The following piece is an in-depth look at just where, after a few years of drama, the Reds stand right now in terms of progress and direction headed. The first half of the article is free to read, the second half is for Subscribers only.

Feeling disoriented? You may not be alone. It seems that many Liverpool fans are a little lost right now. Lost between expectations, transitions and reality. We are the discombobulation nation. Far better under Dalglish than Hodgson, but behind Newcastle in the table.

(Still, we were behind almost everyone this time last year, in 18th place.)

Fans almost always want more than is realistic. But what is realistic right now?

The 1990s were spent in the shadow of belief: belief that we were the rightful heirs to the title, having spent the previous two decades basking in glory. It took a while to realise that, hey, we’re not simply unlucky; we’re just not that good anymore.

For a while, in the mid-‘90s, the Reds, just like Keegan’s Newcastle, had a great attacking team, but, at best, an average defensive one; only Manchester United (and briefly, Dalglish’s Blackburn, before he moved ‘upstairs’ having wont he 1995 title) seemed to get it right at both ends.

After the last title in 1990, the Reds won just two trophies that decade: an FA Cup in 1992, and the League Cup three years later, both against lower league opposition. There was just one further final, the cream suit debacle of ’96. There were a couple of tilts at the title, but never quite amounting to much.

Then came the Houllier years, a general upward trend from seasons two to four, and a nosedive for the last two. Still, he won four trophies, and the treble of 2001 was the best time we’d had for a decade.

Throughout his time – excluding the poor first season – Liverpool were ‘roughly’ a top four side, if only a Champions League side on two occasions.

Manchester United and Arsenal were the titans, and Chelsea, Leeds and Newcastle the rivals for a place in the top four. This trio were relatively big spenders, and so were Liverpool. (Even so, United were spending £30m on single players almost a decade ago, when £11m was a lot for Liverpool.)

But it was a time when ‘big spending’ had yet to be redefined by Roman Abramovich. That came in 2003.  The big-spending ‘90s had yielded very little for the Reds, and now they were losing out to richer clubs.

Liverpool averaged 65 points a season in Houllier’s time, and, fortunately for us, scraped 4th place, with a fairly low total of 60 (with just 16 wins from 38), in 2003/04. A massive 30 points off the title, but still good enough to scrape by.

I can’t speak for others, but I felt I knew where LFC ‘belonged’ during the next five years; I had my bearings. Maybe it’s because I started analysing the club on a full-time and highly detailed basis, or perhaps it was the five consecutive Champions League qualifications, and four journeys to at least the quarter-finals. A top four side, and top-eight in Europe.

Liverpool were never title favourites, and were always paying lower fees than United and Chelsea, but there was a strong identity to the team, with the two scouse Trojans (as they were, in their pomp) and the Spanish cavalry.

But then it started to go wrong. The club was at war with itself, and the owners were loathed by the fans. The priority became less about winning matches (although that never becomes meaningless), and more about protecting the future of the club. The fans, split 50-50 over Benítez by the end, were unified in their hatred of Gillett and Hicks.

While Roy Hodgson was a universally underwhelming appointment for Kopites, had his team not performed so much below even modest expectations, he may have steered the ship – after all, he was the ‘steady hand’ – to the shore of season’s end. He may have been a decent interim boss, the man who, after all, said his speciality was getting more out of players, and not requiring a big budget to get results.

Alas, managing Liverpool is nothing like managing Fulham or West Brom in terms of expectations. The tactics were all wrong, the approach far too defeatist.

My own view was that, having expected top four under Benítez, 5th or 6th was where his replacement should have had the team; for me, there were no unrealistic expectations last season with which to hammer Hodgson. (I was mocked on the official site forum by someone who said, after the opening day Arsenal draw, that Liverpool would end the season as champions under Hodgson. Really? These same people called me ‘optimistic’ under Rafa.)

Unfortunately, Liverpool became a team floundering below mid-table, and the football was poor from front to back. All sorts of records for the worst performance in 50 years were being set – worst start, worst cup exit (in terms of quality of opposition), worst goal difference. Remember, this was less than a year ago.

Still, at least Gillett and Hicks were sent packing; if they’d blighted the latter years of Benítez and first three months of Hodgson’s tenure, there was now an incredible sense of victory in the air. Winning the court case was like winning a trophy.

The clouds had lifted! The arrival of FSG coincided with a brief upturn in results, but after a handful of games where things looked increasingly close to being acceptable, the team fell apart, and were now playing worse than ever. Fans became united again; in excess of 90% wanted Hodgson removed.

Hodgson hadn’t got to spend the new owners’ money, but he had benefited from the sense of calm that fell over the club; but chaos on the pitch was now the problem. For a decade Liverpool had been winning 51% of league games under the successive reigns of Evans and Houllier (1994-2004), and 56% under Benítez between 2004 and 2010.

Under Hodgson, the Premier League win percentage was just 35%. He did better with what he called the ‘B team’, in Europe’s second-rate competition, but with the ‘A team’, where it counted, he was found wanting.

So the board turned to the man who, in an era when 60% was an incredibly high win rate (after all, Bob Paisley’s was 57% when racking up six titles in nine seasons), posted 61% across six seasons.

Whatever Kenny Dalglish’s long-term prospects at the club, it was hard to think of anyone better to bring a sense of unity to the fans; or at least, unity that did not involve despising the manager.

Short-term, it didn’t really need thinking outside the box; just someone to fill the rapidly emptying Anfield seats, and get the players smiling again. Oh, and passing the ball on the deck. As fans, there was a sense of relief, and a sense of euphoria. But if last season under Dalglish was the great night on the tiles, this would always be in risk of being the morning after.

Until the final two games of last season – both of which were lost (immediately after the manager’s role was made permanent) – Dalglish’s record was far better than any of us had a right to expect.

The football was fluent, and the Reds rose from 13th to 5th in almost no time, but stumbled over the line, in 6th. Some in the media saw this as a ‘collapse’.

Still, with 35 points, Dalglish had racked up 11 more in 18 games than Hodgson managed in 20. Hodgson was on course for a 48-point finish, whereas Dalglish’s results, pro rata, were suggestive of a 74-point season. Boy, were we grateful. And that brings us to this season.

So, where does this undulating journey leave us now? What are realistic ambitions? It’s okay saying “but we are Liverpool!” (which translates as: we should be winning the league), but that doesn’t put food – I mean points – on the table.

The second half of this post is for Subscribers only.

Adios Señor, Bonjour Monsieur: A Look At Liverpool’s Forays Into Different Transfer Markets

I have to admit that I wholeheartedly bought into the Spanish revolution at Liverpool; so much more than the French one that went before it.

The big difference, of course, was that we got the best of Spanish: best manager, best players. By contrast, we had a second-rate French manager (by comparison with Arsene Wenger, at least). Given that Arsenal had not only got the better French manager, but got their first (two years earlier, in 1996), Liverpool was never going to be the primary destination for elite French talent.

A lot of Reds still shudder at Houllier’s forays into the French market. While he made good signings from Holland, Germany and England, he only really had one single clear success (John Arne Riise) when plundering his homeland. All managers sign their fair share of flops, but in Houllier’s case, they almost always came from France.

And now, in 2011, the key transfer strategist is once again French. While it’s unlikely that Damien Comolli will focus solely on his homeland, it’s interesting to note how many Ligue Une players we are being linked with. That said, so far it’s a Uruguayan from the Dutch league and a Geordie that he’s helped procure.

Obviously managers and Directors of Football have markets in which they feel most comfortable, or perhaps simply more knowledgeable; it stands to reason that contacts will be strongest in someone’s homeland.

But no matter where a player is from, it’s the individual’s talent and mentality that is key. While it’s interesting to look at success and failure rates from different countries, every player is unique.

French Farce

Gérard Houllier plundered the French market during six years of spending. The list of names reads like a litany of transfer crimes.

Jean-Michel Ferri, Pegguy Arphexad, Titi Camara, Rigobert Song (although he was briefly at Italian club Salernitana), Bernard Diomede, Bruno Cheyrou, Salif Diao, El Hadji Diouf, Djimi Traore, Gregory Vignal, Djibril Cissé, Anthony Le Tallec and Florent Sinama-Pongolle: 13 French (or French-trained) players, plus one Czech, Vladimir Smicer, and one Norwegian, Riise, plying their trade across the Channel, who cost £57.8m, or £108.1m in 2010 money (Current Transfer Purchase Price, CTPP; see Transfer Price Index site or Pay As You Play for more details).

On average, each player cost £3.5m (£6.7m in today’s money). The list does not include young players like Carl Medjani or Alou Diarra, neither of whom played a single game for the club. (Diarra was also signed from Germany, not France.)

Now, there are of course different types of signings, which fit into three broad groups: those bought in order to immediately strengthen the first XI (or at least challenge for a spot); those bought based on future potential; and those who make up the squad numbers – the understudies. And it’s clear that all three categories are represented by those players.

Of the list, Song, Camara, Diouf, Riise, Diao, Cissé and Cheyrou were bought for the first XI (or thereabouts), with Diomede perhaps also expected to at least remain on the face of the earth.

