Why do clubs make such appalling errors with some transfers?

By Tony Attwood

There is a Telegraph article running at the moment, headlined “The 10 worst signings of all time.”  It is a typical doom and gloom feature of their site, and each time they run it, the message one might take from it is, “Do not give your manager everything he asks for, until he does a Wenger and brings players you’ve never heard of who turn out to be utterly brilliant, or players who are failing elsewhere and turn out to be utterly brilliant.  Don’t give him all the money: make sure he is not Emery buying Pepe.”

And yes, there is something in all that because one of the reasons that managers make mistakes is that they come into a club where the newspapers are raging daily about the need for new signings, and the manager takes notice of what the media is saying.   That is, of course, very silly, but it happens.

Obviously, journalists know nothing about transfers and signing players, for as we have seen, 97% of their predictions and “reports” (I use the word lightly) concerning transfers never happen  (although they may have done better this summer simply by reducing the number of stories they print).

But, if they really knew about football management, they would be in football management, where the salaries are about ten times higher (or more) than in journalism.   But no, no one will ever give a journalist a job as a club manager and anyway, journalists don’t actually dare apply for such a job for fear of being laughed at in an interview.

Yet still, the underlying question is an interesting one: why do so many transfers go wrong?   Take Arsenal, for example.   On 29 November 2019, Unai Emery was sacked with Arsenal eighth in the league after 13 games.   

But it was actually worse than that.  Arsenal had under half the number of points that Liverpool had after 13 games.  And between Liverpool at the top and Arsenal in eighth, we had Leicester City (now in the Championship and embroiled in legal cases with the Premier League), Wolverhampton Wanderers (currently bottom of the Premier League), Sheffield United (currently bottom of the Championship) and Burnley, currently 14th, having been promoted last season.

Each of these clubs has done a lot of transfer deals since then, and has experience of being in the top league, but now they sit in varying amounts of trouble.  (Even Burnley, a club which for years ran a fairly sustainable financial programme, has lost money heavily in the last two seasons.)

Despite clubs being massively in debt, and despite the fact that, as we have often revealed, more often than not, managerial changes and transfers don’t work, two things seem inevitable in football.   The media will keep on suggesting the clubs are going to (and indeed should) buy certain players, and will also suggest that a change of manager will be a good idea.

Last season, Brighton, Chelsea, Everton, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester United, Southampton, West Ham and Wolverhampton Wanderers changed their managers.   That is 45% of the Premier League clubs.   Of course, some change is inevitable – managers themselves sometimes want to move or retire, but even so the fact of an almost 50% tunrover rate is extraordinary.  Especially as most of these change-change-change clubs are not doing any better now than they were last year.

So why does this happen?   The most obvious answer is that, despite the overwhelming evidence that most incoming players do not significantly improve a team in the long run, shunting the squad around as soon as they take up the new job, is pretty much all most managers seem able to do.  

But there is another point.  The media, despite knowing full well that changing managers doesn’t help (after all, one only has to look at the league table), always encourage fans to think that changing managers is necessary for progress, when in fact the opposite is the case.  So why do they do this?  And what is the alternative?

Of course, changing managers does help occasionally – but it takes time.After Arteta came to Arsenal in December 2019, his first job was to unload some of the players his predecessor had bought.  This of course, included Pepe who came in for 80 million euros and who nobody would even take on a free because of his wage demands and the poverty of his performances.

In fact, in his first season at Arsenal, Arteta moved on seven players for a fee and three on a free.  In his second season, Macey, Sokrates, Ozil, Mustafi and Mkhitarian all left on frees, while five went out on loan.

In 2021/22 it was one player sold, nine out on loan and six on free transfers, including Aubameyang.   And so it went on.   In 2022/23 four players went out for modest fees, two on free transfers, and an astonishing nine on loan.  

In 2023/24 six players went out for a fee, and three went out for a loan.  Three left on a free, including thankfully Pepe.  And to round it off, in 2024/25 three were sold, two left on a free and six went on loan.

This is a phenomenal change around of players.    I might have made a slip somewhere because not all sources agree about exact details, but it is a fact that 39 players, (or maybe 38 or 40), playes have left Arsenal permanently since Arteta arrived.

Now of course, all sorts of reasons can be behind a player not doing as well, including the player’s wife or girlfriend demanding to go back to her homeland.  All clubs make mistakes – although of course, as Arsenal supporters we mostly remember Pepe, just like Leeds remember letting Cantona go to Man U..

In terms of Arsenal, we might also think of Francis Jeffers, who was nowhere near the standard of  Henry, Kanu, Wiltord and Dennis Bergkamp. But then that transfer teaches us that even the great spotter of talent that Wenger was couldn’t always persuade the player to deliver the football he was capable of.  

But then, going the other way around, Arsenal did give Alexis Sánchez to Manchester United, allegedly so they could have the privilege of paying him half a million pounds a week.  That move perhaps shows more than any other that just because a player can score 30 goals in around 50 games for Arsenal, he might not do the same with another club.

So why do clubs make such errors?   There are many reasons, but I’d start with these three: because they don’t do their homework, because they buckle under media pressure, and because no one talked to the wife or girlfriend..