Tin Pot FC Part Three: Why being “Premier League proven” is vastly overrated
The primary feature of West Ham’s transfer policy this summer has been the insistence on acquiring “Premier League proven” players. That familiar refrain, or a variation on it, has been drilled home in virtually every single piece of communication to come out of the club since May.
It’s a concept repeated so broadly by people associated with English football that it’s passed into conventional wisdom.
And it’s absolute fucking nonsense.
We’re by no means the only offenders on peddling this shit, but we are currently the worst.
I can vaguely understand why the board have come to this position. We signed from far and wide last summer and none of them really worked out.
Gökhan Töre was an unmitigated disaster. Sofiane Feghouli couldn’t ever really find his feet and failed to have much impact. Håvard Nordtveit started appallingly, was forced to cover a variety of different positions that exposed his lack of pace, and although he eventually found a bit of form, he’s since moved on to a Champions League club. It was excruciating watching Simone Zaza play for West Ham. He didn’t suit the way we played at all but the fact that he went and scored 6 times for a poor Valencia side after Christmas indicates that perhaps he’s not as terrible as he looked.
It was a similar story with Calleri — by the end of the season, playing upfront for us was a thankless task and he looked completely bereft of confidence as he struggled to influence games. He missed a brilliant chance after coming on as a sub early in the season against Bournemouth, and, had that gone in, he’d have been a different player. André Ayew had his season disrupted by picking up an injury on his debut but after he recovered he eventually did ok. Ashley Flecther looked massively out of his depth and showed nothing to indicate that he’ll be anything other than a mid-tier Championship striker in the future. The less said about Álvaro Arbeloa, the better.
But to focus solely in drafting players who “know the league” and “who don’t need to adjust a lot”, as Bilić said of Arnautović, just because we made a few mistakes last time round is wrong. This approach both ignores the reality of our previous transfer record and throws the baby out with the bathwater.
To take the latter point first: all of West Ham’s best players in recent seasons weren’t “Premier League proven” when they were signed.
Look at the last three winners of the Hammer of the Year award:
2017 — Michail Antonio: signed from Nottingham Forest with no top flight experience and after a slow start developed into a crucial member of the squad.
2016 — Dimitri Payet: signed from Marseille having only ever played in France and immediately shone through as the best player in the squad.
2015 — Aaron Cresswell: similar to Antonio, Cresswell made the jump up from the Championship, played every minute of every league game in his first season, and impressed in Allardyce’s last season.
The same is true of Pedro Obiang, Cheikou Kouyaté, and Manuel Lanzini who were playing in Italy, Belgium, and the UAE before signing for us and yet are comfortably amongst our best performers. Plus, last summer wasn’t a complete write-off: Arthur Masuaku and Edimilson Fernandes were both inexpensive purchases and, despite having to content themselves with being on the fringes of the starting XI for most of the season, they showed enough glimpses of quality to suggest they can play a greater role going forward.
If you want to look at the bigger picture, the same is broadly true of the league as a whole. Overwhelmingly, the best players in the league haven’t been bought as known quantities. The last three PFA Player of the Year award winners: N’golo Kanté, Riyad Mahrez, Eden Hazard. All bought from Ligue 1 with no prior experience of the Premier League and yet they all excelled. (ok, Kanté won his after moving from Leicester to Chelsea, but his performance in his debut season in England after arriving from FC Nantes was equally impressive as his first year at Stamford Bridge).
Not to belabour the point, but the core of the Tottenham side that has been so admired over the last two seasons is comprised of players with no prior Premier League experience: Hugo Lloris, Eric Dier, Jan Vertonghen, Christian Eriksen, Dele Alli, Son Heung-min, Érik Lamela, Harry Kane — not a Premier League appearance between them when they broke into the Spurs first team.
The point is: these signings thrived not because of intimate knowledge and experience of the Premier League, but because their attributes as players made them well-suited to the playing style of the league/ their individual clubs.
And I can understand where this impulse for buying known quantities comes from. It’s essentially risk aversion and, when such enormous sums of money are at stake in elite level football and when a few expensive mistakes can be financially ruinous for a club/ job-threatening for a manager, signing players who are able to have an instant impact and are unlikely to completely fail to adapt becomes attractive.
