Big Transfers: Is Real Ka-ka-krazy?

By: Ian Rose | June 13th, 2009

I’ll do my best to keep the Numbers Offside as topical as possible, which is difficult when the numbers of the game lag necessarily behind the game itself. This week, there was really only one story on the front pages of football rags around the world. I speak of course about Australia’s 0-0 with Qatar. No, it was the blustering start of the transfer madness, with Kaka and Ronaldo joining Real Madrid for the new #1 and #2 transfer fees (not respectively), along with talk of the rest of the Milan squad following Ricky out the door.

The question is, what can the two most expensive transfers in history, along with likely the two biggest wage bills, do for Real Madrid? I won’t belabor the point everyone else has already made about building a team exclusively out of attacking midfielders and then being shocked when you concede in the fifth minute of matchday one. We can’t see the future, but we can look at the past for some ideas, and so I took a look at the fourteen biggest transfers in European history to see how both teams did before and after the deal. Is it better to sell or to buy, in terms of league standings?

The 14 biggest transfers of the pre-K-Ron era have, of course, been a mixed bag. Some have ended well for the buyer or seller, and a few even for both, and of course some have been disasters. Yes, Sheva, we are looking at you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But when we look at the data set as a whole, a few trends do emerge. Just looking at the raw averages, sellers of big players tended to slightly slide in the rankings (2 places total in 14 cases, so barely noticeably), and buyers rose, but only just as slightly. But if you take away one outlier from each, and look at them without this one most extreme case, things are a bit different. In 13 such transfers, sellers lost a total of 15 places, more than an average of a position per sale, while buyers get even more neutral, actually losing a ridiculously insignificant 0.07 average places. So it’s fair to say that while selling and buying big both average out to a wash, selling has a tendency to be a lot more negative than buying does to help.

But of course those numbers don’t mean much on their own, so let’s look a little deeper for some situations that are similar to the K-Ron insanity. Real fans can take some cautious optimism from the case of Juventus in 2001, who bought two big names after finishing second, and rode them to the league title the next year. Now, the reality check. One of those two players was arguably the best goalkeeper alive, Gigi Buffon, the ultimate build at the back. In fact, 2 of the 3 buyers that were able to spend their way to a league title the season after the purchase paid the big bucks on defense – Juventus for Buffon and Manchester United for Rio Ferdinand. To be fair, positional comparisons are a bit difficult with such a top-heavy set of data … 10 of the 14 on the top money list are primarily or exclusively attacking players. Factor in Ricky and Cristie and that’s 12 of 16.

The scatterplot below shows the effects on buyers and sellers the season after the sale. Higher means league improvement, and farther right means a higher transfer fee. Like so many datasets, the most important thing to look at here isn’t the trend, it’s the distribution. Buyers (red) didn’t see any extreme effects, mostly because they started in very high positions. The average buyer had just finished a 3rd place season, while the average seller had just finished in 5th. The effects of sales on the seller (blue) were extremely mixed and much more volatile, ranging from an improvement of 13 places to a loss of 10.

Of course, this is a small set of data. In the future, I’ll take a look at all the smaller transfers that, in the end, mean more to the fate of teams. But if you’re Manchester United, AC Milan, or Real Madrid now, you’re not thinking small. You’re about 2 months from starting what will be the ultimate experiment in whether the financial insanity of 100 million pounds changing hands on two players has a footballing reward for anyone involved.

Data Sources: Wikipedia (Checked all primary sources, so stop your whining)