Free Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski Page B

club is going somewhere, which may be as much fun as actually winning things. Buying big names is how these clubs keep their customers satisfied during the three-month summer shutdown.
    So addicted is Newcastle to buying big names that even its high spending on salaries doesn’t bring it the high league position you would expect. When Francisco Pérez Cutiño analyzed data for the Premier League for the 2006–2007 season, for an unpublished MBA paper at Judge Business School in Cambridge, he found that “only Newcastle United seemed to significantly underperform taking into account its wage expenditure.”
    Certain Nationalities Are Overvalued
    Clubs will pay more for a player from a “fashionable” soccer country.
    American goalkeeper Kasey Keller says that in the transfer market, it’s good to be Dutch. “Giovanni van Bronckhorst is the best example,”
    Keller told the German journalist Christoph Biermann. “He went from Rangers to Arsenal, failed there, and then where did he go? To Barcelona! You have to be a Dutchman to do that. An American would have been sent straight back to DC United.”
    The most fashionable nationality of all in the transfer market is Brazilian. As Alex Bellos writes in Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life : G E N T L E M E N P R E F E R B L O N D S
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    “The phrase ‘Brazilian soccer player’ is like the phrases ‘French chef’ or
    ‘Tibetan monk.’ The nationality expresses an authority, an innate vocation for the job—whatever the natural ability.” A Brazilian agent who had exported very humble Brazilian players to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland told Bellos, “It’s sad to say, but it is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival. Irrespective of talent, it is very seductive to have a Brazilian in your team.”
    A wise club will buy unfashionable nationalities—Bolivians, say, or Belorussians—at discounts.
    Gentlemen Prefer Blonds
    At least one big English club noticed that its scouts kept recommend-ing blond players. The likely reason: when you are scanning a field of twenty-two similar-looking players, the blonds tend to stand out (except, presumably, in Scandinavia). The color catches the eye. So the scout notices the blond player without understanding why. The club in question began to take this distortion into account when judging scout-ing reports.
    Similarly, Beane at the Oakland A’s noticed that baseball scouts had all sorts of “sight-based prejudices.” They were suspicious of fat guys or skinny little guys or “short right-handed pitchers,” and they overvalued handsome, strapping athletes of the type that Beane himself had been at age seventeen. Scouts look for players who look the part. Perhaps in soccer, blonds are thought to look more like superstars.
    This taste for blonds is an example of the “availability heuristic”: the more available a piece of information is to the memory, the more likely it is to influence your decision, even when the information is irrelevant.
    Blonds stick in the memory.
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    The inefficiencies we have cited so far are so-called “systemic failures”: more than just individual mistakes, they are deviations from rationality.

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    All this is what you might call Transfer Market 101. To learn more about how to play the market, we need to study the masters.
    DRUNKS, GAMBLERS, AND BARGAINS:
    CLOUGH AND TAYLOR AT FOREST
    “Cloughie likes a bung,” Alan Sugar told the High Court in 1993.
    Sugar’s former manager at Spurs, Terry Venables, had told him so.
    A “bung” is British slang for an illegal under-the-table payment to sweeten a deal. The court heard that when Clough bought or sold a player for Nottingham Forest, he expected to get a “bung.” In a perfect world, he liked it to be handed over at a highway rest stop. Clough denied everything—“A bung? Isn’t that something you get from a plumber to stop up the