Let's say that the average Premier League team makes around five major transfers per season. So, that's 100 transfers in the league per year, and 1,000 transfers per decade. Research has shown that only about 50% of new players start at least 50% of matches for their new clubs. If we use that low threshold as the standard for success, then over 10 years, about 500 new players succeed and 500 fail.

Though there are plenty of obvious, preventable reasons for many of those failures -- misidentifying a tactical fit, paying for past performance, ignoring which parts of a player's game are predictable, forgetting about age curves -- a lot of those players fail for reasons that nobody could've predicted.

You shouldn't be flipping a coin when you go into the transfer market, but even the savvi

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