Guide to winning the January transfer window: Do’s and don’ts

It’s been a quiet January in the Premier League.

Per Transfermarkt, Tottenham are the only club to spend more than €5 million on a transfer: €25 million for Genoa center-back Radu Dragusin. Only three other clubs have spent anything on transfer fees: €4.5 million from Brentford to acquire Sivasspor midfielder Yunus Emre Konak, €3 million from Brighton for FCV Farul winger Adrian Mazilu, and €1.2 million from Luton for Reading center-back Tom Holmes.

There have also been three loan moves — and that’s it. We’re almost two-thirds of the way into January, and just eight players have joined the richest league in the world.

Allow me, then, to propose an unthinkable question: Are Premier League teams finally … getting smarter? I doubt it. (See: this past summer, when teams recklessly exceeded £2 billion in spending for the first time ever.) But let’s say Premier League teams wanted to get smarter. How might they approach the minefield that is the transfer market? How might they avoid the failed signings and the wasted millions we’ve seen so many times before?

We’ve put together a guide with some do’s and don’ts, backed by historical evidence and statistics.

Don’t: Expect anything from the January window

The truth is that most January transfers don’t move the needle. For every Virgil van Dijk and Bruno Fernandes move, there are many more like Andy Carroll and Wilfried Bony and Oumar Niasse.

In fact, there’s even some evidence that the teams that need to sign and then play the players they just acquired will perform

Also: Despite the general ineffectiveness of the window, transfer fees in January typically have a 20% premium when compared to the summer.

Don’t: Sign a striker in January — it’s probably a waste of money

If you need to make a move in January, then do it for someone other than a center-forward.

Most of the worst signings in Premier League history have been massive overpays for goal-scorers who simply don’t end up scoring. Here’s what Aurel Namziu, a senior data scientist at the consultancy Twenty First Group, once told me:

Arguably the toughest skill in football is being able to put the ball in the back of the net. We’ve been able to calculate that attacking players are more valuable than defensive players. They rely more on individual talent than collective work. Our analysis has also shown that over 50% of strikers signed by Big Five leagues in January fail to score in the league between January and the end of the season. So, it has historically been a difficult position to get right in the transfer market, and a task made more difficult with the premiums paid for strikers.

It’s worth emphasizing the point here. We’re not just saying that your odds of signing a striker who succeeds is worse than 50-50. No, we’re saying that your odds of signing a striker who even scores a single goal before the end of the season is worse than 50-50.

Do: Sell to the Premier League — they’ll overpay

In January or summer, most transfers don’t succeed. There are so many different factors stacked against every individual move: new systems, personal upheaval for the player, managerial preferences, the potential for injury, the difficulty of scouting, the impossibility of being able to confidently model the value of anything that happens on a soccer field, et cetera.

The average record signing for a given club only plays about 50% of the available minutes for his new team. So, outside of a year or two where the Premier League weathered the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to its TV deal and the rest of Europe were in desperate need of cash to make up for the lack of in-stadium attendance revenue, the transfer market has almost always benefited the clubs transferring players out.

And if you want to maximize your sales, you should do it in England. Compared to the crowd-sourced valuations on Transfermarkt, the average Premier League transfer costs 32% more.

Don’t: Rely on experience or athleticism — youth and skill are the safer bets

Players simply peak way earlier than we think.

Bob Hayes, an analyst and consultant, looked at all player data from the Big Five leagues from 2006 through 2022. To assess how players age, he looked at how minutes played changed over time. As he told me:

The baseline aging analysis primarily confirmed prior player aging research: players peak between the ages of 25 to 27, with center backs a little later and with minutes better maintained post-peak. My data showed central midfielders peak a year earlier (24 to 26), which surprised me a bit but perhaps speaks to the increasing athletic demands on players writ large is most relevant for the players who have to cover a lot of ground. It is interesting how age curves are very symmetric for all positions, with a clearly identifiable band of the top three seasons. Overall, the big takeaway on this portion of the analysis is confirmation that players peak earlier than most fans realize.

