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TOMKINS: FREED BY A KNOWLEDGE OF HISTORY
Paul Tomkins 19 September 2008
One of the problems with Liverpool's glorious past is that some younger fans (and older ones with short memories), seem to think it was all achieved at a canter, with brilliance at every turn. Time turns fact into myth. 
However, as great as much of the halcyon days undeniably were, those players and managers were also fallible. Not every game was won 5-0 with imperious style.
I read one fan complaining about the 0-0 draw at Villa Park, saying that the great Liverpool sides would never have settled for such results. Really?
The fact is that Rafa Benítez has won a greater percentage of league games than Bill Shankly and Joe ************an, two of the club's legendary managers. Only Kenny Dalglish and Bob Paisley have won a higher percentage of league games in the last 50 years.
If critics then say, 'well, it's easier to win games now', that may be valid –– although it's impossible to prove. However, you can't pick and choose from the past and present in contradictory fashion to suit your argument. If you acknowledge that wins were harder to attain in the old days, then don't turn around and say that in the old days Liverpool never settled for an away draw. They did.
In 1984, Liverpool won the league with a staggering 14 draws, as well as six defeats. That was a phenomenal team, one that achieved an historic treble, but let's not airbrush out its shortcomings. It failed to win almost as many of its 42 league games as it won. Its captain, Graeme Souness, brilliantly summed up why they were still justifiable champions: "By our standards we didn't deserve to win the league this year. But by everyone else's standards, we did."
Given how the talk of finances totally dictates modern football discussion, one of my aims in writing Dynasty was to find a way to compare the transfers made by both Liverpool and the club's main rivals over the last 50 years, to get a sense of expenditure.
Using pounds sterling just didn't make sense. Bill Shankly spending £13,000 in 1960 to break the club record on Kevin Lewis just seems utterly meaningless as a financial figure now, in a day and age when the current English transfer record is 2,461 times higher. If standard inflation worked this way, a loaf of bread would cost around £100.
While admitting that working from transfer records is not a 100% perfect way of judging the financial landscape (given that many transfer fees seem to lack logic), I felt it was about as close as I could get. So while Lewis was Liverpool's new record signing, his cost was 20% of the overall English transfer record of the day. Suddenly it made sense. In today's terms, that 20% would make him a £6m player.
Having then worked out the average cost of all the major teams over the last 50 years using this method, I found an interesting phenomenon. Until the start of the Premiership, there was a mix between expensively-assembled league champions and those put together on a shoestring budget.
For instance, Bill Shankly won the title in 1964 and 1966 with a team that averaged around just 10% of the British transfer record. Everton's team of the mid-'80s was similarly inexpensive.
What's interesting, however, is that since Leeds in 1992 –– i.e. the very year before the Premiership began –– every “new” team to win the league ("new" meaning after a break of at least five years, so that it was essentially a very different collection of players and/or manager) cost on average more than 40% of the British transfer record.
That applies to Manchester United in '93, Blackburn in '95 and Chelsea in '05, but most surprisingly, to Arsenal in '98 too, after their seven-year itch.
I was shocked by this last finding. I always thought Wenger achieved the double on a tight budget. To a degree he did, with regards to his own spending, although players like Vieira and Overmars were far from free transfers. But that Arsenal title was actually built on some heavy spending by the Frenchman's predecessors, Bruce Rioch and George Graham. They signed some very good and very expensive players.
The fact is that in 1990 David Seaman was a very expensive goalkeeper. The figure of £1.3m seems fairly cheap if you look at it by 1998's standards, but by working out Seaman's cost as a percentage of the transfer record –– 48% –– at the time the transfer took place, a truer picture is revealed.
The percentage is set for the duration a player stays at the club. As another example, when United bought Roy Keane for a British record £3.75m in 1993, they took him off the open market. They paid what was then a fortune to make him theirs, so that even when the transfer record went up and up over the next decade, he was already where they wanted him. But it all depended on digging deep and breaking the transfer record to give themselves that luxury.
Once Graham spent big on David Seaman, no other club could get their hands on him. David Platt, Ian Wright and Martin Keown were three other players who played regularly in the 1998 side who cost over 50% of the British transfer record.
The same was also true of Dennis Bergkamp – whose move to Highbury set a new British record in 1995, at £7.5m: a ‘100%' transfer. A year later, when Alan Shearer cost Newcastle £15m, was Bergkamp suddenly only a ‘50%' signing? Was he suddenly a cheap player? Of course not. He still cost a ‘100%' fee, because that was the most expensive at the time.
