to look over his shoulder to the pool, where glistening footballers lounged in the sun. Fulham were also at the hotel and their squad formed a modest grouping. Whereas Portsmouth’s took up a whole side of the pool, and was almost spilling into the water. Those bare bones still had a few million pounds of flesh on them, it seemed.

 

Redknapp always springs to mind this time of year. A transfer window opens on Sunday and so many appear to share his view that you can just never do enough splurging on new players.

 

Liverpool fans are rightly salivating about Florian Wirtz; their club is close to one of the great signing coups of our age. But, on social media, a certain type fantasises about Wirtz just being for starters. They can’t wait to absolutely rip up the team that has just won the league.

 

A similar strain of Manchester United fan — judging by our reader comments — would be keen to see Bruno Fernandes complete a move to Al-Hilal because it would give their club funds for a spree. Ignoring that Fernandes has just won United’s player of the year award for a record fourth time, and United are as good at deal-making as Jack in the fairytale when he swapped his mother’s cow for some beans.

 

It’s going to be a “big summer” for everyone, if you believe all the threads and blogs saying that your team has to spend big. Yet as a club owner said: “Winning the transfer window seems to rarely convert to actual winning, huh?” Maybe I’m old school, I’ve never thought the contest was in the market — it’s on the pitch.

Whoever a club buys, whatever it spends, it will still rest on the same fundamentals that make organisations successful — or dysfunctional. These include the management, culture, strategy, connection with customers, investment in the future, ability to develop people. See the decline of United, 2013-25.

 

Beyond that there are simply limits to what recruitment can do. Bad news for the transfer nerds but, historically, signing players is an unreliable route to transformation. Transfers have the success rate of Rasmus Hojlund’s shooting.

According to transfermarkt.com, Premier League clubs made 370 signings in 2024-25, at a gross cost of €2.8billion (about £2.4billion), averaging at almost €143million (£120.5million) per club. So, what proportion of those new arrivals went on to play even half of the minutes available to them in the competition? The answer is 12.7 per cent (47 players). How many played in more than 70 per cent of available minutes? A jaw-droppingly meagre 6.7 per cent (25 players).

 

That’s one in 15. Of course, a proportion of signings are not intended as immediate first-team regulars. Some are young players (though our figures, taken from transfermarkt, which include loans, are for first-team squad recruits not youth signings). Some are back-up players and some are players acquired for trading. However, it remains an extraordinary thought that only one transfer in 15 might end up with the player becoming important to the first XI. And this in an age of sporting directors, big recruitment structures and data.

Some proclaimed West Ham United as “winners” of the 2024 summer transfer period. Certainly, their unctuous technical director at the time, Tim Steidten, seemed to think so. He took the unusual step of giving the kind of pre-match TV interview normally reserved for managers before West Ham played Chelsea in September. “The summer was really busy, as expected, but at the end we have great players,” Steidten crowed on TNT.

 

Of course West Ham lost the game (heavily) and by February Steidten was fired amid a hail of “good riddance” posts from fans. But what were they posting while he was conducting his £121million trolley dash of ten signings the previous July and August? Things like “insane business!” (when Jean-Clair Todibo arrived from Nice) and “this puts West Ham in the top three discussion for next season” (when Luis Guilherme arrived from Palmeiras) and “the striker we’ve been waiting for for ten years” (after Niclas Füllkrug — remarkably on a deal that will see him past his 35th birthday — rolled in from Borussia Dortmund).

.

The question of why so few transfers work is examined in How to Win the Premier League, Ian Graham’s exceptional insider account of the data revolution in football. As Liverpool’s director of research from 2012, Graham worked hand-in-hand with Michael Edwards to turn the club from the Premier League’s least to probably most successful recruiters. He now consults for a range of clubs through his sports advisory, Ludonautics.

 

In the chapter entitled “Zebra farmers: why transfers fail”, Graham takes all transfers to Premier League clubs of €10million or more from the start of the competition in 1992 to January 2021 and suggests they could be considered “successful” if the player started at least 50 per cent of their club’s league games in the two seasons after joining. The minimum €10million fee was chosen to weed out players signed as reserves or with long-term development in mind.

Graham discovered 46 per cent of €10million-plus players failed to start half or more of their team’s matches and only 54 per cent succeeded. Hojlund’s shooting accuracy since leaving Copenhagen as a teenager, incidentally, is 52 per cent.