However, Hayes also found that players aged differently — and those aging patterns could be categorized. Put simply: players who were more skilled than athletic maintained more playing time in their post-peak years, while players who relied on athleticism more than skill experienced a steeper drop-off once they exited their peaks.

More skilled players, then, will tend to be able to contribute high-level play for a longer period of time. If there are two equally valuable young players — one contributing more by athleticism, the other more by technical ability — then the latter would be more likely to live up to his transfer fee over time. While it’s risky to sign any player past his peak years — you don’t know when the decline is coming, but it’s definitely coming — it’s less risky to make a move for a more technical veteran, as opposed to a physically dominant star.

Take Real Madrid’s midfield: They’ve hung onto the uber-skilled pair of Toni Kroos and Luka Modric, while they let the athletic dynamo, Casemiro, move to Manchester United last summer at age 30. Fast-forward to today: Madrid are in first in LaLiga, and both 34-year-old Kroos and 38-year-old Modric have played significant minutes. United, meanwhile, are seventh in the Premier League, and Casemiro has only started eight matches.

Do: Look beyond the big leagues

As we’ve discussed, Premier League clubs pay a massive premium for players. An analysis by TFG has found that players from France cost 17% more than similar players elsewhere in the market — despite these players not providing any kind of quantifiable performance benefit. Everyone knows everyone in the Premier League. And everyone knows that France produces more soccer talent than anywhere in the world other than, maybe, Brazil.

However, so many top players come from areas outside the premium markets.

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia joined Napoli for €11.5 million from the Georgian league in summer 2022 — and within six months, he was one of the most valuable wingers in the world. In 2021, Brighton acquired Moisés Caicedo for a reported €5 million from Independiente del Valle in Ecuador — and two years later, he was on his way to Chelsea for €117 million. Brighton brought in Kaoru Mitoma from Japan for €3 million in 2021 — his current valuation on Transfermarkt is €50 million. When Liverpool won the Premier League in 2019-20, two of their four most-used players were Andy Robertson and Georginio Wijnaldum, both of whom were acquired from teams that were relegated the season before they were signed.

In other words, the best players in the world do not all play for the best teams in the world. Kvaratskhelia was almost immediately a superstar upon joining Napoli. Unless he magically developed a ton of soccer-playing ability in a single offseason, that means that there was a superstar playing in the Georgian league for a season. It’s just that we only realized he was a superstar once he had the opportunity to play for a top team. And now that he has, his transfer value has risen to €80 million, per Transfermarkt.

By taking the small risk of acquiring an unproven player from a smaller league, Napoli won Serie A and probably secured themselves a massive profit at some point in the near future.

Do: Spread out the risk rather than going all-in

Given all the uncertainty that we’ve established, every transfer fee should be viewed as a bet. The higher the fee, the more confident a team should be that a player is going to work out. However, no transfer is a sure thing — no matter how much a team pays, no matter who the player is.

Take the most expensive transfers of all time. Back in 2022, I looked at every transfer since 2010 that cost at least €50 million. There were 75 transfers, and I defined “success” as any player who featured in at least 70% of their new team’s minutes. And by that definition, only 25 of the transfers (or 34%) were successful. These are the players that the richest clubs — with the biggest scouting departments, and the best coaches — were placing their largest bets on. And only one-third of them were consistently on the field.

However, between 2010 and 2022, all of the players acquired for €50 million or more played 61% of the minutes in their first season with their new team. For players in the €10 million to €30 million range, that number drops down to 53%. Spending more money does increase the odds of a player hitting — but only to a degree.

Part of the reason expensive players play more is because clubs feel the need to play the players they’ve spent a ton of money on, even if they’re playing worse than less-expensive teammates. And the difference in money invested in these transfers isn’t proportional to the smaller increase in playing time we see as the transfers get more expensive.