Liverpool Show Moneyball Works in Soccer, Too PDF

5/31/2019 Liverpool show Moneyball works in soccer, too
Business Sport England
Liverpool show Moneyball works in

soccer, too
Soccer was thought unsuitable for the analytical approach described in Michael Lewis’
book, but Liverpool's turnaround suggests data analysts can work in football.
Bruce Schoenfeld
Updated May 31, 2019 — 10.10am,

first published at 10.04am
J
ürgen Klopp was in his third week as Liverpool’s manager, in
November 2015, when the team’s director of research, Ian Graham,
arrived at his office carrying computer printouts. Graham wanted to show
Klopp, whom he hadn’t yet met, what his work could do. Then he hoped to
persuade Klopp to actually use it.
Graham spread out his papers on the table in front of him. He began
talking about a game that Borussia Dortmund, the German club that Klopp
coached before joining Liverpool, had played the previous season. He
noted that Dortmund had numerous chances against the lightly regarded
Mainz, a smaller club that would end up finishing in 11th place. Yet Klopp’s
team lost, 2-0. Graham was starting to explain what his printouts showed
https://www.afr.com/business/sport/liverpool-show-moneyball-works-in-soccer-too-20190523-p51qlc 1/23
when Klopp’s face lit up. “Ah, you saw that game,” he said. “It was crazy. We
killed them. You saw it!”
Liverpool teammates celebrate after scoring a goal during the Champions League semi-final
against Barcelona. PA
Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that autumn, as Liverpool were
deciding who should replace the manager they were about to fire, Graham
fed a numerical rendering of every attempted pass, shot and tackle by
Dortmund’s players during Klopp’s tenure into a mathematical model he
had constructed. Then he evaluated each of Dortmund’s games based on
how his calculations assessed the players’ performances that day. The
difference was striking. Dortmund had finished seventh during Klopp’s last
season at the club, but the model determined that it should have finished
second. Graham’s conclusion was that the disappointing season had
nothing to do with Klopp, though his reputation had suffered because of it.
He just happened to be coaching one of the unluckiest teams in recent
history.
In that game against Mainz, the charts showed, Dortmund took 19 shots
compared with 10 by its opponent. It controlled play nearly two-thirds of
the time. It advanced the ball into the offensive zone a total of 85 times,
allowing Mainz to do the same just 55 times. It worked the ball into
Mainz’s penalty area on an impressive 36 occasions; Mainz managed only
17. But Dortmund lost because of two fluky errors. In the 70th minute,
Dortmund missed a penalty shot. Four minutes later, it mistakenly scored
in its own goal. Dortmund had played a better game than Mainz by almost
any measure — except the score.
'We killed them'

In soccer, pure chance can influence outcomes to a much greater extent
than in other sports. Goals are relatively rare, fewer than three per game in
England’s Premier League. So whether a ball ricochets into the net or
misses it by a few inches has, on average, far more of an effect upon the
final result than whether, say, a potential home run in baseball lands fair or
foul or an NFL running back grinds out a first down. Graham brought up
another game to Klopp, against Hannover a month later. The statistics
were weighted even more heavily in Dortmund’s favour: 18 shots to seven,
55 balls into the box compared with 13, 11 successful crosses from the wing
to three. “You lost, 1-0,” he said. “But you created double the chances –”
Klopp practically shouted. “Did you see that game?”
“No, no, it’s just …”
“We killed them! I’ve never seen anything like it. We should have won. Ah,
you saw that!”
Graham had not seen that game, either. In fact, he told Klopp, he hadn’t
seen any of Dortmund’s games that season, neither live nor on video. He
hadn’t needed to, unless he wanted to experience one of the breathtaking
acts of athleticism that can occur in soccer, or the drama of two teams
fighting to assert their will upon the other – the reasons, in other words,
that most fans watch sports. To understand what happened, all he needed
was his data.
Analytics has famously influenced the tactics in professional baseball and

basketball in recent years. Ultimately, it may have just as great an impact
on soccer, which traditionally hasn’t relied on statistics to figure out much
of anything. Graham, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at
Cambridge, built his own database to track the progress of more than
100,000 players from around the world. By recommending which of them
Liverpool should try to acquire, and then how the new arrivals should be
used, he has helped the club, once soccer’s most glamorous and successful,
return to the cusp of glory.
This month, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in

