Judging transfers: When and how can you tell if a move has been a success?

Antony signing for Real Betis on loan from Manchester United was one of the more interesting storylines of the 2025 winter transfer window.

The Brazilian has subsequently contributed to four goals in four La Liga games since the move — twice as many as he did in his last 37 Premier League games for United.

Some would argue that those numbers alone suggest the move is already a success, which raises two interesting questions: when can you accurately assess a transfer and what qualifies as a successful deal?

Decision-making in football is increasingly guided by data and specialist expertise, but transfers continue to be extremely difficult to predict.

A head of recruitment from a club in Europe’s top five leagues, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, explained to The Athletic that winter transfers are more “dangerous” and that 70-80 per cent of these are made targeting “instant performance,” which is why teams try to bring in known commodities. Aston Villa’s moves for Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio are examples of that.

The remainder? Some are opportunistic, like the Antony deal. Others are strategic.

“We almost signed a player that we saw as a big talent and we felt if we get him in January, we’re preparing him for six months until the summer; another idea is taking the player to take them off the market,” the head of recruitment said.

That long-term vision extends to assessing summer transfers too. “I would say six to 12 months is a very good period to analyse a player but with a caveat of where they come from,” the head of recruitment said, referring to how players arriving from other countries need time to acclimatise.

“This is one area where teams don’t do a very good job. They will spend £30million, 40m, 50m, 60m on a player but as soon as they come in, it’s almost expected (for them to do well) because you are getting paid a lot and need to adapt faster.

“At the end of the day, it’s up to the player to adapt but the more processes you put up as a club — to take classes, take them to dinners, assign him a team-mate that speaks the same language, take care of his housing, getting their spouse’s visa fast enough, a lot of things behind the scenes — the better.”

The paradox is that time and scrutiny wait for no one, particularly players and managers. As of May 2024, the average tenure of a Premier League manager stood at just 787 days.

Former Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United manager Harry Redknapp emphasised that point when speaking with The Athletic for this article.

“You don’t have time as a manager to sit back and wait six months or a year for people to bed in,” Redknapp said. “You need players who are going to come in and make an impact because you get judged immediately. You never think two or three years down the line because chances are you’re not going to be at that football club.”

This dissonance impacts decision-making. Bright starts often end up being just that, and before long the player and team suffer. Andre Schurrle at Fulham and Philippe Coutinho at both Barcelona and Aston Villa are notable recent examples.

Things can break the other way too. Wolves signed Hwang Hee-chan from RB Leipzig on loan during the 2021-22 season and while he scored just five times in 30 league games, Wolves opted to sign him on a permanent deal. He has proved to be a solid addition, as has Rayan Ait-Nouri, who went through a similar process.

Coutinho began well at Aston Villa… but it didn’t last (Clive Mason/Getty Images)

Research suggests that the probability of both cases is nearly equal.

Dr Ian Graham, former director of research at Liverpool, listed multiple mitigating factors to explain during a 2021 conference that only about half of all transfers are successful.

Two tangible areas where these factors are visible are the player’s minutes on the pitch and, in the post-Covid, profit-and-sustainability-rules era, the profits made on player sales.

The finance angle is complicated by lengthy contracts, amortisations, and myriad other issues but, as Redknapp says: “It’s what (the player) does on a Saturday, in the matches that will get him judged — and you judged as a manager.”

Metrics differ from one position to the other, but league minutes are a somewhat consistent indicator of performance and trust, even with the implied caveats.

The Athletic put together a dataset of transfers by 10 clubs (the traditional ‘Big Six’, plus Brighton & Hove Albion, Everton, West Ham United and Wolverhampton Wanderers, with the last four chosen at random) from the last five completed seasons (2019-20 to 2023-24).

Using data from Transfermarkt, we looked at the league minutes played by each new signing — permanent and loan arrivals in summer and winter — as a percentage of the total league minutes their team played. These minutes excluded the time the player spent out on loan but included the minutes they missed due to injury or other absences. For instance, Jurrien Timber, who suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury in the first game of the 2023-24 season, played just 71 league minutes, 2.4 per cent of Arsenal’s 3420 minutes (38 games).

A player must have played at least one minute of regulation time in the league to be included. The period chosen was up to either the end of the 2023-24 season or to whenever they left the club before that point.