 

Graham recently did a similar analysis looking at the top 100 transfers coming into the “big five” leagues each season and found something similar, with more than 50 per cent of transfers “failing” and no improvement in recent seasons. Why is it so hard to get transfers right? His chapter title alludes to it.

 

The American historian and scientist Jared Diamond wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning book on why some civilisations conquer others, called Guns, Germs and Steel. He considers why so few (14 of 148) animal species that have the potential to be farmed have actually been farmed. Zebras seem a particular puzzle, given their similarity to horses and desirable hides. They tick every box except one — “safe for farming”. Unfortunately, zebras tend to kick, bite and kill anyone who attempts to domesticate them.

Graham applies the idea to footballers. For a signing to work, numerous boxes must be ticked like “avoids injury” and “is played in the right position” and “fits the style of play” and “has the right personality”. If there are six such boxes and a signing ticks 70 per cent of each one, the chance of them succeeding is 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent x 70 per cent, which equals 12 per cent. If the signing ticks 92 per cent of each box their “success chance” is still just 51 per cent.

 

By applying rigour, using data and working with a brilliant sporting director (Edwards) and a manager (Jürgen Klopp) who was happy with a committee approach to transfers, Graham helped Liverpool to raise its success rate (using his “50 per cent rule”) from 41 per cent (the Premier League’s worst) to 68 per cent, making signings including Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané and Virgil van Dijk.

But there were still “failures” such as Naby Keita, who was beset by injuries, and Lazar Markovic, considered Europe’s hottest prospect when he joined from Benfica for £20 million but who Edwards had reservations about, having viewed him on video and thought him not quite as good as per the scouting reports. The Markovic debacle led Edwards to introduce an extra layer of video analysis to the recruitment process and helped shape the Liverpool view that they should only buy a player if all departments and stakeholders in recruitment are aligned.

 

Redknapp’s love of transfers worked for him. That summer in 2007 he did get reinforcements, adding Glen Johnson and Papa Bouba Diop (on deadline day, of course) to the seven signings he had already made prior to Hong Kong, and Pompey finished the season by winning the FA Cup. But Harry was Harry. Transfer-mania doesn’t work for many and it is telling Edwards, now Liverpool’s chief executive of football, who worked for Redknapp, chose not to follow Redknapp’s path. And the same is true of Richard Hughes, Liverpool’s present sporting director and Redknapp’s former player.

Both — Hughes especially — were criticised when Liverpool made only two signings last summer but their approach took into account that Hughes was new to the club, and there was a new head coach, Arne Slot, and that it was better to thoroughly assess the squad and market before making moves. Another Edwards maxim is “you can’t spend the money twice” and Liverpool are now benefitting from the strategic approach by having retained the resources to bid £109million for Wirtz, and in how well Hughes and Edwards have plotted that move.

Liverpool were champions despite signing the fewest players last season and before their 2019-20 title-winning season signed only a youngster (Sepp van den Berg) and two reserve goalkeepers (Adrian and Andy Lonergan). Tottenham Hotspur reached the 2018-19 Champions League final in a season they made no signings at all and Chelsea had a rebirth under Frank Lampard during a period under a transfer embargo.

 

Ranking the Premier League teams by number of players acquired in 2024-25 in ascending order is interesting: the table bears some similarities to the actual league table. The two teams making the fewest transfers (Liverpool then Arsenal) were also first and second in the actual table and the two teams making the most (Southampton then Ipswich Town) finished 19th and 20th. The “net spend” table is also instructive, with ten of the 11 most parsimonious teams enjoying seasons their supporters would class as successful.

None of this is to say transfers are bad. They’re undeniably exciting and the right ones are, indeed, transformative but the truth is that “less is more”. Graham calculates the maximum number of starters to sign is, historically, three per season. He also thinks a 70 per cent success rate for transfers is about the maximum a club could reach.

That says it all. Even with best practice, roughly a third of transfers will fail. But perhaps it is not so surprising. There are a range of studies that suggest, in any workplace, only about 50 per cent of hires will be successful. It’s just that the loafer in the office who talked up their CV to get a job can hide behind their computer in a way you cannot on a Premier League pitch.

 

So, enjoy the transfer window but view all the bids and pursuits as escapism, retail therapy. The reality is your club needs a lot more than shopping to be transformed. Look at the most expensive deals last summer and note the calamities such as João Félix and ponder that it’s not until you get to No14 on the list — Elliot Anderson — that you see a transfer you can say, unequivocally, was a success.

 

 

 

 

Edited Sunday at 12:31 by Uilleam