the sport’s history. They lost only one of their 38 games in the Premier
League, yet finished second. Manchester City, the defending champion,
edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of
their league games since January. (In the Premier League, as elsewhere in
soccer, a victory counts as three points in the standings and a draw counts
as one; Liverpool set the record for the most points in a season, 97, by a
runner-up.) In an added fillip for North American fans, Liverpool are
owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s
Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, and Manchester City
have a business relationship with the New York Yankees.
At the same time as they were trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in
England, Liverpool were competing against the top teams from other
countries in Europe’s Champions League. In the semi-finals of that
tournament this month, they overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat
Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team. On June 1, they will face a
Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final.
Acceptable number-crunching
More than other big clubs, Liverpool incorporate data analysis into the
decisions they make, from the corporate to the tactical. How much that
has contributed to their recent performance is itself hard to measure. But
whatever the outcome of the final, the club’s ascent has already started to
make number-crunching acceptable, even fashionable, in England and
beyond. As more clubs contemplate employing analysts without soccer-
playing backgrounds to try to gain a competitive edge, Liverpool’s season
has served as something of a referendum on the practice.
Klopp analysed no data at Dortmund. In this, he was like most managers.

He was consumed by coaching his young team on the field. But by the time
Graham left his office that morning in 2015, Klopp’s epiphany was
complete. He was convinced that Graham, despite having watched none of
Dortmund’s games, appreciated the unusually bad fortune that had
befallen the team almost as keenly as if he’d been coaching it himself.
Later, Klopp learned that without Graham’s analysis of that season, which
was only one aspect of as thorough an investigative process as any soccer
club had undertaken to replace a manager, he never would have been
hired. “The department there in the back of the building?” he said recently,
referring to Graham and his staff. “They’re the reason I’m here.”
In the 79th minute of the second game of the Champions League semi-
final, in early May, a ball was deflected out of bounds for a Liverpool corner
kick. Trent Alexander-Arnold, a 20-year-old fullback, was about to move
towards the middle of the field to let a Liverpool teammate take it. But as
he started to walk away, Alexander-Arnold noticed that Barcelona’s players
seemed distracted. Only a few were looking his way. “It was just one of
those moments,” he said, “when you see the opportunity.” Alexander-
Arnold took four steps, a feint as if heading back to his position. Suddenly
he reversed direction, ran to the ball and thumped it towards Barcelona’s
penalty area.
Jürgen Klopp (second from left) celebrates Liverpool's win with his players and staff. PA
By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the

semi-final contest back on even terms. The team scored three unanswered
goals, matching the three that Barcelona scored at home in the first game
of the home-and-away series. Before the series started, Barcelona were the
strong favourites to advance to the final, and the outcome of the first game
validated that assessment. After that, someone who wanted to win $US100
($144) betting on Barcelona needed to risk $US1800 to do it.
For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool were dominant.
They won 10 titles in England’s top division. They won the European Cup,
which preceded the Champions League, four times in eight years.
Liverpool FC were so successful that for a time they figured as one of
England’s most visible exports. Fan clubs were organised throughout
Europe, and in places that hadn’t previously followed the sport, such as
Australia and across America.
Rich men change the game

English clubs in those days were owned by ruddy-faced businessmen who
had kicked the ball around as boys and made fortunes with stone quarries
or parking lots. That changed when the richest men in the world began
buying them up. In 1997, the Egyptian businessman and department store
owner Mohamed al-Fayed took control of Fulham, a London team in the
second division, and led its promotion into the Premier League; in 2003,
the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who had made his fortune in oil,
aluminum and steel, bought Chelsea; in 2007, Stan Kroenke, the husband
of a Wal-Mart heir, began accumulating shares of Arsenal. That same year,
the family that had controlled Liverpool for half a century sold out to two
American businessmen, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Hicks owned
baseball’s Texas Rangers and hockey’s Dallas Stars; Gillett parlayed an
interest in ski resorts into a Nascar team and the NHL’s Montreal
Canadiens. Liverpool itself remained a faded port of half a million
inhabitants, only marginally less dilapidated than the gritty, gray-toned,
postwar city that had produced the Beatles. Its dockside economy
attracted far fewer big corporations than London or even Manchester. And
it turned out that Gillett and Hicks had little money left for soccer. Within a
few years, Liverpool were hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and
struggling on the field.
In October 2010, through what was essentially a bankruptcy proceeding,