In other words, a player's expense can only be rated by working from the time of his purchase; his value may rise or fall in the coming years, and other deals may dwarf his, but the payment relates to the market of that particular year.
All in all, with players like Seaman, Keown and Bergkamp key to their success, that Arsenal side rated at 43% of the transfer record. Once the bargain find of Nicolas Anelka took over from Ian Wright in the second half of the season, the average dropped, but it was still a success that was very much bankrolled; if not exclusively by Wenger, then by Arsenal as a club.
Of course, assembling a team costing over 40% of the transfer record does not guarantee success. Newcastle's 1996/97 side cost a whopping 49.7%, but won nothing.
Perhaps most depressingly, the Liverpool teams of Graeme Souness and Roy Evans both averaged between 40-50% of the transfer record, but even with the best crop of youth graduates the club has produced, the ‘90s was a barren decade. In that time, other clubs moved ahead.
Coming forward, the 2007 Champions League semi-final first-leg at Stamford Bridge shows the spending power of Chelsea in recent years. As an average, Liverpool's starting XI - Reina, Riise, Agger, Carragher, Arbeloa, Zenden, Alonso, Mascherano, Gerrard, Bellamy and Kuyt - cost just 14.5% of the English transfer record. By contrast, the Chelsea team that started the match - Cech, Cole, Carvalho, Terry, Ferreira, Cole, Lampard, Makelele, Mikel, Drogba and Schevchenko - came in at a whopping 51%. So in ‘real' terms, Chelsea's team was more than three times as expensive as Liverpool's.
(51% was the highest percentage I found in all my calculations, although still lower than I was expecting; however Chelsea's spending went into the squad as a whole, with so many costly substitutes.)
Since that game there have been a handful of expensive signings at Anfield. Javier Mascherano (who was only on loan in 2006/07), Ryan Babel, Fernando Torres and Robbie Keane have been procured for fairly hefty fees. The gap is closing, but there is still a gap.
What is arguably Liverpool's current strongest XI (with the addition of Dossena, Riera and Keane) averages out at 30%. Replace Riera with Kuyt, Arbeloa with Degen and Skrtel with Agger, and it remains virtually identical. Even before signing Berbatov, and with Tevez's valued only at his reported loan fee (£10m, as opposed to the £30m+ he will eventually cost), Manchester United's side averaged out at almost 40%.
What I found was that once a club had won its elusive first title, the average cost often decreased during the coming campaigns. The team had achieved that magical aim, and that vital experience (which is priceless) was in the bag. Then, gradually, the manager could introduce a few youth team players, as United did with Beckham, Neville and Scholes in the mid-'90s. Ferguson knew he had earned himself some time and leeway. Wenger later did the same, although it took three barren seasons before that success was repeated.
Prior to the Premiership there was another interesting phenomenon. Clubs like Everton in the ‘70s and Manchester United in the ‘70s and ‘80s spent massively –– far more comparatively than the Reds in recent years –– but success was not achieved at the peak of that spending.
In United's case they won the league when their side dipped from a peak of almost 50% –– although, as noted, it was still above 40% in 1993 when they finally ended a 26-year wait for the title. In Everton's case, the spending proved totally disastrous, but it kept the club ticking over until a collection of brilliant young talents like Neville Southall and Kevin Ratcliffe came into the side.
But this sort of success hasn't happened in the last 16 years; or in what we now call the ‘modern' game. And the extraordinary changes at Manchester City since Dynasty went to print shows the febrile financial climate of English football.
Should Benítez win a ‘first' title with a side that averages out at 30% of the transfer record it would clearly be some achievement, particularly with such expensively-assembled rivals. It shows how difficult the task is.
Ultimately, however, there are no hard and fast rules regarding what creates success or leads to failure. There are only examples, case studies, cautionary tales. Trends can be bucked, after all. But maybe they are just the exceptions that prove the rule? I honestly don't know.
And all this was part of the aim of Dynasty. As well as the anecdotal history of the last 50 years of Liverpool FC, with stories of the triumphs and a look at all the players and managers (good and bad), it is a book in which I have striven to highlight not just the achievements or failures themselves, but the context in which they came about, to better understand them. For me, that was the key.
As Professor Lynn White Jr. so succinctly put it, "Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary."
