The transfer paradox: how expert knowledge in football became worthless

By Tony Attwood

It is strange how the discussions that go on in the media in Europe can be so very different from those in England.

For example, at the moment there is a discussion going on about the morality of asking players to have their salaries cut during the current crisis.  Into this debate comes the scenario in which players find themselves foregoing part of their salary so that the club has more money which it can then spend on more transfers… one of which might well lead them to sell a player who has been giving up part of his salary.

Curiously these are issues that are rarely being considered by those strange people who make up transfer stories all day long.

And that failure is part of a broader problem in England today in which experts in all fields are increasingly denigrated.

Thus we see that a man with no background in science who can assert that 5G telephone masts will kill us, and he is believed over the opinion of people who have a lifetime with working with this type of technology.

That approach transfers to football wherein football writers who are wrong 97% of the time when it comes to talking about transfers, still expect us to take them seriously.  Meanwhile we can show that Arsenal has had the fourth highest expenditure on players in the last five years while supporters complain either that that Arsenal is starved of funds, or that it is uniquely suffering under a manager and transfer team who are utterly lacking in an understanding of what players the team needs.

In short, modern day reporting on football leads to the view that we already know all we need to know and so can see what needs to be done, far more clearly than  those who are paid to take these decisions.

What’s more, the scientific approach, which often leads to a change of viewpoint as more data becomes available, instead of being welcomed (because it is taking new data into account) is now denigrated, with the implication that the analyser knows nothing because he may well change his mind.

It is as if having said that the sun clearly goes round the earth, because we can see it in the sky, anyone who changes his mind and says, actually no, the earth goes round the sun, is not to be considered seriously, for the simple reason that he has changed his mind!

But the biggest problems facing football is that, when given a choice between believing a highly credible journal that reports evidence, and a radio phone in which effectively offers the opinion of one person, many people prefer the one-person opinion.

In short reaching a conclusion without external evidence seems to give people a feeling that they have all the information they need to be able to understand the issue.  This seems to be because people do not want to be reminded of the complexity of a topic.  They want something that is easy to understand, so that they can feel they know about the subject, and (presumably) then sound off to their friends in what seems to be a knowledgeable way.

The reason is fairly obvious: what the simplistic articles do is leave the audience with a sense of confidence, as in “Here is an issue, the manager hasn’t got a clue how to solve it, but I can.”  Better still, anyone who reconsiders an issue and then changes his/her mind, can be denigrated for the simple fact of reconsidering.

Thus as journalists make football easier and easier to understand with ever more simple explanations of what is wrong, and ever greater emphasis on individuals rather than the complexity of an 11 man team, so readers like it more and more, even those these ever easier explanations are increasingly misleading and often contrary to the known facts.

This is happening everywhere and as a result across our society faith in experts is vanishing while the game itself is becoming increasingly complex.  In this approach the management at Arsenal are then reduced to the level of idiots who can’t see that David Luiz is useless, and don’t understand that paying the agent a fee equal to 60% of the transfer cost, on top of the transfer fee, is ludicrous.  The fact that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest Arsenal ever did pay such a fee is ignored.  It was said, it must be true.

So because Arsenal’s management are considered to have less knowledge of football as a game and football as a business than the man in the north bank (or any other part of the ground) the man in the ground is considered to be right.  Journalists know a free lunch when they see one, so they make up ever simpler stories of management incompetence.

Thus the notion that Arsenal won’t spend any money circulates, despite the figures showing that Arsenal had the fourth highest net spend in the Premier League across the last four years.  Faced with that dichotomy the tendency is to suggest that the figures are wrong because everyone know that Arsenal don’t spend money.

Thus exists contemporary commentary on football.

• Just how wasteful has Arsenal’s transfer policy been? Here’s the answer.