It’s a lazy method of recruitment, though. By only signing players who have already played within the league, you’re allowing other clubs to shoulder the burden of risk as they spend their time and resources on developing a player. No wonder that they then insist on charging an extortionate premium.
What this conservative mindset does, though, is constrain you to low-ceiling, high-floor type of signings, who are rarely going to allow you to progress as a club.
The other problem, of course, is that being “Premier League proven” is absolutely no guarantee of anything.
You only need look at our January transfer window to see that this is the case. Fonte and Snodgrass — established, “proven” Premier League players by any metric — were brought in at great expensive and flopped. Snodgrass was next to anonymous in virtually all of his appearances in a claret shirt and Fonte actively made us worse as a team whenever he played, especially as part of a back three.
Their experience of top level football in England was an assurance of fuck all; on paper, they are the poster children for the type of thinking that is currently informing our transfer policy but on the pitch they were disastrous.
Even geographical familiarity is no guarantee of a player settling. Both Gökhan Töre and Håvard Nordtveit spent time at academies of London football clubs and should have been safe bets (given their time at Chelsea and Arsenal respectively), yet failed to make any impact whatsoever.
The problem was that they were all tactically and stylistically poor fits for our squad and system. All of this suggests that there are other, more important factors at hand that decide if a player is going to be success or not than whether they’ve previously played in England.
There are countless examples of this being the case throughout the league but let’s take one of the most high-profile: Fernando Torres. This should have been one of the safest, most nailed-on deals ever, even if Chelsea did chuck £50 million on him back when that was still an eye-watering amount of money. At Liverpool, Torres had looked like a world-beater; at Chelsea, Torres looked like he couldn’t beat an egg.
The flip side to that presents you with a player like Kevin De Bruyne. The Belgian had a brief spell at Chelsea during Mourinho’s second period in charge but only managed to make 3 first team appearances for the Blues before being loaned, and eventually sold, to the Bundesliga.
After a brilliant season at VfL Wolfsburg, City broke their transfer record and spent £54 million on him and he’s since flourished in Manchester, racking up 18 assists last season and generally looking like one of the most creative players in world football currently.
But if your primary criteria for deciding whether to sign a player or not was their experience in the Premier League, you wouldn’t have touched KDB with a barge pole; through this lens, he could only be perceived as a failure. Interestingly, one of his team-mates from that spell at Chelsea who also failed to make an impact has just signed for Liverpool and could go on to prove this exact point once again.
It all goes to show that just because someone doesn’t work out for your team doesn’t necessarily make them a bad player. Sometimes they’re just the wrong player.
And this is down to clubs just as much as individual players. All too often, when a move doesn’t work out, the blame is laid at individuals when really, it’s the club who should be hung out to dry. You can’t sign a player and expect him to completely change his physique and playing style (unless you’re going to give them the time and guidance to do so), so greater care needs to be taken in assessing whether someone is a good fit or not. Clubs also have a duty of care to players as individuals in helping them assimilate into life in a new city, often with the added difficulties of a language barrier, but that’s an entirely different conversation.
As a final point to illustrate the absurdity of the “Premier League proven” line of thinking:
Everton bought Michael Keane for £25mil from Burnley and it was widely greeted as a good bit of business. Shortly after, Antonio Rüdiger was signed by Chelsea for £29mil. I’ve seen it argued that the fact that Keane has experience of playing in England explains why they’re similarly priced and makes him more valuable than the German. I think this is bollocks.
Michael Keane has played around 50 Premier League games (including one season where Burnley were relegated) and has two caps for England, whereas Antonio Rüdiger has made over 100 appearances across the Bundesliga and Serie A (for much higher calibre teams), has played nearly 20 times for Germany, and has a handful of Champions/Europa League games under his belt too. Essentially, Rüdiger has played twice as much football as Keane has despite being the same age.
Based on prior experience, you can make a case that it is mad that they’re similarly priced. Keane might be familiar with the league, but you could argue that Rüdiger has already proven himself able to move abroad and adapt to a different footballing culture fairly easily. As an added bonus, he already speaks fluent English, providing him one less hurdle to overcome and reducing an obvious barrier to settling in London. The two clubs are obviously operating in different tiers of the market, but I know which deal I’d be more pleased with.
(continued in part four).