For details of how to purchase 'Dynasty: Fifty Years of Shankly's Liverpool', click here to visit Paul Tomkins' official website>>
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by Liverpool FC or Liverpoolfc
Paul Tomkins 19 September 2008
One of the problems with Liverpool's glorious past is that some younger fans (and older ones with short memories), seem to think it was all achieved at a canter, with brilliance at every turn. Time turns fact into myth. However, as great as much of the halcyon days undeniably were, those players and managers were also fallible. Not every game was won 5-0 with imperious style.
I read one fan complaining about the 0-0 draw at Villa Park, saying that the great Liverpool sides would never have settled for such results. Really?
The fact is that Rafa Benítez has won a greater percentage of league games than Bill Shankly and Joe ************an, two of the club's legendary managers. Only Kenny Dalglish and Bob Paisley have won a higher percentage of league games in the last 50 years.
If critics then say, 'well, it's easier to win games now', that may be valid –– although it's impossible to prove. However, you can't pick and choose from the past and present in contradictory fashion to suit your argument. If you acknowledge that wins were harder to attain in the old days, then don't turn around and say that in the old days Liverpool never settled for an away draw. They did.
In 1984, Liverpool won the league with a staggering 14 draws, as well as six defeats. That was a phenomenal team, one that achieved an historic treble, but let's not airbrush out its shortcomings. It failed to win almost as many of its 42 league games as it won. Its captain, Graeme Souness, brilliantly summed up why they were still justifiable champions: "By our standards we didn't deserve to win the league this year. But by everyone else's standards, we did."
Given how the talk of finances totally dictates modern football discussion, one of my aims in writing Dynasty was to find a way to compare the transfers made by both Liverpool and the club's main rivals over the last 50 years, to get a sense of expenditure.
Using pounds sterling just didn't make sense. Bill Shankly spending £13,000 in 1960 to break the club record on Kevin Lewis just seems utterly meaningless as a financial figure now, in a day and age when the current English transfer record is 2,461 times higher. If standard inflation worked this way, a loaf of bread would cost around £100.
While admitting that working from transfer records is not a 100% perfect way of judging the financial landscape (given that many transfer fees seem to lack logic), I felt it was about as close as I could get. So while Lewis was Liverpool's new record signing, his cost was 20% of the overall English transfer record of the day. Suddenly it made sense. In today's terms, that 20% would make him a £6m player.
Having then worked out the average cost of all the major teams over the last 50 years using this method, I found an interesting phenomenon. Until the start of the Premiership, there was a mix between expensively-assembled league champions and those put together on a shoestring budget.
For instance, Bill Shankly won the title in 1964 and 1966 with a team that averaged around just 10% of the British transfer record. Everton's team of the mid-'80s was similarly inexpensive.
What's interesting, however, is that since Leeds in 1992 –– i.e. the very year before the Premiership began –– every “new” team to win the league ("new" meaning after a break of at least five years, so that it was essentially a very different collection of players and/or manager) cost on average more than 40% of the British transfer record.
That applies to Manchester United in '93, Blackburn in '95 and Chelsea in '05, but most surprisingly, to Arsenal in '98 too, after their seven-year itch.
I was shocked by this last finding. I always thought Wenger achieved the double on a tight budget. To a degree he did, with regards to his own spending, although players like Vieira and Overmars were far from free transfers. But that Arsenal title was actually built on some heavy spending by the Frenchman's predecessors, Bruce Rioch and George Graham. They signed some very good and very expensive players.
The fact is that in 1990 David Seaman was a very expensive goalkeeper. The figure of £1.3m seems fairly cheap if you look at it by 1998's standards, but by working out Seaman's cost as a percentage of the transfer record –– 48% –– at the time the transfer took place, a truer picture is revealed.
The percentage is set for the duration a player stays at the club. As another example, when United bought Roy Keane for a British record £3.75m in 1993, they took him off the open market. They paid what was then a fortune to make him theirs, so that even when the transfer record went up and up over the next decade, he was already where they wanted him. But it all depended on digging deep and breaking the transfer record to give themselves that luxury.
Once Graham spent big on David Seaman, no other club could get their hands on him. David Platt, Ian Wright and Martin Keown were three other players who played regularly in the 1998 side who cost over 50% of the British transfer record.
The same was also true of Dennis Bergkamp – whose move to Highbury set a new British record in 1995, at £7.5m: a ‘100%' transfer. A year later, when Alan Shearer cost Newcastle £15m, was Bergkamp suddenly only a ‘50%' signing? Was he suddenly a cheap player? Of course not. He still cost a ‘100%' fee, because that was the most expensive at the time.
