The secrets of success for Premier League clubs in the January transfer window

Graham Taylor knew a thing or two about transfers. He was manager of Watford in the late 1970s and early 1980s as they rose from the Fourth to the First Division.

In his autobiography he wrote: “Over the course of a manager’s career if you could say that roughly a third of all signings worked out well and added real value to the team, a third did okay and a third didn’t make the grade, then you’d be talking about a manager who had done pretty well.”

We can look back now and agree that Taylor did pretty well. But we do not usually wait until a manager’s career is over and evaluate his signings all together. We judge the first, then the second, and keep going as long as he does.

If one or two signings do not work out he might not get to make any more, and we will never find out how good others could have become. But if at any time a few deals go well he will become highly sought-after. Even though in a small number of transfers there are a lot of things beyond a buyer’s control that can go right or wrong.

In this January window many transfers will be initiated by someone other than a manager.

Steve Walsh was the assistant at Leicester who scouted Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kante. They cost £8 million. Vardy, Mahrez and Kante starred when Leicester won the Premier League in 2016, and afterwards Walsh was headhunted by Everton to become director of football. Then Everton spent £150m on players who did not make the team better and in 2018 Walsh was sacked.

I suspect Walsh is a fine judge of players – nowhere near as bad as Everton thought he was when they fired him, but not quite as good as they thought he was when they hired him.

Over a short period it is hard to distinguish skill from luck in the achievements of scouts, managers or players. Ed Zwick is a film director who understands this is also true for movies.

He said: “You don’t learn much in success. Success makes you a little bit anxious because things have worked out, and you’re not entirely sure what you did differently on this occasion than on another occasion. And suddenly everyone’s telling you how smart you are, and you’re a little bit uneasy.”

Not everyone who enjoys a moment of success in their field is as honest as Zwick, with themselves never mind with others.

Taylor suggested that if a club have a good transfer market operator one-third of signings will make the team a lot better, one-third will make the team a bit better and one-third will make the team worse.

Let us imagine instead someone who is not good but average – someone who after a long career, if they are allowed to have one, would rank bang in the middle. We will assume that for each signing there is a one-third chance of being better than the player they replace, a one-third chance of being the same and a one-third chance of being worse.

The transfers listed in The Big Kick-Off, the Racing Post’s pre-season supplement, tell us that in the summer window a typical Premier League club will buy four players. In January they will sign fewer – perhaps two. To keep things simple, let us say that our recruiter works for a Premier League club who sign three players in every window.

In any window they are as likely to make the team worse as better. Whether in this window they makes them worse or better will come down to luck. There is a 37 per cent chance they will get worse, a 26 per cent chance they will stay the same and a 37 per cent chance they will get better.

There is a 14 per cent chance that purely by luck they will make the team better for two windows in a row. And a five per cent chance that they will do it for three windows in a row.

Put that another way. There is a one-in-20 chance that entirely through good fortune our recruiter will make their team better for three windows in a row.

Suppose now that all 20 Premier League clubs employed player-recruitment specialists with identical ability. Just by luck one of them could improve their team for three windows in a row. But nobody would call it luck. They would say they were a genius. In real life a recruiter who improved a team for three windows in a row might be a genius. Or they might be lucky. Or a bit of both.

Taylor knew something about transfers. Most of us would do better to repeat the words of Fats Waller, a jazz pianist and singer in the first half of the last century. He said: “One never knows, do one?”

Something that looks like skill might not be

This is how the scam works. John Allen Paulos explained it in a book called A Mathematician Plays the Market. He came across it in the United States.

The scammer picks a betting market in which there must be a winner – say, the over-under line in an NBA game. He sends letters to 640 people chosen at random. Three hundred and twenty are told to bet over, 320 to bet under. Half have been given a winner.

To those 320 he sends a second letter a week later about another game. One hundred and sixty are told to bet over, 160 to bet under. Again half have been given a winner. To those 160 he sends a third letter, and so on.

After six weeks ten people have been given six winners. The scammer now sends a different kind of letter to those people. He says he will keep giving them tips if they pay him $1,000.

Something a person attributes to skill can be attributable to luck. Here it was certain ten people would be given six winners – but which ten people was down to luck. If they pay $1,000 it will be bad luck.

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