Why don't teams spend big on buying defenders in the transfer window?
June is a deceptive month for football. This is not, perhaps, immediately apparent on the back pages of newspapers and homepages of websites, where the fevered talk of swoops and deals and big-money signings begins almost as soon as the last ball of the season is kicked. By and large, though, June is a month of positioning and posturing, one colossal stand-off as everyone waits for everyone else to move. Still, it is possible to discern certain patterns in the transfer market so far. First and foremost, something is stirring in Milan. As the front page of Gazzetta dello Sport pointed out a few days ago, Serie A is currently the highest spending league in Europe. Given that only a fraction of the summer's total business has been completed, it is too soon to say whether that will remain the case. But from the early exchanges, it does seem that after years of austerity, Italy means business once more. Leading the charge alongside Juventus are Internazionale (who have already captured Geoffrey Kondogbia, Miranda and Jeison Murillo) and their city rivals AC Milan, who have beaten several Premier League sides to Carlos Bacca and have made offers for almost every other player in Europe. Both seem determined to arrest what had looked like a process of managed decline, and both are prepared to pay a premium to do so. The second trend, though, is both more concrete and of more universal concern. There are a few exceptions to it, of course, but it is one that holds true at clubs as diverse as Atletico Madrid and Liverpool, Manchester City and Juventus. Nobody wants to buy defenders anymore. This is odd. It is odd because defenders are generally much cheaper than attackers, both in terms of transfer fees and wages. Sergio Ramos, one of the handful of defenders who may move this summer, is annoyed with Real Madrid because they will not offer him pay parity with the likes of Gerard Pique and Thiago Silva. They earn around ￡140,000-a-week, chump change for a striker of equivalent class. It is also odd because improving your defence is the best way to improve your results. As an extensive statistical analysis by The Numbers Game found, every clean sheet is worth more (in terms of points) than every goal. Obviously, you also need to score goals to win games. But you also need to not concede them. And achieving the latter is substantially cheaper than the former. In certain cases, the oddness warps into straightforward bafflement. Liverpool and Manchester City were stymied in their ambitions last season not by a lack of attacking threat, but because they were nowhere near good enough at the back. For Brendan Rodgers and Manuel Pellegrini to ignore that fact, particularly given how cost-effective defensive improvement is, can only be described as perplexing. So, how have we come to this? In part, it is to do with fashion. Football has always been rather more preoccupied with attack than defence but in a globalised age where how entertaining you are can be directly monetised, that obsession has grown almost pathological. Owners know their teams will only go over well in football's emerging markets if they are good to watch. Managers know they will only get the next big job that comes up if they are seen as being the sort of coach who can deliver not just the results a team requires, but the style of play they demand. Football is still a results business but being good to watch can now be counted as something of a result, too. Arsenal stand as testament to this: a decade without a single trophy did not damage their popularity overseas because Arsene Wenger's brand of football was so easy on the eye. In terms of winning the loyalty of those new to the game, it is not all about silverware. That is not the only factor. The fact that simply signing an attacking player (regardless of how well they actually perform) has a value cannot be ignored. Take Angel di Maria: when Manchester United broke the British transfer record last summer, it was not to address a particular need. Louis van Gaal had many holes in his side but Di Maria did not fill any of them. They signed him to prove they could attract a superstar, and superstars tend to be attackers. Then there is the changing nature of football's defensive roles. Increasingly, the primary attributes teams look for in full-backs are offensive: it is arguably more important that they can contribute going forward than offer some solidity at the back. Something similar is happening at centre-back, too, thanks in no small part to the approach taken by Pep Guardiola. There is a demand for defenders to help construct attacks and bring the ball out; the simple fact is that there are not many players out there who are capable of doing so to any great effect. Scouts looking for defensive reinforcements are inclined to think that their options are limited and managers tempted to believe that they are better off sticking with what they have, concentrating their financial firepower on boosting their forward lines. The most significant factor, though, is best exposed by United's search for an upgrade on Phil Jones, Jonny Evans and Chris Smalling. Now, strictly speaking, this should not be an especially difficult task. And yet van Gaal's attempts to find a replacement have extended no further than Mats Hummels (now inclined to stay at Borussia Dortmund) and Ramos. The 29-year-old Spaniard is one of the best defenders in the world, but he is not exactly Franco Baresi in his prime. His disciplinary record is poor. He is vastly experienced and he is a winner, but he is hardly impermeable. At his age, a fee upwards of ￡30 million seems rather a lot. That is what United must pay, though, because of a very stark reality: there aren't that many defenders out there. That is the main reason why so many clubs seem to be ignoring the cheap points improving their back-line would offer and prefer to take the old Kevin Keegan approach: you will score, but we will score more. (Though quite why the likes of Monaco's Aymen Abdennour have been overlooked remains a mystery.) Why is there a lack of defenders? The fact that they are now asked to do more than simply defend is part of it. The skill-set required has changed and the stock of players capable of meeting it has not yet caught up. But it's also impossible to escape the role played by football's rule changes in diminishing the number of high-class defenders. Over the past 20 years, tackling has become endangered. The balance of the game has shifted inexorably to favour the attackers: more contact is deemed illegal and more types of challenge have been outlawed. The intention has been honourable -- protecting the magicians and preserving the beauty of the game -- but it's also made it infinitely more difficult for defenders to excel. This plays into teams' thinking when they watch players. The best sides don't usually spend their money without doing due diligence. They are as picky as they can afford to be (until the very end of August, anyway). They watch dozens of games. And in those dozens of games, most defenders will be exposed at some point simply because the weapons they have traditionally had at their disposal have been taken away from them. The shortfall is a product of nurture, not nature: more and more emphasis on attacking in academies and youth structures, fewer and fewer legal forms of stopping attacking players in full flight. This is why all of the "proper" defenders, the hard men, are in their late 20s and early to mid-30s. The next generation are not cast in their image. They are something else, a hybrid between defenders and midfielders, and football does not yet quite know what to do with them. What we are seeing this summer is a direct consequence of that. Buying defenders is the cheapest, easiest way to improve your side. But only if there are defenders out there to buy.
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发表于 2-7-2015 08:21 AM
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