Traore, Cissé and Smicer were all key parts of the Champions League triumph a year after Houllier departed, although none was a clear success in their own right. Smicer was very gifted but injured too often, and Cissé was quick and powerful, but also somewhat aimless, and like Smicer, had more than his share of bad luck.

For what was paid, Sinama-Pongolle was a success of sorts, although he never reached his full potential at the club. Titi Camara really succeeded in relation to expectations, with one fine season at the club; but it never amounted to any more than ‘pretty good’. And even though he was a success, John Arne Riise wasn’t outstanding.

Now contrast with the Spaniards/La Liga players (who made a Premier League appearance) signed between 2004 and 2010:

Xabi Alonso, Daniel Pacheco, Daniel Ayala, Alvaro Arbeloa, Fabio Aurelio, Mark Gonzalez, Pepe Reina, Josemi, Luis Garcia, Maxi Rodriguez, Fernando Morientes, Antonio Nunez, Mauricio Pellegrino, Albert Riera, Momo Sissoko and Fernando Torres.

Sixteen players, who cost £71.5m. Obviously Benítez was paying for players at a more expensive time, due to inflation, and that’s where CTPP comes in: £107.8m is virtually identical, in current money, to Houllier’s 15 French buys (£108.1m).

But look at the outstanding successes: three, in the form of Reina, Alonso and Torres. Then come the undeniable, if perhaps unremarkable, successes: Arbeloa, Aurelio and Garcia. And next, the qualified successes of Maxi (who is improving all the time) and Sissoko (who had two fine seasons before a serious eye injury, and was sold for a large profit). Eight out of 16 isn’t a bad ratio for successes, particularly as Pacheco and Ayala can still make that ten out of 16.

So, is this because Benítez was a better judge of player, or because Spanish footballers are better suited to England? Or was Rafa buying a few ‘high end’ talents that cost a lot of money?

Looking at the prices paid for certain French and Spanish players, there’s not a huge difference. In today’s money, Cissé and Torres were £25m and £22m respectively, so it was Houllier who made the most expensive single purchase. Meanwhile, Diouf and Alonso were £16 and £19m when inflation is taken into account; and there was only a couple of million pounds (CTPP) between Reina and Diao, Smicer and Garcia, and Arbeloa and Song.

Then there’s the sell-on profits. Taking all fees at 2010 prices, of the twelve La Liga signings to have been sold, £121m has raised; roughly a 20% profit. (If using non-inflated figures, the profit is even higher, at almost 50%.)

This obviously does not include the hopefully-never-sold Pepe Reina, who could fetch £20m+ in the current market; while Maxi, Ayala and Pacheco, for whom less than a million in total was paid, could raise a fair few million between them.

Compare this to Houllier’s French signings. £108m spent in current money, but only £37m recouped on those sold; meaning that 66% of the money effectively vanished.

But none of this proves that the Spanish market is better than the French one. What’s almost certainly true is that, on average, the 16 La Liga buys had a better mentality than the 15 from Ligue Une.

Of the 15 French signings, there were some hotheads (Diouf, Cissé), some wallflowers (Cheyrou), and those who were happy to hang around and pick up their wages for doing nothing (Diao). None had the psychological toughness of Reina, Alonso, Morientes, Pellegrini, Maxi, or even Torres (2007-2009, at least). Cissé did brilliantly to recover from injury, but on the pitch he was something of a loose cannon.

Is this a national failing? – The French implosion at the 2010 World Cup hints that it is, but previous Spanish camps have also fallen apart, and the stereotypically laid-back Dutch are well known for self-destructing at tournaments. (The English, meanwhile, are often best-known for drinking exploits.) And anyway, can we generalise in such a way?

It’s more likely that this was just a bad collection of players, who lacked the mental strength of many of their compatriots at Arsenal at the time. After all, Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires and Thierry Henry were winners.

Value

It’s fair to say that some nationalities are overpriced, as noted in “Soccernomics”. The example given there relates to the Dutch, and Kuper and Szymanski also go on to reference the cachet of Brazilians (quoting an agent who says “It’s easier to sell a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican.”)

But it’s also about the markets in which you shop. Buying from major leagues costs more than buying from backwaters, for players of similar ability.

The best bargains seem to be found in South America, where the talent can be bought direct from the source. But what tends to happen is that British clubs buy Latinos only after they’ve been a success in Europe. But is this such bad practice?

Take Luis Suarez. Aged 19, in 2006 he moved to Groningen in Holland for a measly €800,000. But at the time he wasn’t even a full international. After impressing, he was bought a year later by Ajax for £7.5m. In the end, it cost Liverpool £22m to bring him to England.

But the fee relates to not only talent, but how ‘proven’ the player is. Groningen took a gamble on a teenager who’d never left his homeland. By 2007, Ajax knew that he could handle European football and life away from South America, but it was only after he starred for them that his ability to lead the line (and lead the team) at a big club was proven. Ideally, you find the player before he’s established elsewhere, and therefore a lot cheaper, but it’s easier said than done.

Liverpool haven’t had the best luck buying directly from South America, although the total of around £11m paid for Lucas, Leto, Insua and Paletta has proved a worthwhile investment, given that Lucas – my vote for the Reds’ player of the year – is now worth at least that amount on his own. Insua’s value had risen to around £5m in 2010, while Paletta’s fee was recouped (and eventually became a profit, as the Reds were due 45% of his transfer fee when he was sold to Parma last summer). A profit was likewise made on Leto.

Again, the South American successes have tended to have first acclimatised to Europe: Mascherano, Aurelio, Maxi and now Suarez: a 66% record (with only Pellegrino and Gonzalez failing), compared with 25% (or 50% if you rate Insua) when buying direct from the source.

Of course, two the four successes were big-money buys who were more likely to succeed, and therefore it was perhaps less about where they were from and more to do with the increased odds for success when paying higher fees. The other two were well-known players on free transfers, while neither of the flops were expensive.

In the past 15 years, Liverpool have probably had their best success rate with Dutch clubs, if not necessarily Dutch players. Ryan Babel didn’t work out as hoped, but Sami Hyypia, Dirk Kuyt, Sander Westerveld, Jerzy Dudek and Luis Suarez result in an 86% strike rate for the Reds when plundering the Eredivisie.

(I include Westerveld and Dudek as successes, as they were pretty good for the most part, and played their part in very successful seasons. Dutchman Jan Kromkamp was bought from Spain, Bolo Zenden arrived from Middlesbrough, and the lovable but totally hapless Erik Meijer from Bayer Leverkusen.)

Appearances

One way of judging the success of transfers is how many games the individuals start; the better the player, the more chance that they will feature more prominently in the XI. (Those who have injury problems may still be good players, but if they rarely start, it doesn’t necessary make them a good signing.)

For the purposes of this mini study, I’ve excluded kids bought well before they were ever intended to be near the first team, as well as reserve goalkeepers, whose appearances were always going to be limited. It’s not entirely representative of ability, as strikers will be rotated more often than goalkeepers, but it should still provide an interesting guide.

The rest of this post is for Subscribers only.

Assessing the overall tactical master-plan under the new management/coaching team of Kenny Dalglish and Steve Clarke, and guessing where it’s heading, is somewhat difficult, given the number of changes to both the playing staff and the systems seen in the past few months. This season, the task for those who replaced Roy Hodgson and Mike Kelly was always going to be about patching up a ship that was rapidly sinking, and getting back towards the top six.

Roy Hodgson inherited a squad set up to play one way (although Rafa Benítez was both praised and criticised in equal measure for his tactical variations). Hodgson then made a number of purchases, and suddenly the squad was more of a mixed bag. The new players didn’t really suit 4-4-2 – Hodgson’s default system – and to make matters worse, they injected little new quality into the pool of players.

Flat 4-4-2

For a while, earlier in the season, Liverpool FC had gone back in time; back to the dark ages. A horribly predictable and plodding ‘flat’ 4-4-2, under an ill-suited manager, seemed to undo the moves into modern, flexible tactical football taken in the past decade.

Then, Liverpool went further into the past, but this time, took simultaneous strides into the future. While Kenny Dalglish may have been out of the game for more than a decade, his approach (aided and abetted by the indispensable Steve Clarke) has appeared far more modern than that of Roy Hodgson.

Quite why Hodgson reverted to a flat 4-4-2 at Liverpool when he’d apparently evolved out of the habit in his final year at Fulham (particularly in European competition, in which most of his team’s eye-catching performances came), only he will know. At the Cottage, he’d had success with Zoltan Gera playing off a main striker; performing the role that Steven Gerrard had being reinvented in at Liverpool.

Hodgson briefly tried ‘Cole in the hole’, but that lasted 45 minutes against Arsenal on the opening day, before the player – who’d been unable to get into the game on his debut – was sent off.

In the next game, at Manchester City, with Javier Mascherano’s late withdrawal, Hodgson reverted to using two very similar front-line strikers, in Torres and Ngog, rather than moving Gerrard out of central midfield, or seeking other solutions. That midfield was duly outnumbered and overrun, and City deservedly won 3-0. Torres and Ngog together meant no-one could naturally link play, and they floated adrift of the action like Jersey and Guernsey miles from the British mainland.