Hicks and Gillett were forced to accept a $US480 million bid from New
England Sports Ventures. John Henry, the former commodities trader and
investment manager who served as the majority shareholder, grew up in
small-town Missouri and Arkansas. One of his boyhood passions was
APBA baseball, a dice game in which the actual performances of major
leaguers are translated into cards representing each player; Stan Musial
was as likely to hit a triple on Henry’s bedroom floor as he was for the St
Louis Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park. Henry became wealthy from an
algorithm he devised that predicted fluctuations in the soybean market.
The same sort of analysis is knit into his company’s DNA. Almost no
decision there, from hiring executives to where the Red Sox shortstop
should play for each batter, is made without it.
The richest men in the world, including Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, started buying
English soccer clubs. AP
At the time that Henry’s group, now known as Fenway Sports Group,
acquired Liverpool, the club hadn’t finished atop its league in two decades.
Since Fenway couldn’t outspend sheikhs and oligarchs, it needed to be
smart. In its first six seasons under Fenway’s ownership, Liverpool finished
above sixth place only once. It qualified for the Champions League only one
of those years, and was eliminated before the quarter-finals. Its reliance on
numbers, many soccer people believed, was undermining the football men
who should have been making its decisions. The main obstacle Klopp
would need to overcome if he hoped to succeed at Liverpool, the English
newspaper The Independent wrote, “will be the club’s deep attachment to
the theory that players’ statistics – analytics – can provide most of the
answers”.
But Graham’s analytics team can only nudge the team’s outcomes in a
positive direction incrementally, one recommendation at a time. And
because Klopp also gets advice from more conventional sources, the
tactics he chooses end up being a mix of the data-driven and the intuitive.
In preparation for the Champions League semi-final, he appeared to focus
on how the club’s unusually quick defenders could pressure Barcelona’s
forwards, intercepting passes and trying to convert them into instant
counter-attacks. The plan worked, mostly. In the opening minutes of the

first game, Barcelona’s players seemed flustered. But as often happens in
soccer, a tactical advantage didn’t translate into an immediate goal.
Instead, Luis Suarez, a former Liverpool player, scored for Barcelona.
Transcendent skill
A 1-0 Liverpool loss would have set up a dramatic second game at Anfield,
the atmospheric stadium that has been the club’s home since the 19th
century. But late in the match, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, one of soccer’s
greats, scored twice more. The last goal was a free kick that curled around
a wall of defenders and just past the outstretched hand of Liverpool’s
goalkeeper. It seemed to impart the message that no amount of analytical
preparation could overcome the transcendent skill of such a player. “In
these moments,” Klopp said after the game, “he is unstoppable.”
In the Champions League, goals scored away from home carry additional
weight if the score is tied after both games. That meant if Barcelona scored
one goal at Anfield, Liverpool would need five to move on. If that wasn’t
daunting enough, two of Liverpool’s best players, Mohammed Salah and
Roberto Firmino, were hurt and wouldn’t play. Still, when Divock Origi, the
substitute for Salah, scored in the game’s seventh minute, the crowd came
alive. Then Liverpool scored two more times early in the second half. That
set up Alexander-Arnold’s deceptive corner.
Before taking the kick, he caught Origi’s eye. Then, as Alexander-Arnold

raced back to the corner, Origi switched his position. The ball reached him
on two hops, and he redirected it into the left side of the net. It was a goal
that could never have been scripted, or predicted by any calculations. “We
had nothing to do with the fourth goal,” Graham emailed me after the
game. “I’m always wary of being assigned credit when none is due.”
The great Brazilian player Pelé once called soccer “the beautiful game”. He
didn’t coin the phrase, but after he said it, the description stuck. Fluid, at
times balletic, soccer isn’t composed of discrete events, like baseball and
American football, and there aren’t dozens of scoring plays to dissect, as in
basketball. Rather, much of what happens seems impossible to quantify.
Talent is often judged exclusively on aesthetics. If you look like a good
player, the feeling is, you probably are.
Most sports use a range of statistics to assess teams and players. Until
recently, nobody in soccer cared about much beyond who scored the goals.
Now we get updates on how many shots different players have taken, what
percentage of the time each team has controlled the ball, and plenty of
other metrics. But almost none of that seems to provide a clearer
explanation of what’s happening on the field, including which team ends
up winning.
For example, a ball deflected by a defensive player over the end line gives
the opposition a corner kick – a goal-scoring opportunity. In theory,
corners are good, and getting more of them than your opponent would
seemingly indicate a successful strategy. Except that corners are more
helpful to some teams than others. Teams with attackers who are skilled at
redirecting centring passes work to create them, but teams with finishers
who have the talent to elude defenders often prefer to take their chances in
open play. Those teams don’t try to create corners, and they aren’t
especially pleased when they happen.
Or consider time of possession. Teams rarely score without the ball, so

