How Successful Have Liverpool's Transfers Been Since 2015?
The Reds' former Director of Research Ian Graham has a method for assessing transfer success. Let's use it to rate the Premier League.
Liverpool fans are eagerly awaiting the debut of record signing Alexander Isak. Nobody can wait to see him tearing it up at Anfield and beyond.
The interest is increased as the Reds recently signed Hugo Ekitike who plays in the same position. Will they line up together? Is the £79m signing from Eintracht Frankfurt now largely a substitute, understudying the former Newcastle striker?
We shall see. No matter how things pan out for the new forwards, Liverpool are undergoing a level of turnover seldom seen in the Premier League.
This notion was put into context by the club’s former Director of Research, Ian Graham. He was recently interviewed in an episode of the Men In Blazers podcast:
“About a quarter of the starts get replaced season to season. So players that weren't at the club or weren't part of any line up last season, they make 25% of the starts on average in the next season… If you're newly promoted, it's like 35% of the starts.”
The Reds will likely pass that latter mark in 2025/26. Jeremie Frimpong, Milos Kerkez and Florian Wirtz will start most games if they’re fit, while at least one of Ekitike or Isak should be in the XI every week. Alisson’s injury history suggests Giorgi Mamardashvili will get games, with any similar problems in central defence potentially promoting Giovanni Leoni.
Defending champions don’t usually make so many alterations to their line up. Not that anyone will care if the new players prove their worth. Graham also spoke about his simple measure to determine if a signing has been successful.
“If a transfer comes in and he starts half the league games over the next two seasons, he's a success. So we don't even care if he's any good or not. He just has to get on the pitch. Over the past 10 years, 54% [of the top 100 transfers per season in the big five leagues] have failed.”
This idea also came up in his book, How To Win The Premier League. Graham acknowledged that Paul Tomkins had previously devised a more complicated way to assess success though the results were broadly the same. If a club succeeds with even half of their transfers, they’re playing the market pretty well.
A note on the methodology here. Graham only included players who cost at least €10m, to stop the likes of reserve goalkeepers dragging down the hit rate. The prices which follow are taken from Transfermarkt for signings made between 2015 and 2023 (as anyone signed since doesn’t have enough data yet).
Graham also looked at the first two years after a player signed; to keep things simple, I’ve pulled data for their first two full seasons. If they joined in January, the tally doesn’t start counting until the following August.
By my estimate, 13 players in the sample of 516 might be treated unfairly by this so it doesn’t torpedo the findings. Here’s how Liverpool have fared.
Virgil van Dijk is the sole outfield player in the whole study with a full house. Jordan Pickford is the only other 76-er, which feels grimly ironic given he ended Virgil’s third season when it had hardly begun. The Dutchman is one of 15 men who have made two successful moves in this era; Diogo Jota is another.
The Reds have had 15 hits and eight misses according to the law of Graham, a 65.2 per cent success average against the Premier League’s collective 47.7 per cent. Ineligible for this study, James Milner (64 starts, free transfer), Andy Robertson (58, €9.00m) and Joël Matip (49, free) went well past the target of 38 too.
Liverpool got decent bang for their buck with most of their costliest buys, as this chart of the players sorted by transfer fee illustrates.
Thirteen of the 15 costliest footballers made the 38-start grade. The leading outlier is Naby Keïta, who was the focal point of a New York Times article on Graham in 2019. The other failure in the top bracket is Christian Benteke. He fell foul of signing for a manager who was dismissed just eight league games into his Liverpool career.
Lower down, Ibrahima Konaté was unable to displace Matip in year one then suffered injuries in 2022/23. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missed a season thanks to a multiple ligament injury while Thiago Alcántara fell one start shy of 38 from 76. There aren’t too many that went catastrophically wrong, even if the bar on this assessment is a low one.
And only one club bettered the Reds’ percentage rate for success: Arsenal.
There was very little between the top two, with the Gunners having two players - the disastrous Nicolas Pépé and the decent Kieran Tierney - making exactly 38 starts. Equally, William Saliba recorded zero after initially joining thanks to loan moves but has been close to ever-present since his debut. This analysis can work both ways.
Who’d have thought United would’ve been the better of the two Manchester clubs (even by a narrow margin)? Brighton’s reputation is built on selling well rather than immediately throwing their signings into the team; their ‘failures’ include Yves Bissouma and Marc Cucurella, a pair sold for almost €60m more than they collectively cost.
Chelsea are taking this process to absurd levels. No matter how good it might be from a business perspective to stockpile players purely to trade them, on a human level it doesn’t sit right.
Even though their process hasn’t yet hampered them in this study, the Blues bought five of the six most expensive players who didn’t even reach 20 starts in their first two years. They did at least sell the other (Mason Mount) to United.
You can see how all Premier League transfers between 2015 and 2023 have fared in this success assessment on the graph below. The costliest signing for each of the big six and Newcastle is marked, along with a few others.
Graham is aware that his system is very simplistic. He even called it “stupid” on Men In Blazers. In his book, he points out that Fernando Torres’ move to Chelsea is deemed successful given he started 50 league matches between the Januarys of 2011 and 2013. As with Darwin Núñez in England, nobody viewed that move overly positively irrespective of starting reasonably regularly. That level of investment tends to force a manager’s hand, after all.
Nonetheless, Liverpool have done well since 2015. This predictable finding helps explain the unexpected expenditure we saw the club unleash this summer. Investing carefully always helps you invest more. It’s now time for Isak and co. to deliver.
It's not surprising they've been successful, we've all seen as much.
The bigger question is: who is your favourite dot on that last graph?!
The costlier signing of each of the big six and Newcastle is shown.
So,so so cold, man.
I love it❤️