A side’s tactics have to reflect the level a team is either at, or where it is intending to be. It is not a case of every team, no matter its standing in the game, playing the same way. Barcelona need different tactics to Bolton Wanderers. Even Manchester United alter their approach depending on the quality of the opposition.

Hodgson seems relaxed and authoritative at West Brom, in the manner he had at Fulham. But at a far bigger club – about which he constantly bemoaned the level of scrutiny and exposure – he looked stressed and flummoxed. He never ‘owned’ the situation, and he never set his team out as if he did.

Even if the fans were not totally on his side even at the outset, he never demonstrated that he had the guts to play the right way in order to win them over. He reverted to a safe setting, and the side faltered. The tactics we’re seeing now at Liverpool – which I will examine in detail in a moment – were open to the man who couldn’t even steer the Reds into the top 10 after 20 games. It’s not about 4-4-2 vs 4-5-1, but about the movement between the lines.

If Hodgson lacked the complete ideal set of tools to work with, he still opted to select a hammer when there was a loose screw, and tried to bang in nails with a spirit level. There was never a match-up between tactics and personnel. It took just hours for Dalglish to remedy this; even 1-0 down after a minute and with ten men after 30, his side looked better balanced at Old Trafford in his opening game.

Jonathan Wilson recently wrote about the death of what I call a flat 4-4-2, but which others refer to as rigid, or in his case, ‘orthodox’.

Football is not a predictable game. A team can have 20 chances and still lose to a side that musters only one. All a coach can do is manipulate the percentages as best he can in his favour. With that caveat in mind, though, a prediction – in the next decade, no side will win a major international tournament playing an orthodox 4-4-2.

The rest of this extended post is for Subscribers only, and looks at how the tactics have evolved under Dalglish, and where they might be heading next season.

Although United pulled back a last-minute consolation goal, there was no denying that this was a rout; not a total thrashing, but about as comprehensive as you normally get in these types of game, where often a single goal decides things.

While the star of the show was arguably Luis Suárez – whose jinking run in a tight space was my highlight of the season, and who was involved in all three goals – there were plenty of others who contributed to a resounding victory. No-one played badly, and even Fábio Aurélio was looking like his old self until (also much like his old self) a muscle twanged.

Yet again, Liverpool did not rely on those players who are supposed to drag the team to victory while the others do little more than make up the numbers.

Gerrard, perhaps due to injury, had a quiet game, bar two excellent long-range efforts (although he rarely performs to his highest standards against teams like United, Chelsea and Everton). He was fairly disciplined, and if the tactics determined that he held his position, he did so better than in the past.

Carragher (like Rafael) was lucky to stay on the pitch after a reckless tackle, and shuffled around at right-back like someone who clearly no longer suits the role; but he did a job, and that’s about all that could have been asked. Pepe Reina didn’t have an awful lot to do, bar watch Hernandez’s late effort sail in, while the club’s best defender and libero, Daniel Agger, was out injured. And of course, Liverpool FC lost its star player when he moved to Chelsea.

On top of that, there’s Roy Hodgson’s single really good buy, Raul Meireles, who looked a fine player earlier in the season, but since the change of manager, has started to look a great one. His runs from midfield were tremendous, and the positions he takes up – now that he’s free to roam – showed why he’s been making the headlines with his goals of late, even if he didn’t score today.

Take that lot out of the equation, and most of the club’s critics would say that there’s not a lot left. It’s just deadwood; often an excuse to batter Benítez, despite a handful of bargain buys who are positively buoyant under Dalglish.

Soto Kyrgiakos, who, despite having the mobility of a snail buried in cement, was faultless after coming on as an emergency sub; Maxi’s movement and first-time passing was first-class, as was his work rate; Glen Johnson showed that he can look a top-class full-back on either flank even when asked primarily to defend; and of course, Lucas Leiva epitomised precisely why no-one attempts more tackles in the Premier League, on account of his incredible hard work and clever reading of the game, while his distribution goes from strength to strength.

And of course, then there’s Dirk Kuyt. Constantly questioned, Kuyt yet again proved that he is the ultimate big-game player. This is the third outstanding game he’s had as the spearhead striker since Kenny’s return, following on from the games against Stoke and Chelsea; and of course, two of the three came in massive fixtures.

To go with goals against Chelsea, Arsenal and Everton (who, of course, only belong in that company by virtue of the derby), he now has a hat-trick against United. This means that he now has at least three goals against those opponents. This is before getting onto the vital goals at key times in games, like the one that qualified the Reds for the Champions League against Standard Liège in 2008, or the late goal in Athens that gave us a couple of minutes to contemplate adding that city to a list including Istanbul.

In a strange way, he’s better when the opposition is stronger, because the tempo is often higher. In the last few games – since the victory over Chelsea, in which he was immense – he’d looked terrible (but of course, even at his worst, he gives 100%, and that can have infectious properties.)

Perhaps he needs the Reds’ best technical players to be around him – so that it’s closer to the Dutch national team, for which successive managers continue to find space for him in the XI, despite an excess of far more naturally gifted individuals. While there’s the guarantee of great technique when picking from Van Persie, Sneijder, Van der Vaart and a host of others, those chosen are almost always supplemented by Kuyt.

If the game is slow, Kuyt can look clunky, with his bandy legs you could drive a bus through. But here’s the paradox: usually clunky players look even worse when there’s less time, and they’re hurried; strangely, Kuyt often looks better.

His one-touch passing can be superb, and while lacking pace and silky skills, he somehow swerves past defenders and makes things happen. Perhaps most of all he needs to be surrounded by movement, and under Dalglish – in the total opposite of Hodgson, when it was glaringly absent – Liverpool have that in spades in the majority of games.

Kuyt has a brilliant understanding of space, and is therefore able to find players who move off of him; static team-mates leave him exposed, and he gets in a muddle. While more pace is clearly needed in the team – and with the wings the obvious position for it (if Carroll and Suárez are to be the usual striking combo) – Kuyt’s place has to be under threat to a degree come the summer. But his versatility and attitude – as well as an aptitude for pass-and-move – should keep him as a key component of the squad, even if he doesn’t start as often.

There’s one more unsung hero, lurking behind the scenes, whose influence I’d like to salute.

The rest of this post is for Subscribers only.

While this wasn’t a particularly exciting game, from a tactical perspective there was plenty to intrigue. A fourth consecutive win under Kenny’s managership and a fourth successive clean sheet – just the sort of sequence that, in Hodgson parlance at least, would be described as a “juggernaut”.

Tactical line-ups

Having used a 4-3-3 for most of his Chelsea tenure, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti reverted to the 4-1-2-1-2 he had experimented with against Sunderland last week – a shape he had attempted at the beginning of last season as well – employing Nicolas Anelka at the tip of a diamond midfield. This was evidently a precursor to his accommodation of Fernando Torres in the starting line-up, as the former Liverpool striker replaced Salomon Kalou alongside Didier Drogba in a two-man strike force for the Blues.

King Kenny continued with the three-man central defence he had utilised against Stoke, albeit with Jamie Carragher returning from a protracted injury lay-off following a dislocated shoulder sustained against Tottenham earlier in the season, to replace Kyrgiakos in the starting line-up. Skrtel moved to the centre of the back three, while Agger and Carra played on either side of him, as Martin Kelly and Glen Johnson reprised their wing-back roles further forward.

The Liverpool midfield four was of particular interest: while Kenny had deployed a midfield ‘square’ against Stoke, with two deeper-lying midfielders and two in advance of them, here the shape was a diamond. Lucas Leiva was the most withdrawn of the four, playing as the sole holding midfielder in front of the defence; Gerrard and Maxi operated as determined shuttlers (or ‘carrileros’) on the right and left respectively; Meireles continued in his now-familiar role ‘in the hole’, supporting lone striker Kuyt.

Key tactical points

To be sure, this was a tactical victory in a fundamentally defensive sense. For LFC, the strategy was three-fold:

1) Spare man at the back

From the outset, it appeared as if Kenny’s decision to persist with the back three in order to counter Drogba and Torres was an astute one; as I’d discussed in the post-match analysis of the Stoke game, the use of three centre-backs is – theoretically, at least – designed to be negate the threat offered by a team playing with two strikers. Two ‘markers’ contend with the two frontmen, while there is the security of the ‘spare’ defender who can ‘sweep’ up behind them. For instance, when Carragher was occupied by Torres, and Agger by Drogba, Skrtel’s role was to provide cover as the extra defender, in the eventuality of any attacking danger. Further, if one of the strikers attempted to drop deep to collect the ball – as Drogba notably did in the 35th minute – one of the central defenders (Carragher, in this situation) could pursue him with alacrity, as two central defenders remained to secure the defensive area. (As an aside, Skrtel’s cover was also crucial in the sense that, Carragher, in his advancing years, would be naturally susceptible to Torres’ pace, so have an extra defender as ‘insurance’ was imperative).

