In the summer of 2013, when Manchester City confirmed the acquisition of Alvaro Negredo from Sevilla for a fee of £16.4 million, the world of football wondered how the men from Sevilla were going to cope in his absence. The director of football at Los Rojiblancos, though, was way ahead of everyone else.
Monchi had already replaced Negredo with a certain Colombian forward who went by the name of Carlos Bacca, for less than half of that sum. Everyone knows how Bacca managed to fill the void, while his predecessor at the Sanchez Pizjuan struggled at the Etihad.
Andalucian success
When Monchi took over the role of Sporting Director in 2000, Los Rojiblancos were fighting relegation and bankruptcy at the same time – all the while being on a 52-year-old trophyless streak. Since then, they have won five Europa Leagues and have been involved in 14 finals in the last 10 years.
More than a sporting miracle or a one-off success story, this sort of success is the result of meticulous planning and thinking ahead of everyone else. The club has been able to maintain its position in the elite of European football while shipping off its best players.
Starting with Jose Antonio Reyes, for whom Arsene Wenger came calling in the summer of 2003, to Dani Alves, Ivan Rakitic and Carlos Bacca, the club has been the treasure-house of the best talents in Europe for the past one and a half decade.
In a recent interview, Monchi, the man behind the extraordinary feat that Sevilla have achieved, explained how they unearth the rough diamonds. The process involves monitoring of different leagues across the world by 16 specialized scouts.
In the beginning, the procedure only involves information-gathering. Monchi said to The Guardian, “16 people cover a series of leagues. For the first five months we watch a lot of football but with no particular aim: we’re just accumulating data. Every month we produce an ideal XI for each league.
“Then in December, we start watching players who appeared regularly in different contexts – home, away, international – to build the broadest possible profile.” Then, the manager asks for a player in a particular position and some of them fit the profile.
Then start the negotiations. Monchi says, “This part was easy. Now-a-days, the clubs have realized the amount of profit that Sevilla can make and hence ask for bigger prices.”
Not only Sevilla, proper sports management has led to some of the greatest legends of the footballing epic in recent as well as ancient times. Starting from Nottingham Forest under the legendary Brian Clough to Leicester City under Claudio Ranieri. While it may not seem so, the foxes’ recent triumph was not as much of a miracle as is thought.
The ‘miracle’ in Leicester
When Leicester City sacked manager Nigel Pearson, the club had just pulled off the ‘Great Escape’ having been rock bottom of the Premier League table in December of 2014. In came the young, jolly genius in the form of Claudio Ranieri. But the secret weapons that the club needed in their title challenge next year were present much before he arrived. The scouts, headed by Steve Walsh, had developed a huge scouting network across Europe and were acquiring the finest talents before the ‘big boys’ heard a word about them.
Walsh had been busy in the summer. He had been building the backbone of the team that was going to be champion. He had made Robert Huth’s loan from Stoke a permanent one, scouted and signed Christian Fuchs from Schalke 04 and Shinji Okazaki from Mainz. They were going to be pivotal in the title challenge. Obviously, it wasn’t done in a day. Nothing is.
But the real change that happened after Ranieri took charge is the acquisition of midfielder N’golo Kante from Caen in France for a mere £5.6 million. Having later admitted that he did not know about the Kante earlier, Ranieri needed convincing at that time but eventually agreed to buy the Frenchman. Finally, the report on the midfielder that had been carefully written by Senior Scouting Co-ordinator David Mills had yielded fruit. The final cog in the wheel had been set.
Mahrez and Vardy were other players who had been spotted by Walsh and his team much earlier. They were the main men in the team in the title-winning season. They were the players that took the responsibility of putting the ball in the net while Huth and Kante stopped the opposition from doing so. The fact that their combined transfer fee is less than £1.5 million is a subject of astonishment. Just to put into perspective the fantastic business done by Leicester, Manchester City spent £55 million on Kevin De Bryune, nearly 8 times the combined transfer fees of Vardy, Mahrez and Kante of £7 million, to challenge for the title. The results were and still are there for everyone to see.
As simple as it may seem, the miracle at Leicester wasn’t a miracle after all.
Forest, the club that got promotion and European success
The foxes have often been compared to the Nottingham Forest side under Brian Clough. Their feats were similar. Not only in the ends but also in the means.
Clough and his relatively less popular assistant Peter Taylor used more or less the same tricks of the trade in their time to attain unexpected as well as unprecedented success. The best examples of the similarity between the two are Gary Bristles and Roy Keane. Birtles, a forward by trade had been bought for a sum of £2000 in 1976 and was later sold to Manchester United in 1980 for £1.25 million. Who knows how much a player like Mahrez will be sold for when the clubs rolling in dough come calling. Certainly a lot more than £1.25 million!