In other words, a player's expense can only be rated by working from the time of his purchase; his value may rise or fall in the coming years, and other deals may dwarf his, but the payment relates to the market of that particular year.
All in all, with players like Seaman, Keown and Bergkamp key to their success, that Arsenal side rated at 43% of the transfer record. Once the bargain find of Nicolas Anelka took over from Ian Wright in the second half of the season, the average dropped, but it was still a success that was very much bankrolled; if not exclusively by Wenger, then by Arsenal as a club.
Of course, assembling a team costing over 40% of the transfer record does not guarantee success. Newcastle's 1996/97 side cost a whopping 49.7%, but won nothing.
Perhaps most depressingly, the Liverpool teams of Graeme Souness and Roy Evans both averaged between 40-50% of the transfer record, but even with the best crop of youth graduates the club has produced, the ‘90s was a barren decade. In that time, other clubs moved ahead.
Coming forward, the 2007 Champions League semi-final first-leg at Stamford Bridge shows the spending power of Chelsea in recent years. As an average, Liverpool's starting XI - Reina, Riise, Agger, Carragher, Arbeloa, Zenden, Alonso, Mascherano, Gerrard, Bellamy and Kuyt - cost just 14.5% of the English transfer record. By contrast, the Chelsea team that started the match - Cech, Cole, Carvalho, Terry, Ferreira, Cole, Lampard, Makelele, Mikel, Drogba and Schevchenko - came in at a whopping 51%. So in ‘real' terms, Chelsea's team was more than three times as expensive as Liverpool's.
(51% was the highest percentage I found in all my calculations, although still lower than I was expecting; however Chelsea's spending went into the squad as a whole, with so many costly substitutes.)
Since that game there have been a handful of expensive signings at Anfield. Javier Mascherano (who was only on loan in 2006/07), Ryan Babel, Fernando Torres and Robbie Keane have been procured for fairly hefty fees. The gap is closing, but there is still a gap.
What is arguably Liverpool's current strongest XI (with the addition of Dossena, Riera and Keane) averages out at 30%. Replace Riera with Kuyt, Arbeloa with Degen and Skrtel with Agger, and it remains virtually identical. Even before signing Berbatov, and with Tevez's valued only at his reported loan fee (£10m, as opposed to the £30m+ he will eventually cost), Manchester United's side averaged out at almost 40%.
What I found was that once a club had won its elusive first title, the average cost often decreased during the coming campaigns. The team had achieved that magical aim, and that vital experience (which is priceless) was in the bag. Then, gradually, the manager could introduce a few youth team players, as United did with Beckham, Neville and Scholes in the mid-'90s. Ferguson knew he had earned himself some time and leeway. Wenger later did the same, although it took three barren seasons before that success was repeated.
Prior to the Premiership there was another interesting phenomenon. Clubs like Everton in the ‘70s and Manchester United in the ‘70s and ‘80s spent massively –– far more comparatively than the Reds in recent years –– but success was not achieved at the peak of that spending.
In United's case they won the league when their side dipped from a peak of almost 50% –– although, as noted, it was still above 40% in 1993 when they finally ended a 26-year wait for the title. In Everton's case, the spending proved totally disastrous, but it kept the club ticking over until a collection of brilliant young talents like Neville Southall and Kevin Ratcliffe came into the side.
But this sort of success hasn't happened in the last 16 years; or in what we now call the ‘modern' game. And the extraordinary changes at Manchester City since Dynasty went to print shows the febrile financial climate of English football.
Should Benítez win a ‘first' title with a side that averages out at 30% of the transfer record it would clearly be some achievement, particularly with such expensively-assembled rivals. It shows how difficult the task is.
Ultimately, however, there are no hard and fast rules regarding what creates success or leads to failure. There are only examples, case studies, cautionary tales. Trends can be bucked, after all. But maybe they are just the exceptions that prove the rule? I honestly don't know.
And all this was part of the aim of Dynasty. As well as the anecdotal history of the last 50 years of Liverpool FC, with stories of the triumphs and a look at all the players and managers (good and bad), it is a book in which I have striven to highlight not just the achievements or failures themselves, but the context in which they came about, to better understand them. For me, that was the key.
As Professor Lynn White Jr. so succinctly put it, "Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary."
For details of how to purchase 'Dynasty: Fifty Years of Shankly's Liverpool', click here to visit Paul Tomkins' official website>>
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by Liverpool FC or Liverpoolfc