In addition, both Drogba and Torres tended to stay high up the pitch and in central areas even when Chelsea were out of possession, whereas they might have attempted to use the channels more in an attempt to drive a wedge of space between the outside centre-back – either Carragher or Agger – and Skrtel in the centre. However, the fact that both Carragher and Agger have both played at fullback before meant that they were comfortable enough to pursue the strikers into wider areas when the need arose. (Agger’s foul on Torres, close to the left touch-line at around 25 and a half minutes, is an example of such an instance).

Although, admittedly, Chelsea did have plenty of chances from open play (not many clear-cut ones, to be fair), there was a distinct lack of cohesion between the front two, as Torres, in particular, cut an increasingly frustrated figure as the match wore on. His eventual substitution in the 2nd half – and the now widely-disseminated statistics showing him to have had the least number of touches of any outfield player during his time on the pitch, 29 in 66 minutes, according to OptaJoe on Twitter – suggest that Liverpool’s back three were effective at nullifying the threat posed by Torres and Drogba.

As the chalkboards below demonstrate, Salomon Kalou (whom Torres replaced in the starting line-up), was far more involved against against Sunderland – a game in which Chelsea also used the diamond formation, while Sunderland used only two centre-backs against Chelsea’s front two of Kalou and Drogba (so there was no spare man in defence) – than Torres was here against his erstwhile team:

In fact, Chelsea’s front two and Anelka looked more effective in a defensive posture: Reina was unable to distribute the ball to the peripheral centre-backs from short goal-kicks as easily as he had done against Stoke, because the Chelsea strikers would frequently mark the outside two central defenders (Torres on Carragher; Drogba pressing Agger), while Anelka would push up to close down Skrtel – forming a de facto 4-3-3 for Chelsea, but a tenuous one, as it only materialised from LFC goal-kick situations.

By the time Chelsea had made a genuine switch to a 4-3-3 in the 2nd half, so that the advanced wide-attackers might drag the 2 outer centre-backs out of position and thus create space, LFC had taken the lead; this prompted Dalglish’s instructions for the wing-backs to drop deeper – along the same ‘band’ as the centre-backs – creating a 5 versus 3 advantage in defence for LFC (3 centre-backs plus two full-backs, in effect, against 3 CFC attackers). It therefore allowed the three centre-backs to remain central and not get drawn out wide to confront the likes of Kalou and Malouda. This necessarily entailed a shortfall further up the pitch for LFC, but it proved inconsequential as the Reds sought to cede both territory and possession in an attempt to remain defensively impermeable.

2. Matching Chelsea’s shape in midfield

Kenny’s rationale for altering the midfield square used against Stoke, to a diamond here, was presumably to replicate Chelsea’s own alignment in midfield. As Michael Cox of ZonalMarking.net correctly points out, each LFC midfielder had what was essentially a direct opponent in midfield: Lucas, as the deepest of the four, picked up Anelka in the trequartista role; Gerrard tracked Lampard; Maxi confronted Essien; and Meireles contended with Mikel further up the pitch.

Lucas, in particular, was brilliant at restricting Anelka’s efforts to find space behind the two Chelsea strikers – as the Frenchman had done to great effect in his ‘trequartista’ role against Sunderland – by closing down astutely and tracking his movements between the lines. By virtue of the diamond midfield’s structure, the major creative burden of the team rests on the player at the apex of the diamond; keeping this player (Anelka) subdued was thus crucial.

The rest of this post – plus additional analysis of the Stoke game – is for Subscribers only.

By Dan Kennett. Following on from the previous review after 13 games this article aims to put Liverpool’s performance in the first half of the 2010/11 season into context with the history of the Premier League.  Halfway is a fair point for extensive analysis as apart from postponements, clubs have played each other once.

As well as looking at the league tables across the Premier League area courtesy of www.statto.com this article also utilises the Pay As You Play TPI database.  It also attempts to quantify the oft repeated claims that 2010/11 is an “unusual season” with a “condensed” or “tight” league table.

Part One: LFC current season performance versus historical Premier League performance

There’s been a lot of coverage of this in recent days (e.g. lowest points total going into the New Year since 1953/54 relegation season), not least from the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post so I don’t want to spend too much time going over this again. At the halfway stage, Liverpool has set a host of unwanted records:

• Lowest points total =25 (previous was 28 in 92/93 and 98/99)
• Fewest wins = 7 (previous was 8 in 3 seasons)
• Most defeats = 8 (previous was 7 in 4 seasons including last season)
• Fewest goals scored = 23 (previous was 28 in 4 seasons)
• Worst goal difference = -1 (previous was +6 in 92/93)
• Joint worst league position =9th (along with 92/93 and 98/99)

Now let’s compare against the median of Liverpool’s Premier League record at halfway (note – the first 3 Premier League seasons were 42 games, however the median is almost exactly the same for all measures when you include and exclude the 42 game seasons)

If Hodgson had managed to re-create a typical LFC Premier League performance of 10 wins, 34 points and a goal difference of +13 then Liverpool would be 5^th, behind Chelsea on goal difference but ahead of Spurs.

If Hodgson had managed to match last season’s dismal campaign then Liverpool would still have been 6^th, 4 points behind Chelsea

Using last season as a benchmark, if I was Roy Hodgson’s boss and in charge of his appraisal I’d be setting his season goals as:

• Minimum targets = 6^th place, 64 points
• Stretch target = 4^th place, 70 points

Both are fair given Liverpool’s performance in the Premier League era.  At halfway that translates to 32 and 35 points.  Currently Hodgson would be missing the minimum target by 22% and the stretch target by 29%, an almost impossible margin to make up in the 2^nd half of the season.

(Note from TTT statistician, Graeme Riley: The last weekend game with a lower attendance was 34,705 v Sheff Wed in Sept 1997, when Anfield Road was being refurbished, and the lowest on New Year’s Day since 1983; and before that, 1955.)

Part Two: LFC current season performance versus TPI performance

Parts Two and Three of this post is for Subscribers only.

From The Soccerlens Awards:

The Best Club Fansite award celebrates those websites dedicated to a single club. It the ultimate populist vote, and this year saw Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Tottenham fans (amongst others) thrash it out for the title.

Despite the presence of heavyweights such as KUMB, Republik of Mancunia and Arseblog, we’ve gone for The Tomkins Times for the insightful news coverage and analysis of all things Liverpool. No one puts it better than the Independent when they called it “perhaps the most intelligent guide to Liverpool available on the internet”.

Paul has done a fantastic job, and while he may not win the populist vote, he gets ours for the best club fansite of 2010.

Editors’ Pick: The Tomkins Times

As I noted on Twitter, thanks to everyone who has supported the site in the past year.

Now, some important site news for subscribers.

Introduction

One of the more interesting theories associated with football is that success can be ‘bought’; that it’s almost off-the-peg, waiting to be snapped up by any willing buyer who’ll meet the asking price. Often intended to be dismissive – and disregarding the success of others is what football fans do best – the claim was made of Blackburn Rovers in the ‘90s, and, more recently, has been directed at Chelsea. The latest club apparently intent on ‘buying’ success is Manchester City. But is there really a price that can be put on certain levels of achievement, be it avoiding relegation, qualifying for the Champions League or landing the Premier League title? Just what role does money play in the modern English game? And which clubs of the past 18 years have punched above or below their weight?

Competitive balance is essential in sport in order to keep results unpredictable – and therefore the audience engaged. But has the way the game has been structured since 1992 – both in the English league and with the changes to the old European Cup – caused too much disparity? Is there now a lack of competitive balance in the Premier League? And is the problem growing worse?

* * *

It was from a curiosity about converting old transfer fees into present-day money that this project was devised. That curiosity led to questions about what kind of value for money clubs were getting for their transfer outlay. Did the big spenders really have it all their own way?

Much has been made of the correlation between wages and success in football, but what about the role played by transfer spending? While some clubs have excelled with a policy of picking up out-of-contract, highly-rated players on Bosman ‘free’ transfers – in the process handing them relatively big wages – most transfers do not involve this kind of discount.

One of the problems with analysing success in relation to wages is that a pay packet can radically alter further down the line, upon signing a new contract, whereas a transfer fee remains constant; even potential add-ons are known in advance. As author and journalist Gabriele Marcotti told us: “What tends to happen is that, because successful teams tend to be successful (and cash-rich), year-on-year their wages tend to be higher, creating a chicken and egg situation. In other words, wages are as much a reflection of past performance as they are an estimate of future performance.”

Neither method is perfect – some clubs will always perform better or worse than expected, for a whole host of unpredictable reasons – but as we will outline in this book, we feel that we’ve found the strongest-ever link between transfer spending and success.

* * *

So, what makes one player cost £23.7m and another 25 worn tracksuits and a half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives? Many factors go into deciding a transfer fee. But ultimately, any player is only worth what the buying club are willing to pay, and what the selling club are happy to accept. Precedents are often used for comparison – Ade Akinbiyi cost £5m, therefore my player, even with two broken legs and acute blindness, is worth more – but it seems there’s always someone brave (or stupid) enough to go against the generally perceived market value and offer a king’s ransom for a right royal turnip.