having it more than the opponent sounds desirable. Yet some teams don’t
want possession of the ball. If you don’t have it, you can’t give it up deep in
your own end, a member of Iceland’s defensive-minded national team once
told me. Iceland’s ball handlers aren’t especially adept, so its coaches
prioritise keeping the ball far from its goal. In 2016, Iceland advanced to the
quarter-finals of the European championships, beating countries many
times their size, including England – and tying the tournament’s eventual
champion, Portugal. In none of those games did they come close to
controlling the ball even half the time.
For these sorts of reasons, soccer was assumed to be unsuited to the

analytical approach described in Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball,
about how the Oakland A’s baseball team found an advantage by
evaluating players using different criteria from everyone else. Soccer
seemed impossible to quantify. Much of the game involves probing and
assessing, moving the ball from player to player while waiting for an
opening. And then the only goal might come from a winger who has done
little else – after, say, a faulty clearance by a team that otherwise has been
entirely dominant. “Our game is unpredictable,” says Sam Allardyce, who
has managed 12 clubs over nearly three decades before Everton fired him
last year. “Too unpredictable to make decisions on stats. We’re not talking
about baseball or American football here.”
Soccer was assumed to be unsuited to the analytical approach described in Michael Lewis’ 2003
book Moneyball, which was made into a film starring Brad Pitt. Supplied
Chelsea created the Premier League’s first analytics department in 2008.

Arsenal later bought a statistical analysis company, StatDNA. But the
managers of those clubs didn’t see an advantage in applying data to the
sport, or they were too busy trying to keep their jobs to figure out how to
do it. A few years ago, the OptaPro analytics conference emerged in
London as a way for the tiny band of soccer quants to present papers to
one another. Still, all those charts with arrows and heat maps revealing
where most of the action takes place seemed to have little effect on the
game. As new metrics emerged, commentators and coaches took pride in
repudiating them. When ESPN’s Craig Burley, a former Premier League
midfielder, was asked on the air to comment about a team’s “expected
goals”, a formula that calculates how often a team should have scored as
opposed to how often it actually did, he replied with disbelief. “What an
absolute load of nonsense that is,” he shouted. “I expect things at
Christmas from Santa Claus, but they don’t come.”
But teams such as Chelsea and Arsenal have resources at their disposal
that allow them to accumulate the best talent. Compared with them,
Liverpool were essentially in the position of those 1990s A's teams. A
different approach was necessary for them to keep up with them. And all
those players running around the soccer field were clearly doing
something. Every now and then, too, goals were scored. If collecting and
analysing data could help divine a connection, wasn’t it foolish not to try it?
About half an hour into a game at Anfield last January, midfielder Naby
Keita received the ball from his left and started to dribble with elongated
strides. At the time, Liverpool led the Premier League, as they had for
much of the season. A loss by Manchester City the previous night gave
Liverpool an opening to extend that lead to seven points if they could beat
Leicester City now. From his seat in the stands, Graham exhorted Keita.
“Go on, Naby,” he said, in his deep Welsh accent. “Go on!”
Keita passed two Leicester defenders. Then he hesitated for a moment and
lost the ball. Graham sighed.
“Ahhhh, Naby,” he said.
Mathematical revolution
Graham grew up an hour’s drive from Cardiff as a Liverpool fan. His
childhood in the 1970s and ’80s coincided with Liverpool’s era of
dominance. It didn’t hurt that one of the club’s best players, Ian Rush,
happened to be Welsh. Before each game, he and the three analysts who
work under him compile a packet of information. By the time Klopp
decides which of their insights are worth passing along to the team, the
equations are long gone; the players are only dimly aware that some of the
suggestions are rooted in doctorate-level mathematics. “We know
someone has spent hours behind closed doors figuring it out,” says
midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. “But the manager doesn’t hit us with
statistics and analytics. He just tells us what to do.” Often, the advice
contradicts what someone merely watching videos of the games might
come to believe. Graham and his team could report that a club’s strong-
footed left winger sends booming crosses over the defence towards the
goal. But the data indicates that the less impressive crosses coming from
the right wing, often accurately placed, result in goals far more frequently.
That sounds rudimentary. In soccer, it is practically a revolution.
Graham’s weightiest responsibility is helping Liverpool decide which