For instance, Pedro Neto, who joined Wolves just before the 2019-20 season, stayed until the end of 2023-24, making him eligible for 17,100 minutes (38 games every season for five seasons). But Liverpool signed Ozan Kabak on loan in January 2021 until the end of the season, and he was only eligible to play 17 league games (1,530 minutes).

A total of 295 transfers (240 permanent and 55 loan deals) were studied.

On average, those 295 transfers played 41.4 per cent of their team’s total minutes. We defined a ‘successful’ transfer as a player who matched or exceeded that number, something achieved by 155 players, which translates to — interestingly — just below Dr Graham’s figure of 53 per cent.

Out of those 240 permanent transfers, 149 (62 per cent) are still at their clubs. Excluding the two seasons at either end (2019-20 and 2023-24) to eliminate outliers, 85 out of 181 permanent signings (47 per cent) between 2020 and 2023 are still at their clubs.

On the loans front, only 20 of 55 deals were made permanent. Most players either began well and could not sustain it, did not earn enough minutes or simply were not very good. The exceptions to those rules were players such as Dejan Kulusevski and Cristian Romero at Spurs, Martin Odegaard at Arsenal and Matheus Cunha at Wolves.

Looking at specific clubs, Brighton made five signings in 2019-20 — Tariq Lamptey, Adam Webster, Aaron Mooy, Neal Maupay and Leandro Trossard — who played 81 per cent of eligible minutes. Lamptey and Webster are still starting regularly for the club.

West Ham improved across 2019-20 and 2020-21, rising from 16th to seventh in the league and laying the foundations for a Europa League semi-final in 2022 and the Conference League title in 2023. The 13 players they signed across those two windows played nearly 66 per cent of eligible minutes, with Jarrod Bowen, Tomas Soucek, Vladimir Coufal and Alphonse Areola still at the club.

The outliers here are players signed for depth and youngsters bought with the intention to develop and sell. But the overall trend aligns with Dr Graham’s findings.

Bowen and Soucek are two of West Ham’s most successful transfers of recent times (James Gill/Getty Images)

Most signings should still be classed as gambles. That said, the increased reliance on the expertise of qualified analytics departments, heads of recruitment and sporting directors aims to reduce the risks these expensive bets bring.

A key step, according to the head of recruitment we spoke to, is to adopt a layered approach involving all the concerned parties, with shared accountability.

“In my club, before we sign every player, I’ll have a meeting with the head coach and coaching staff and explain what we saw from this player from technical, tactical, physical, psychological, and social points of view.

“(Once) we signed a player and when we did the background checks and my interview with him, (we found that) he’s someone who is very tough on himself, he’s a perfectionist. This was important to mention to the coach, ‘If he makes a mistake, don’t pound on him because you might expand the problem’.

“Little things like that can make a transfer successful or unsuccessful. It’s not 100 per cent on the player or 100 per cent on the club — it’s a symbiotic relationship for a transfer to work.”

There’s a growing belief that the psychological angle might be the future game-changer as the technical, physical, and tactical factors remain mostly consistent at the highest level.

“(Biopsychosocial factors) are where the teams spend the least amount (of resources). In many cases, the clubs that get it right are prepared and patient with the players: the Brightons, Brentfords, Bournemouths. A lot of people speak about their data or scouting but not about what they do when they actually get the player in the building.”

Football loves a redemption arc. Maybe that is why it is easy to discount or overly praise players or managers on massive wages and salaries in the short term. The reactionary opinions are a part of the tribalism that accompanies the sport. Negating the immediate pressure on coaches is crucial too.

“When a coach’s tenure is nine to 12 months, he has to be successful right away and win games — but to win games, he doesn’t want players who fluctuate (in performance). That becomes a vicious cycle,” the head of recruitment says.

“I always put the fault on the club because they need to alleviate the coach from those pressures and fears that if you lose 2-3 games, we are not going to fire you. We are going to fire you if you’re not developing our players well and we’re not progressing the right way. It’s a continuous pursuit of getting it right.”

And getting it right is what all clubs aim to do in the transfer market — even if it only happens 53 per cent of the time.

(Header photo: Alex Pantling/Getty Images)