One of the enduring problems with comparing managers (and clubs) across the eras is how inflation distorts their dealings in the transfer market. After all, when Nottingham Forest’s Brian Clough paid £1m for Trevor Francis in 1979, he was doing much the same as Manchester City did 29 years later when purchasing Brazilian star Robinho from Real Madrid: agreeing to pay more money for one player than any English club had ever done. Only now, that figure had risen to £32.5m.

There is almost infinitely more money in the game now. Decidedly different from standard inflation, where the price of everything tends to rise at a steady rate, there is ‘football inflation’, which reflects the driving financial forces of increased TV revenue and, more recently, the influx of billionaire owners who don’t have a need to balance the books. (Of course, this may change with the introduction of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play Rules in 2012, after which clubs will be expected to stick to spending only the money they earn, but to date, their outlay has gone largely unchecked.)

This project came about when Graeme Riley contacted me after reading my own method of comparing players across the eras: the Relative Transfer System (RTS). RTS was devised for my book Dynasty: 50 Years of Shankly’s Liverpool, as a way of comparing the signings of Bill Shankly with those of his seven successors as Liverpool manager up until 2009. For this, I set every record-breaking English transfer at 100%; Francis and Robinho were therefore both ‘100%’ transfers. Anyone who cost half of that current-day record would have a 50% value, and so on. So, in 1979, £500,000 was 50%, whereas in 2009, £16.25m was 50%.

But I made it clear that it wasn’t without its flaws; not least how a big anomalous transfer can occur, raising the bar, at a time when the mid-range transfers might be of a lower average value. It was with this flaw in mind that Graeme, Head of Tax, Treasury and Risk at a large corporation by day and author of several mind-bendingly replete statistical books on European football by night, suggested looking at another way to solve the problem.

And with this he came up with the idea of the Transfer Price Index. He ran his idea by me, I made a few suggestions, and with the help of fellow football fanatic Gordon Fawcett, we researched and double-checked every single transfer fee in the new satellite TV era, in order to create a database with thousands of entries, each with its own list of figures, relating to things such as age, nationality, position, number of appearances and any eventual sell-on fee.

(Quick note: a pet peeve of mine is when people treat football history as commencing in 1992. However, for this project, we needed to make the data manageable. And the aim had to be to see how – if at all – the Premier League has changed clubs’ ability to challenge for the title, for European places and to avoid relegation. To do this, it is acceptable to look at those first years – when the money had yet to really kick in – and compare them to the later seasons.)

Of course, it’s important to stress that determining a definitive transfer fee for any given player is often far from straightforward. Some clubs do their best to cloud the information, and ‘undisclosed’ can start a thousand arguments raging; and that’s before getting onto part-exchanges and the increasingly common additional bonus clauses (£100,000 upon making 50 appearances, £50,000 for winning an international cap, £10,000 with every radical change of hairstyle), not to mention people using different exchange rates for deals originally listed in euros.

But even though we searched only trusted sources (often the Rothmans/Sky Football Yearbook), it is impossible to be 100% accurate – and as such, at times we had to rely on other people’s educated guesses. However, we feel that the majority of fees will be between 97-100% correct, with most bang on the money. (Fans and/or associated ‘experts’ of all 43 clubs were invited to look at the data we had, in order to point out anything they saw as inaccurate, as well as contributing their thoughts to the chapter on their respective club.)

Once we had every transfer between 1992 and the end of the 2009/10 season on record, the Transfer Price Index could be created, to monitor inflation throughout the Premier League era. And once we had the season-on-season rises (and at times, falls) of the TPI, all sorts of interesting comparisons could be made, because now, all transfers – be they from 1992, 1999 or 2007 – could be converted to present-day prices: the Current Transfer Purchase Price (CTPP). Therefore, in current terms, Chris Sutton cost Blackburn £18.9m in 1994 (£5m at the time), while Stan Collymore cost Liverpool £22.2m (£8.5m) in 1995. To add insult to injury, Ade Akinbiyi’s £5m transfer to Leicester City in 2000/01 now equates to £8.9m.

With this in mind, squads of any Premier League season could be compared not just against those of the same year, but against those of any year. If the playing field wasn’t levelled in this way, then of course teams would now be far more expensive than they were 10 or fifteen years ago. By applying TPI, we can see that some of the squads from the ‘90s actually rank as more expensive than those of fairly big-spending clubs of more recent years. On top of converting the fees to modern-day money, we also looked at the overall price of each squad, to see who had amassed the most costly collections, as well as the price of every starting XI fielded in the past 18 years, to see how much of each club’s ‘investments’ made it onto the pitch during a campaign (it’s one thing paying lots of money for players, but what if all your big buys were out injured?).

We could see which teams spent the largest percentages of the overall Premier League outlay over the course of each 12-month period, in both gross and net terms, along with who had the costliest average side over the 38 (or 42) games, and examine how that affected their league position. The spending of individual managers could also be studied, to see who paid their way to success, and who punched well above their financial weight. Some of the results are as expected; others are very surprising.

It’s fair to say that when managers buy players they often sell others at the same time. Gross spends are usually misleading, but even a net figure doesn’t explain the all-important starting point; after all, Carlo Ancelotti hasn’t yet spent that much at Chelsea in comparison with José Mourinho because he inherited a side that was already a well-oiled machine, with a deep squad behind it; whereas other managers have taken over at clubs and been unable to see the dead wood for the dying trees.

A new method of comparing players’ values

In everyday life, most people are familiar with the concept of the Retail Price Index (RPI) as a measure of inflation. A basket of goods is identified and every month the same items are checked to see what the value would be if these were to be purchased. The difference between the current value and that from the previous month is calculated and termed the RPI. By comparing the value this month with the corresponding value for the same month last year, we obtain the annual RPI.

The same methodology applies to the TPI, except that the “basket” contains every single footballer bought and sold each season, rather than grocery produce (although a few rotten eggs remain.)

Inflation, 1992-2010

Before getting on to who spent what, and the success or failure to which this expenditure led thereafter, it’s important to establish the overall spending pattern of the past 18 years, and to understand how that determines the Transfer Price Index.

On the whole, transfer prices have risen dramatically during the 18 full Premier League seasons to date. Twelve seasons have seen an increase, six a decrease.

Overall, since 1992, the average cost of a player has risen 565%, although at one point (2009) that figure was as high as 751%.

Important Notes and Small Print

Current Transfer Purchase Price (CTPP)

One of the benefits of looking at the cost of a team by converting all fees to the current price (CTPP) is that it reduces the artificial benefit of clubs that include expensive buys made many years earlier. For example, if a club purchased a whole XI of £3m players in the 20-25 age range in 1992, then five years down the line the team, if successful and still together, will retrospectively seem relatively cheap; after all, a side that cost £33m suddenly doesn’t look expensive considering that, in 1996, Alan Shearer alone moved for £15m. But in 1992, when this fictional team was (astutely) assembled, £3m was a lot of money. By 1997, that £33m XI equated to closer to £100m, given that the average price of a transfer trebled in the intervening five years. It’s not a case of punishing that side or its manager for the foresight, simply pointing out that, at the time of the deals, the club would have been spending serious amounts of money; and of course, once a big club signs a player for a fee approaching or breaking the transfer record of the day, it removes him from the market and keeps other clubs from buying him.

Terminology

For the purposes of this project, two key values were calculated for each club in any given season: the cost of the squad as a whole (excluding any youngsters who never featured, unless they cost more than nominal fees), and the average cost of the starting XI. This latter figure is hereby referred to as the ‘£XI’. All prices for the £XIs are converted to CTPP. The £XI figure is the club’s ‘utilisation’ over the course of a season.

‘Sq£’ is the cost of a club’s squad, adjusted to current-day prices.

When the term ‘genuine profit’ is used, it refers to a sale where the amount received is in excess of the fee originally paid when inflation is taken into account. So if a club buys a player for £1m, and sells him for £1.1m five years later, that would not represent a genuine profit if there was significant inflation.

Cost per game and appearances all relate only to the Premier League. While cup success is discussed at various points, this is primarily a league-based study.

Transfers and Trainees

The first time a player appears for a club, his status is assessed. Generally, this is classed as a transfer (for a value or on a “Bosman”), a loan, a trialist or a youth player from the academy (trainee).

Transfers can be for cash, (part-) exchange or undisclosed. In this last case, unless a very reliable estimate can be found, the existence of the transfer is acknowledged, but is not used in calculating the TPI – as this would give a false value. We are effectively removing them from the numerator (value) and the denominator (number of transfers) for the calculation. In cases where several players were acquired as part of the same transfer, the fee is divided equally amongst the players, unless otherwise stated.

Transfer values are taken from a number of sources – these will be made available on the Transfer Price Index website. For players purchased when the team was playing in a lower division, the transfer value is noted with the letter ‘d’ preceding the fee, but is not used in calculating TPI. (Players signed before the Premier League was formed are marked with a capital ‘D’; their inclusion is purely in the analysis of £XIs and does not contribute to the inflation calculation.)