After domestic and European success, Forest underwent a dip in form when Taylor left after a rift with Clough and they started to buy big in the transfer market instead of buying Smart. Big-money signings Justin Fashanu, Peter Ward and Asa Hartford couldn’t make their mark. This was the beginning of their downfall and they never won a league or tasted European success again under Clough.
The only player that Clough bought for a lot of money and was relatively successful at the club was Trevor Francis, Britain’s first £1 million player, who scored in the European Cup final against Malmo in 1979.
Lyon and French domination
To find yet another example of success in sports management that led to great glory, we have to go to the then not-so-football-fanatic city of Lyon in France. When a local accountant, Jean-Michel Aulas took over the club in 1987, the club was nearly non-existent. The people of the city were almost unaware of the presence of a local football club. And the fact that the club struggled in the second division didn’t help either. Since then, under Aulas, the club has only been on a way up.
Aulas developed the club from the grassroots level gradually to the top. In his first season as president, under new manager Raymond Domenech, the club went unbeaten on their way to win promotion. With the help of former France and Lyon striker Bernard Lacombe who is widely credited with having the ‘Best pair of eyes in France’, Aulas bought players on the cheap and sold them on a high. Players who were going to help the team in the short term and who would contribute to the financial situation of the club in the longer term.
Following this strategy, they had managed to bring a team together by 2002 that was going to dominate French football for the next 7 years. They won 7 consecutive league titles with players who didn’t cost them tens of millions. Players who they had scouted.
No manager brought about this revelation. They had 4 managers in those 7 years. Somewhat inconsistent but their philosophy was same all the time and hence the success followed.
They bought good players on the cheap. They made the team better. Eventually, the team got better. They got sporting success which contributed to financial growth. Then they sold their top players, helping the club get better financially. And they replaced the old players with new players who were just as good. The perfect thing.
Though Leicester and Forest and Sevilla have done very well in the market to accomplish great things, I don’t think the achievement of Lyon is in any way less comparable. The level of consistency that they managed to create while selling top talents like Michael Essien, Karim Benzema and others is second to none.
Porto, the pioneers
Porto in Portugal have been another example of great on-field as well as off-field success. Porto have been the top destination of South-American football talent in the 21st century. Starting from the likes of James Rodriguez, Falcao, Hulk, Joao Moutinho and Danilo in more recent times, Porto have sold all their best players and still maintain a level of consistency that is praiseworthy. Between 2001 and 2011, the club has accounted for a total of £850 million of sales which has provided them with £342 million in profits. That is a considerable sum of money.
While many of their counterparts in old times like Ajax, Milan and Celtic have dropped low in their performance in recent years, Porto have been excellent all the way winning the Champions League in 2004 as a insignia of their glory. This was possible not because of a era-defining manager or a one-in-a-generation player. This was possible because of a policy that has proved true time and again in the script of footballing history.
Atletico Madrid, the edifice of continued success
In more recent times, another example of top level football management has been shown from Atletico Madrid. Away from the glitterati of Real Madrid, Atletico under the leadership of Diego Simeone has been a step ahead of their title rivals in the transfer market. Their level of consistency has been praiseworthy too. Having won the Spanish Liga in 2014, they are now in the Champions League final for the second time in three years.
Just like the striker scenario at Sevilla, Atletico have been, over the years, gifted with some of the best strikers in the world. Starting from the days when Fernando Torres broke into the scene to Sergio Aguero to Diego Forlan to Falcao to the infamous Diego Costa, Atleti have always had one of the best strikers in the world leading their attack in recent years. More recently, Antoine Griezmann has come into the spotlight and taken responsibility as Los Colchoneros’ go-to man in difficult situations.
Out of all the clubs that have achieved unexpected success in recent times, Atletico have been up there the longest time yet. On Saturday, when they take up Real Madrid in Lisbon in the Champions League final, the worst result that they can get is that they would have qualified for the Champions League final twice in three years. That is enough to be a symbol of their success.
Smartness over extravagance – the recipe for success!
Starting from Nottingham to Lyon to Seville to Madrid, it has often been proved time and again that proper sports management can and will get you more rewards in the longer term than buying a player and asking him to change everything. Yes, Nottingham weren’t able to maintain their position after Clough and yes, Lyon are struggling to win the league right now. But the reason for their struggle is that they tried to think like the big boys once they themselves became big. But the problem was, they weren’t equipped to be big. They needed to be small. They just needed to think big.
As Jaime Carragher wrote in his autobiography, “Having money is no guarantee of success. The key is spending it on the right players.”
It doesn’t matter if you have a million dollars if you don’t know how to spend your cent.