players to acquire. He does that by feeding information on games into his
formulas. What he doesn’t do is make evaluations by watching those
games. “I don’t like video,” he says. “It biases you.” Graham wants the club
that he works for to win, but he also wants his judgments to be validated.
“All of these players, there has been discussion of their relative merits,” he
said. “If they do badly, I take it as sort of a personal affront. If I think
someone is a good player, I really, really want them to do well.”
Keita is one of Graham’s finds. Born in the West African nation Guinea, he
was playing for the Austrian club Red Bull five years ago when Graham
noticed the data he was generating; it was unlike any he had seen. At the
time, Keita was a defensive midfielder, positioned in front of Salzburg’s
defenders. Occasionally, defensive midfielders will evolve into central
midfielders, who play further forward. Keita did. Rarely, if ever, will they
emerge as attacking midfielders, whose role is largely offensive. Keita did
that too.
Keita’s shifting roles made a muddle of the conventional statistics used to

quantify a player’s contribution to his club. For example, the position you
play in soccer, unlike basketball, has a significant effect on your chances of
putting the ball into the goal, or how frequently you leave your feet to
nudge it from an opponent. But Graham disdains those statistics anyway.
He has only slightly less contempt for some of the more evolved metrics,
like the percentage of attempted passes that are completed. Instead, he
spent months building a model that calculates the chance each team had
of scoring a goal before any given action – a pass, a missed shot, a slide
tackle – and then what chance it had immediately after that action. Using
his model, he can quantify how much each player affected his team’s
chance of winning during the game. Inevitably, some of the players who
come out best in the familiar statistics end up at the top of Graham’s list.
But others end up at the bottom.
Better than average chance

Keita’s pass completion rate tends to be lower than that of some other elite
midfielders. Graham’s figures, however, showed that Keita often tried
passes that, if completed, would get the ball to a teammate in a position
where he had a better than average chance of scoring. What scouts saw
when they watched Keita was a versatile midfielder. What Graham saw on
his laptop was a phenomenon. Here was someone continually working to
move the ball into more advantageous positions, something even an
attentive spectator probably wouldn’t notice unless told to look for it.
Beginning in 2016, Graham recommended that Liverpool try to get him.
Keita arrived at Liverpool last summer.
As of the January game against Leicester City, Keita’s play hadn’t seemed
to justify Graham’s endorsement. The calculations insisted that Keita was
doing as well as ever, but few fans realised that – and some of Liverpool’s
executives probably didn’t, either. For Keita’s sake, and for the sake of
Graham’s peace of mind, some goals or assists would help. In the second
half, Keita dribbled the ball through several defenders. Somehow, he
emerged with nobody between him and the goalkeeper. As Graham lifted
himself halfway out of his seat in anticipation, Keita shot. At the same time,
a Leicester player careened into him. The ball went wide, and to the
displeasure of Liverpool’s fans, no penalty was called. Graham groaned.
Soon after, Keita was removed for a substitute. Graham clapped
enthusiastically as Keita left the field, but when I asked if he thought Keita
had played well, he wouldn’t give me a definitive answer. He would tell me
tomorrow, he said, after he looked at the data.
Hidden talent search

Graham was labouring through a two-year post-doctorate at Cambridge
when he realised he didn’t want to be a scientist. Most of the
breakthroughs in his area, polymer physics, had been made years before.
“The classic papers had been written in the 1970s,” he says. “So you’re
searching around for something you can maybe make a little progress on.”
When someone forwarded him a notice for a job at an analytics start-up
that was hoping to consult for soccer teams, he was intrigued. He landed
the job and was told to read Moneyball.
For four years, from 2008 to 2012, Graham advised Tottenham. The club
was run by a series of managers who had little interest in his suggestions,
which would have been true of nearly all the soccer managers at that time.
Then Fenway bought Liverpool and began implementing its culture. That
included hiring Graham to build a version of its baseball team’s research
department. The reaction, almost uniformly, was scorn. “‘Laptop guys',
'Don’t know the game’ – you’d hear that until just a few months ago,” says
Barry Hunter, who runs Liverpool’s scouting department. “The Moneyball
thing was thrown at us a lot.”
Graham hardly noticed. He was immersed in his search for inefficiencies –

finding players, some hidden in plain sight, who were undervalued. One
afternoon last winter, he pulled up some charts on his laptop and projected
them on a screen. The charts contained statistics such as total goals, goals
scored per minute and chances created, along with expected goals. I was
surprised to see Graham working with such statistics, which he had
described to me as simplistic. But he was making a point. “Sometimes you
don’t have to look much further than that,” he said.
In 2014, Chelsea acquired the contract of the Egyptian attacking midfielder