Example of Calculation

To refer back to an earlier example, Stan Collymore cost Liverpool £8.5m in July 1995. The average transfer price in 1995/96 was £1.59m and by 2008/09 it was £5.35m, giving a price inflation of 236%. This suggests that the equivalent transfer in 2008/09 would have cost £28.5m. A year later, however, Collymore’s ‘current-day price’ had dropped to £22.2m, due to a decrease in the average value of transfers as the credit crunch struck. As such, players’ current-day values will rise or fall each year depending on that season’s rate of inflation.

One interesting quirk is that, due to a drop of approximately 22% in the value of transfers between 1995 and 1997 (i.e. deflation), Collymore actually cost Villa more at £7m than he had cost Liverpool two years earlier at £8.5m. (Taking the average transfer fee at three points in time may make this easier to follow. In the season he was signed by Liverpool, the average fee was £1.5m. In the season he was sold to Aston Villa, the average fee was down to £1.17m. And in 2009/10 the average was £3.96m.)

Small Print

None of the work within this book is intended to definitively prove anything, especially when findings are taken in isolation or removed from their context. It is simply intended to be a very good indication of what has been spent, courtesy of our attempts to analyse the data. It may help settle a few arguments, but in all likelihood, it may well start a few too.

While some of this book involves in-depth, technical explanations of the concepts – especially early on, to set the scene – the aim has been to make it as readable and enjoyable as possible, without ‘dumbing down’. We trust your intelligence.

Should you know for a fact that a particular transfer fee is incorrect, please email Transfers@transferpriceindex.com. Corrections can then be made to the database, and for further editions of this book.

Part One: The Price of Success

Chapter One: The Rising Cost

One way of judging a club and its manager’s performance is by looking at how many pounds had to be spent for each Premier League point won.

Excluding wages, there are two key valuations that can be studied: first, how much (on average) the XI cost over the course of the season (£XI); and second, the overall cost of the squad.

However, while the ability to choose from a large, expensive squad is a luxury (which we will come to later), it’s harder to determine what role that plays than it is to understand the effect of the £XI. The increasing importance of substitutes also plays a role, but for the purposes of ‘utilisation’ in this book, the starting XI is the prime consideration. (Including substitutes opens up a whole new area of confusion. How long did they play? How do you differentiate between a half-time introduction and one used to wind down the clock in the 93rd minute?)

On average, over the course of the Premier League’s 18-year history, it has cost £854,323 to win each point. In other words, if the average cost of an £XI over 38 games is £854,323, it will, in theory, win just a single point. If that average cost is £8.5m, it will win 10 points. And to get 50 points, it would need an £XI of £42.7m.

However, this does not take into account the difference between the early and later days of the league, nor does it factor in the different expense needed at opposing ends of the table in order to meet specific goals.

From the data, it is clear that points are harder (and therefore costlier) to win the further up the table you go. Even the worst Premier League side – Derby County in 2007/08 – managed 11 points. Teams costing as much as £68m (Roy Hodgson/Brian Kidd’s Blackburn Rovers in 1999) have been relegated; but teams averaging as little as £8m – or in other words, a team that should have won just 10 points – racked up 52 (Ipswich Town, albeit in the first year of the new league, before the financial impact of the expanding riches had been felt). In 2002, both Southampton and Bolton reached the hallowed 40-point mark with XIs costing £14m and £11.7m respectively. It seems that you can be relatively expensive and fall into the relegation zone – as did Newcastle’s £63m £XI in 2009 – but you cannot be relatively cheap and succeed at the sharp end of the table. At least, not any more.

An average ‘price of attainment’ can be calculated by grouping the points tallies of each team into distinct categories, and working out the mean cost of those teams. The categories used here are as follows: 11-39 points; 40-49 points; 50-59 points; 60-69 points; 70-79 points; 80-89 points; and 90+ points. (All 42-game seasons taken as pro rata to 38-games.)

Obviously more clubs have had 50-59 point seasons than 95-point ones; for that reason, at the top end of the scale the sample data is limited. There’s only been one 95-point season since 1992, and that team – José Mourinho’s Chelsea – won points at an average cost of £2,054,349. In other words, the £XI was £195.1m (dividing that by the 95 points won reveals the cost per point). On only five other occasions has a team racked up 90 points or more, and the overall average of those six figures is £1,591,665.

So from this limited data, we could take £1,591,665 as the average cost per point to break the 90-point barrier between 1992 and 2010.

However, then there’s the change in spending patterns over the course of the league to take into account, and the difference in pre- and post-millennial figures. This is clearly visible in the 80-89 point range. Prior to 2000/01, five teams had registered a total in that bracket – Manchester United three times and Blackburn twice, racking up 85.4 points on average – and the average cost per point was £902,743. However, since then, 16 teams have registered a total in the 80-89 point range (Manchester United six times, Chelsea four times, and Arsenal and Liverpool three times each), and the average cost per point has almost doubled, at £1,621,812 – even though the average points worked out slightly lower, at 84, than the mean.

The same pattern can be seen in the other points ranges. As mentioned, in the ‘90s the average cost per point between 80 and 89 was £902,743; come down to the 70-79 point range and it falls to £887,988 – not a steep drop, but a drop all the same. Nineteen teams registered a total in this range – including Norwich City and Nottingham Forest – at an overall average of 74.5 points. Come forward to the new millennium, and to date, the tallies of just eleven teams have fallen between 70 and 79 (again, the overall average is 74.5 points). However, the cost per point for the same level of achievement has now risen from £887,988 10 years earlier to £1,341,221.

So the same pattern is clearly visible in both sets of points ranges: it costs a lot of money to get 80+ points, and not quite as much to get 70+, with the figures in both cases rising sharply since the end of the 1990s.

The cheapest cost per point in the 70+ range dates back to the Premier League’s inaugural season: a mere £211,998, courtesy of Mike Walker’s Norwich City (72 points); a true shoestring budget. The cheapest between 2001 and 2010 in the same point range is the £797,545 for Arsenal’s 72 points in 2008/09. And of the eleven totals in this range, only one other is below £1m per point: also Arsenal, a year later, at £864,868. Spurs finally broke into the top four in the same season (2009/10), although their 70 points worked out at £1,119,580 each; even so, it’s still more than £200,000 a point below the 2001-2010 average (but equally, at ‘just’ 70 points, almost five points below the mean of 74.5; more on this later).

The same pattern continues in the 60-69 point range. Up until the end of 1999/2000, 22 teams fell between these two totals (at an average of 63.8 points). Incredibly – at least when looking back from a present-day perspective – three times Queens Park Rangers found themselves in this bracket. And from 2001 to 2010, a further 26 teams, at an average of 64.2 points, qualify; including Ipswich Town, possibly the last ‘unfashionable’ (/tractor-related) club to gain such an impressive tally (66 points in 2001). The average cost per point in the old millennium was £878,718 – again, a minimal decrease from the higher points bracket that decade – compared with the new millennium figure of £1,101,117; another significant and fairly evenly spaced reduction from the higher points bracket.

This confirms that, on the whole, money was needed in the ‘90s to reach the higher levels, but not serious amounts. To some degree, a meritocracy still existed. In contrast to the current landscape, in the first few years of the league there was a lot more ‘cross pollination’, with a mixture of wealthy and spendthrift clubs side by side throughout the league, all the way up to 3rd place. (The top two was still reserved for the wealthy elite: from 1993 to 2000, it consisted of two from Manchester United, Blackburn, Newcastle and Arsenal.)

Come forward a few years, and 90+ points ‘cost’ in excess of £2m per point; to get 80 points averaged £1.6m per point; to get 70 points averaged £1.3m per point; and to get 60 points averaged £1.1m per point.

In this past decade, only four of the 26 teams to register 60+ points have an average ‘point cost’ below £700,000: Ipswich (£331,339) in 2001, Everton (£446,392 in 2005) and on two occasions Blackburn Rovers: £571,592 in 2003 under the much-maligned (and at Liverpool and Newcastle, financially disastrous) Graeme Souness, and £423,764 three years later, under Mark Hughes. No fewer than 16 of the 26 teams ‘paid’ in excess of £1m per point.

And so it continues, down into the 50+ point range. In total, 52 teams from the ‘90s rank in this bracket, and 42 from the 2000s. The ‘90s cost per point works out at £687,047 (54.2 points won on average); the new decade’s cost per point weighs in at £730,654 (53.4 points).

So, does the pattern continue in the 40-49 point range? In a word, no. It actually reverses between the two decades. In the first nine Premier League seasons, 44 teams posted such a tally; 55 from 2001 onwards. But in the earlier decade the average cost of a point in this range was £866,905 (43.85); compared with £753,084 (44.5) in more recent times.

So in the ‘90s, to get between 40 and 90 points cost an average of between £866,905 and £902,743 – an incredibly narrow range of expense (with the bizarre exception the 50-59 point grouping, which, at £687,047, was actually significantly less expensive than the teams who only registered 40-49).

The 40-49 point reveals a more expensive cost per point in the ‘90s than in the ‘00s. Clearly, you could spend more money in the previous decade and still find yourself caught in the mire; with less of a spread of resources, even the cheaper sides were not financially adrift. The same applies with what is traditionally the relegation zone: below 40 points. Between 1992 and the end of 1999/00, the average cost per point was £761,397. Come forward to 2000/01 onwards, and it drops to £654,734.

The trends in cost per point can be clearly seen in the graphs below. The first graph shows the overall cost per point, which on the whole has risen since 1992/93.

However, the next graph clearly shows how the average cost per point has grown markedly more expensive in the higher echelons of the league in more recent years.

The most expensive cost per point in the past 18 years belongs to Chelsea in 2006/07: £3,075,503, upon finishing as runners-up to Manchester United. Only one other club has a cost in excess of £2.5m – again, Chelsea, a year earlier. But of the top nine ranking figures, only two clubs feature. Chelsea and Manchester United? Actually, no. It’s a northern United all right, but not the one you’d expect. It’s Newcastle.

The 2010/11 season will be revealing – Manchester City will certainly close the gap for this unwanted honour (although if they win the league, they won’t care what people think; they could probably afford to pay £4m or £5m per point if it would guarantee them success). Last year, City’s total of over £1.8m per point ranks as the Premier League’s 19th-highest to date; but as they were the summer of 2010’s big spenders, that figure will more than likely increase.

The cheapest cost per point in a single season – and the second-cheapest – belongs to Sam Allardyce’s Bolton. He remains the only manager to go below the £100,000 mark; between 2003 and 2005, Wanderers’ figures were £82,256 and £81,710. His style may not have pleased the purists, but in terms of getting results on a shoestring budget, it was a real achievement. His assistant at the time, Phil Brown, either contributed significant ideas toward that success, learned from Allardyce, or it was a bit of both: his Hull City also make the top 10 for cheapest cost per point.

The Rest of the Book…

Part One includes:

• 2010 Money and the Transfer Price Index – i.e. football inflation

• Genuine profit – i.e. profit made on a player after inflation taken into account

• Cost per point – how much each club’s XI cost each season, divided by points won

• Managers and clubs punching above and below their weight. Who are the best and worst?

• ‘The Newcastle Effect’ – the difference between small and big club management

• Squad Cost vs XI – what has more effect on success?

• Competitive balance in the Premier League era; how ‘fair’ is the league?

• Cost of players in relation to age, position and nationality.

• A look at the number of trainees graduating into the senior sides

• ‘Dead Dreams’ – a look at Leeds United and Portsmouth’s financial implosions

Part Two: takes a look at all 43 clubs to play in the top flight between 1992 and 2010. Included in each section, following an overview and a statistical breakdown (of the team and its managers), are the views of an ‘expert’ on that particular club. These include Gabriele Marcotti, Jonathan Wilson, Oliver Kay, Daniel Taylor, John Ashdown, Nick Szczepanik and Anthony Clavane; plus fanzine editors and highly-regarded bloggers, such as Zonal Marking, Equaliser Blog and Swiss Ramble.

Example of ‘Expert View’

Anthony Clavane, Sunday Mirror / author of “Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United” www.anthonyclavane.com

Leeds United should have been the team of the noughties. Top of the Premiership on the first day of 2000, 3rd at the end of the season and Uefa Cup semi-finalists. I remember Nelson Mandela opening the new Millennium Square, introduced by Leeds captain Lucas Radebe. Mandela called The Chief his “hero”. For both the city and its football team, the only way was up.

And then came The Fall. An Asian student was beaten up outside a nightclub. Criminal charges were pressed against two stars – Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate – and the club began to unravel. ‘Bowyergate’ was a contributory factor, but the real reason the mighty Whites suffered one of the most spectacular meltdowns in footballing history was the board’s infamous “living the dream” strategy.

During the course of the decade, Leeds went from threatening to win the Champions League – losing the semi-final to Valencia in 2002 – to threatening to win the old third division. They disappeared from the spotlight in a decade when the Premier League conquered the globe. When broadcast contracts, transfer budgets and wages all reached galactic levels. When the top flight attracted some of the best footballers on the planet. David O’Leary’s babies: the team that never was.

Looking at Leeds’ top 20 signings, from Rio Ferdinand (£32m in today’s money) to Dom Matteo (£8.5m), you have to ask the question: “What if?” What if there had been no spend, spend, spend? Critics claim that they bought success, but they reached the Champions League quarter-final without Ferdinand. Thorp Arch, their acclaimed, and envied, conveyor-belt of home-grown talent, had produced the likes of Woodgate, Alan Smith, Paul Robinson and Harry Kewell. It went on to produce the likes of Aaron Lennon, James Milner and Fabian Delph. United worked their way up the table with a fairly inexpensive team. And, whisper it softly, they were quite liked. At one stage, the babies were the darlings of the media.

As a fan, I didn’t complain when they had six top-class strikers on their books. Of course, I didn’t know chairman Peter Ridsdale’s profligate regime had taken out a £60m bond, gambling recklessly on continuing Champions League qualification. And I was kept in the dark about Publicity Pete’s goldfish. The policy of speculating to accumulate unravelled because the team finished 5th in 2002, missing out on the elite tournament.

After finishing in the top five for five consecutive years, Leeds imploded. The only way was down. Devoured from within by a toxic combination of excessive debt and bitter in-fighting, they suffered two relegations, went into administration and plummeted, like a stone in the well, until they hit rock bottom. Separated from the golden umbilical cord of the TV largesse, they were locked into a dive; a fast-moving, downward vortex in which losses and high wages fed debts, which in turn produced yet more losses and yet more debts. At the end of the noughties, they were indeed the footballing story of our times. But for all the wrong reasons.

Part Three looks in detail at all 18 seasons – the big transfers, the trends in spending, and any external financial factors, such as new TV deals.

Part Four is primarily a look at the major managers of the Premier League era, with a full breakdown of their transfer activity, and a look at what percentage of their own spending was recouped in sales. It also contains the Conclusions section, and finally, a list of the 200 most expensive transfers in 2010 money.

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Further Liverpool FC findings below, for Subscribers only.

The calls to sack Roy Hodgson are reaching fever pitch. While I won’t add to them in this particular piece (beyond pointing out what the complaints are), I will look at the options open to the new owners.

I suspect that they have three options:

1 Sack him soon; even though Hodgson is not ‘their’ man, the longer they keep him, the more they are seen to approve.

2 Replace him with ‘their man’ in the summer, using the time to find the perfect man for the job.

3 Judge his performance and suitability at the end of the season; take it from there, when they have a clearer idea of the state of the club and its potential.

Unpopular

Just before the mini-winning run, polls on Liverpool forums were running at about 90% in favour of removing Hodgson. Following the mini-run and back into what was the slump, it now seems to be around 95%.

The consensus seems to be that the style of play is more of a problem than the results. Fans hate losing, but can forgive it if effort and style are present.

So, it’s crystal clear that Hodgson is hugely unpopular right now.

But what can be done about it? NESV are clearly in a difficult situation, through no fault of their own; although how they deal with it will be considered their first major test.

Give Hodgson Time

Managers tend to need time to get their ideas across, although in my experience, they almost always have to offer at least something for the fans and players to cling to in their honeymoon period.

Equally, giving time to the wrong man is counter-productive. Why would you persist with a failure?

The problem is, how do you know for certain that he’s the wrong man and not just a slow starter?

Unfortunately, you don’t. In terms of style, approach and results, on the evidence so far Hodgson is the wrong man. Others may say he’s not yet fully up and running.

You can look at records, of course. Hodgson started slowly at Fulham and got better, to the point where they were a very good mid-table side capable of an exciting cup run.

He started fairly well at Blackburn – fine first season – but it went horribly pear-shaped in his second, to the point where they were relegated with the second-most expensive squad in the league, much of which was money spent under his watch.

(He managed to win just two games and nine points in the first 14 fixtures, with a team that included a lot of his own expensive signings; Brian Kidd, who is widely – and wrongly – credited with the relegation, took over and won 26 points from the next 24 games, which was actually better than relegation standard, and a big improvement, but not good enough to dig them out of a mighty hole. Hodgson is clearly the man at fault. So when Damien Comolli, perhaps out of politeness, said Hodgson did a good job at Blackburn, he was wrong.)

Equally, Hodgson’s win percentage at major clubs (39%) does not quell fears about a man promoted beyond his ability. It’s only marginally better than what he does at small clubs (for whom it’s a good win %).

The main problems with giving Hodgson time are: a) further disenchanting players until they leave, especially if a top-four finish isn’t attained; and b) the fact that he will be involved in the transfer process in the January window, which means players could be bought and sold to fit his template, and if he’s simply seeing out the season until a ‘safer’ time to change boss (option 2), that could prove problematic.

Why not get the next man in ASAP and let him bed in now, and begin next season’s planning? (The problem being, are the best men available now, or could they ‘be made’ available now with a tempting offer? Perhaps not.)

The counter argument is that Hodgson cannot achieve what he wants until he has the players he wants. This is almost certainly true, especially as his style was not suited to the talents he inherited.

The flip side of which is: will what he wants to achieve be what Liverpool fans want to see, and be good enough for even relative success? And if he wants something very different to what he inherited in order to perform in his style, why was the job given to him, and not someone who could work with what was present, in the first place?

Sack Hodgson

There are problems with getting rid of Hodgson right now, even if they know he’s already wobbled off the tightrope he’s been walking. NESV may be understandably nervous about a mid-season sacking, and we all know that changing the manager isn’t always the answer.