Mohamed Salah. Salah arrived with a reputation as a rising star, though in
two years with a Swiss team he scored just nine goals. At Chelsea, he had
what was by all accounts an undistinguished tenure, playing in 13 games
over two seasons and scoring twice, while spending much of his time
being loaned out to other clubs. Eventually, his contract was sold to AS
Roma, in Italy. At that point, Salah was considered to have little chance of
ever succeeding in England.
Every match is a struggle
Playing in the Premier League is unique, according to the English soccer

community. Competition is more balanced than elsewhere; nearly every
match is a struggle. English players learn the game in frosted conditions
that tend to thwart precision passing, fostering a rough, overtly physical
style of play. The intensive media attention is distracting. The weather is
often terrible. Some players, the assumption holds, just aren’t suited for it.
But others don’t get the chance. “There’s this idea that Salah failed at
Chelsea,” Graham said. “I respectfully disagree.” Based on Graham’s
calculations, Salah’s productivity at Chelsea was similar to how he played
before coming to England, and after he left. And those 500 minutes he
played for Chelsea constituted a tiny fraction of his career. “They may be
slight evidence against his quality,” Graham said, “but they are offset by 20
times the data from thousands and thousands of minutes.” In the
conventional notion that playing in England is different, Graham saw an
opportunity – an inefficiency in the system.
Graham recommended that Liverpool acquire Salah, who was thriving in

Italy. In American sports, the team might have offered another player in
exchange. In soccer, players’ rights are bought and sold in a worldwide
marketplace. Once a sale price is reached, negotiations begin with the
player. If he isn’t satisfied with the salary being proposed, or if he dislikes
the city where the team plays or the manager he will play for, he can
remain where he is. Grooming emerging talent and then selling the rights
to it for a profit can help smaller teams stay solvent. Even some clubs
playing in their countries’ top leagues, such as Germany’s Bayer
Leverkusen, use the process to generate enough income to remain
competitive. “Transfers are where the money is,” Graham said. “They are a
huge component of financial performance.”
That July, Liverpool paid Roma about $US41 million for Salah. Graham’s
data suggested that Salah would pair especially well with Firmino, another
of Liverpool’s strikers, who creates more expected goals from his passes
than nearly anyone else in his position. That turned out to be the case.
During the season that followed, 2017-18, Salah turned those expected
goals into real ones. He broke the Premier League record by scoring 32
times. He also became the symbol of Liverpool’s revival. His crown of curly
hair and infectious grin, and his stubby legs that somehow ate up ground
as he raced across the turf, made him one of soccer’s most recognisable
players. In what turned out to be a harbinger of this year’s progress,
Liverpool made an unanticipated run to the final of last season’s
Champions League. That provided the first tangible evidence that the
strategies put in place by Henry and his Fenway group were working. This
season, Salah was one of the three players who led the Premier League in
goals. (His teammate Sadio Mané was another.) The website
Transfermarkt, which tracks player valuations, estimates his current value
at $US173 million.
Another acquisition may have been even more important. Soon after
arriving at Liverpool, Graham was asked to research a left winger at Inter
Milan, Philippe Coutinho. His data strongly endorsed Coutinho. Liverpool
bought Coutinho’s rights for about $US16 million. Over the next five years,
Coutinho’s play contributed to Liverpool’s revival. But his most important
contribution was to accrue value. Last year, Barcelona paid Liverpool about
$US170 million for Coutinho. Soon after, Liverpool spent more than
$US200 million on three new players: Alisson Becker, the goalkeeper; the
midfielder Fabinho; and the fullback Virgil van Dijk. All became crucial
contributors this season. These were known commodities, and none came
at a bargain price. But without the profit made by selling Coutinho, Henry
assured me, those players would not have been acquired.
At Melwood, the club’s training complex in a residential Liverpool

neighbourhood, Graham works in a white-walled room, down a corridor
from the coaches and the cafeteria. Tim Waskett, who studied
astrophysics, sits to Graham’s left. Nearby is Dafydd Steele, a former junior
chess champion with a graduate math degree who previously worked in
the energy industry. The background of the most recent analyst to be
hired, Will Spearman, is even less conventional. Spearman grew up in
Texas, a professor’s son. He completed a doctorate in high-energy physics
at Harvard. Then he worked at CERN, in Geneva, where scientists verified
the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson. His dissertation provided the
first direct measurement of the particle’s width, and one of the first of its
mass. Another club might conceivably hire an analyst like Graham, or
Steele, or Waskett, and maybe even Spearman. But it’s almost impossible
to imagine any but Liverpool hiring all of them.
'It has to be Messi'