Having said that, possibly the two biggest clubs to have done so mid-season in recent times are Spurs and Chelsea, both to very good effect, as I pointed out here.

Of course, it needs to be thought through. Change for change’s sake is not strategic thinking.

Newcastle are quite famous for this kind of thing. Some of their most bizarre sackings, however, came after just two games of the season; 1/18th, when right now, we’re past the 1/3rd stage.

(And if you’re going to replace the manager with a dinosaur like Joe Kinnear – who never won anything, or even managed a big club, first time around – or a total novice like Alan Shearer, you’re likely to do more harm than good. That’s just plain loopy.)

I’d imagine that NESV also don’t want to get into a cycle of sacking. Liverpool have never had a high turnover of bosses (Hodgson is just the ninth in 51 years), and a sacking culture is not the way forward. By bowing to apparent fan pressure, if the next boss starts poorly, a precedent will have been set.

Of course, a precedent was set (not by NESV) upon sacking Benítez after what was deemed a poor season, despite previous achievements; therefore, if those standards for dismissal are not met, fans will ask why.

Equally, with their own first appointment, my feeling is that NESV should be able to stick to their guns, believing him to be integral to their vision, rather than a leftover of a failed regime. My advice would be to give the next man time, but do homework first. Back your manager to the hilt, but don’t be forced to back a dud.

Player Influence

Of course, it’s long been an open secret that the unhappiness of some players was part of the decision process when it came to sacking the last manager. So, if the same – or now other – players are unhappy with Roy, another dangerous precedent could be set: giving in to player power.

The opposite of this is keeping a load of unhappy players who will never be able to give their best for someone they have no faith in. That’s just human nature. You can be willing to give your all for a boss you respect, whether you like him or not. But if you don’t respect him, or what it is he is asking of you, it will show in your work.

For example, Reina wants to play short balls where possible, rather than punt. Agger wants to play out from the back, rather than look long. Torres wants midfield support and clever passes close to goal, not to be a target-man dealing with high balls from the sky. Johnson wants to be taking the game to the opposition, not waiting for the opposition to take it to him, where he’s more vulnerable. Pacheco wants to dribble and try to bamboozle defenders in the final third; or, indeed, just get a game. (Gerrard, meanwhile, at the age of 30, is aware that time is running out, and surely knows he can’t be wasting it with mid-table football.)

None of these are happy, for obvious reasons: they’re being asked to work against their strengths, rather than with them, in order to fit into a pre-ordained template that has only really worked with lesser players (who are more likely to buy into it if it achieves moderate success).

That affects their confidence and their happiness. Players may sacrifice their own needs for the greater good, but if it’s affecting their own form, and results are not making the manager’s case for his very specific approach, they will quickly lose faith. Remember, almost all of these will have worked under some of the best managers in the business, including top international bosses. (How many Fulham players can say the same? A handful at most.)

It’s perhaps no accident that at Blackburn, where some players had won the league just a couple of years earlier, and at Inter Milan, where the legendary Roberto Carlos was misused and misunderstood, player unhappiness and unrest (and downright revolution at Blackburn) was a big issue. It was behind Hodgson’s decision to leave Italy – he said he wouldn’t stay where he knew he was unwanted – and his dismissal from Ewood Park.

It’s perhaps no accident that Hodgson’s relative success has come with lesser players who, by their very nature, expect less.

Is the manager really to blame?

If player power is insidious, then team spirit is far more complex. It is based on the natural harmony of a group of individuals (often with big egos) who have to interact together under intense pressure and scrutiny.

While players need to take more of the blame, the problem is one of collective spirit more than individuals.

You can’t fake team spirit. You can’t fake togetherness. If there are rifts, it will cause damage. If a small number of players are the cause of the rifts, they need to removed, or at least be put in their place. But if it’s the manager who is the cause – making many of his charges unhappy and demoralised, and seen to be unfair or unsuitable – he needs to go. It’s a fact of life that a manager is easier to replace than a large number of players.

If there is a lack of faith and respect from the squad, then with all the will in the world, it’s hard to see how you can get consistent results.

Again, team spirit ebbs and flows with both performances and results, and it cannot be perfect all of the time. The balance of confidence within the unit is constantly shifting; at any time, some will be enjoying better form than others.

But if players aren’t enjoying training, and indeed playing, then the buck stops with the manager. It is his job to try and engender spirit, earn respect and instil belief. We’ve all seen good managers fail to do just that at certain clubs. It doesn’t require Churchillian speeches to motivate players; just an air of being in control, and providing them with the platform to perform.

Brian Clough failed at Leeds upon seriously upsetting the players; famously, he was gone within 44 days, and they were never going to be on his side if he stayed for another 444. Look at the difference in the French national side since they got rid of Raymond Domenech, under whom the players were disillusioned to the point of mutiny at a quite disastrous World Cup. In very little time, they now look a totally different outfit.

World Cup-winner Phil Scolari failed at Chelsea because his methods were seen as inappropriate by several players. (The fact that Hiddink, instantly, and Ancelotti, following later, did much better with the same group suggests that, for all the loathsome associations that come with player power, they were right. Of course, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if they try harder for the new man. But you try harder for those you believe in.)

Each group of players has its own unique mentality. Within that group, each individual has his own idiosyncrasies, and somehow it has to all mesh into one cohesive whole. It’s an art, and a different art depending on the quality of the players and their expectations.

Unlike baseball, in which NESV made their name, football is almost always an 11 vs 11 ebb-and-flow game. It is not pitcher versus batter; the only vaguely valid comparison in football is a penalty shootout.

To me (and I speak as no expert), baseball seems like a sport where the coach works one-on-one with individuals, governing a series of set-pieces. Football, on the other hand, is one organic mass of movement – a shape contracting and expanding out on the field of play, as each and every one of them comes into contact with 11 individuals seeking to stop them, by fair means or foul. Mentally, the equation between the unit needs to be right.

A manager sets the tone with his tactics, his team-talks (plus his general attitude and demeanour towards the players) and his signings. It’s not an accident that teams mirror their manager’s style: Man United fiery, passionate and not slow to go on the attack; Arsenal cerebral and sophisticated; Benítez’s sides hard-working and cunning; Mourinho’s sides confident, brash and confrontational, them against the world; and so on.

Overall, is any given manager too cautious, too cavalier or just right for the task at hand? Does he allow the players freedom to express themselves without the fear of mistakes – a fear which kills ‘attractive’ football – or is it all about safety first? Certain frameworks help skill to flourish, other frameworks hem it in or squeeze it out.

Of course, different approaches relate better to different levels of ability. At smaller clubs, you work on eliminating mistakes, whereas at bigger clubs, where more natural talent is on hand, you must find ways to harness that ability. Smaller clubs need to be hard to beat; bigger clubs have to win games. (Although Liverpool beat Chelsea with men behind the ball to protect the lead - see this image – the same approach patently failed in the next two games, as it did earlier in the season.)

No manager, at any level, wants stupid mistakes, carelessness or casualness, but better players need more than just defensive drills and safety first. Better players have to work out how to beat teams, not how to to stop the opposition winning.

These are the football truths that NESV need to become aware of.

Panic?

It’s clear to me that John W. Henry is not a man to panic. He and his partners have inherited a difficult situation. The difficulties in sacking Hodgson have been discussed, as have the difficulties that could arise from keeping him.

I suspect that they will wait and do things at their speed, but in football, results can hasten any such process. We shouldn’t panic either, but as fans, that’s easier said than done.

Where does that leave Kenny Dalglish?

While I can understand why NESV might not want to appoint Kenny Dalglish as a caretaker – it could be seen as bowing to fan pressure, a retrograde step or a difficult appointment to ‘undo’ at a later date – I actually think there are some pretty good reasons why it could work, at what is admittedly something of a crossroads for the club.

To use American parlance, he could be our crossing guard.

The rest of this post is for subscribers only.

Below is a full record of Roy Hodgson’s managerial career at club level, based on league results only.

What’s noticeable is that it took him 12 years to manage a club for more than 26 league games; mostly due to smaller Scandinavian leagues, and also due to only lasting 21 games at Bristol City.

In England he has managed for 181 games, winning just 57 – at 31.5%. Liverpool should be aiming for 50-60%, with 60% necessary for the top four and 66%+ for the title.

In Italy, he managed for 79 league games, winning 34, at 43%.

In England and Italy, at clubs who were big and/or rich (therefore excluding Bristol City, Udinese and Fulham), his record is well below average. Winning just 51 out of 131 games with these clubs gives him a worse win% than Graeme Souness had at Liverpool; yes, that bad.

Even including all his successes in small Nordic leagues, Hodgson’s entire career win rate of 43.3% suggests a manager who just isn’t ambitious enough in his approach. He’ll make smaller teams hard to beat, but he won’t make bigger teams become winners. Hodgson was the right man for Fulham, but based on his record and performance to date, the wrong one for Liverpool.

Key: Red shade = England an green shade = Italy.

Statistics provided by Graeme Riley, who provides further assessment below for Subscribers only.