As often as possible, the analytics staff arrives at Melwood in time for
breakfast. The food in the cafeteria includes locally sourced eggs and five
or six kinds of salad greens and beef aged in a glass locker. Players sit at
one of two tables with coaches and trainers. The analysts, who look like
nobody else in the building, sit at an adjacent table. Greetings are cordial,
even friendly. But there’s little evidence that the players know one analyst
from another. The morning after the Leicester game, Graham sat with his
back to Keita, their chairs touching. Hours before, he’d been shouting at
Keita from the stands. Now he was within a foot of him, eating the same
poached eggs, yet there was no interaction between the two of them. “If he
wants to talk about the game to me, he can initiate that, and I’d be
delighted,” Graham said. “Otherwise I’ll leave him in peace.”
At one point, Spearman went to get coffee. He returned with a question

rooted in the intersection of breathless fandom and mathematical
geekiness: Who would be the most accurately regarded player in soccer?
Not the most underrated or overrated, but the one whom conventional
wisdom comes closest to gauging correctly.
“It has to be Messi,” he said. “Because if he isn’t the best player in the world,
he’s second. So the most that opinion could be off is one place.” As if to
punctuate his point, Spearman suddenly spilled his coffee so that it
streamed down the middle of the table. The analysts erupted in good-
natured jibes. “You’re not doing a good job at convincing anyone that
you’re not a nerd,” Waskett said.
Spearman hasn’t had much to do with Liverpool’s recent success. He does

almost none of the work that Klopp sees, and he’s rarely involved with
discovering players. His mandate is more ethereal. Spearman knows just
enough about the sport, or just little enough, to try to change it. “We’re just
starting to ask the question, ‘Why don’t we try to play football in a slightly
different way?’” Graham explains. Soccer is the sum of thousands of
individual actions, but the only ones Graham’s model can evaluate are the
passes, shots and ball movements that are downloaded from the official
play-by-play. “There are still fundamental limitations in the data we have,”
Graham says. “It’s still like looking through a very foggy lens.” By working
to get the mathematical rendering closer to reflecting what actually
happens on the field, recording not just that a defender kicked a pass to a
midfielder but how hard it went and what happened when it was received,
Spearman is looking to find a path through the fog.
Most of his time is spent creating a model that employs video tracking. It
assigns numerical scores to everything that happens to everyone, even
when the ball isn’t involved. That includes a fullback racing down the
sideline, forcing a lone defender to choose between two players to cover, or
a striker getting into position to receive a cross directly in front of the
goalkeeper, even if the pass sails over his head – “every action, how much
value it adds, how well it was performed,” Spearman says. “Once you have
that, you can start to create new approaches.” One might be to script plays,
like in the NFL, radically altering the nature of a game that has resisted
change for more than a century.
First, though, Liverpool needs to figure out how to beat Tottenham. Like
baseball’s A’s, this current club still hasn’t won any titles. Another loss in a
final, coupled with its Premier League finish behind Manchester City,
could be interpreted as confirmation that analytics can get a team only so
far. That would be unfair, of course. If soccer were soybeans, you could
plug data into an algorithm and know just what to do. Instead, the sport is
unpredictable enough to remain fascinating, filled with perfect plans foiled
by the imperfections of those sent out to employ them, and undermined by
the vicissitudes of chance. The jostle that threw off Keita in the Leicester
City game easily could have led to a penalty shot. A successful conversion
would have given Liverpool two additional points – and, ultimately, the
Premier League title.
But that’s how probability works. Even when odds are diligently calculated,
and the options judiciously weighed, the wrong number can still come in.
The team that wins isn’t always the one employing the most elegant
calculations, or even the one the models predict. It’s a lesson taught by the
dice that John Henry rolled during the baseball simulations he played as a
kid. That frustrates the analysts, perhaps – but it can make for a beautiful
game.
— The New York Times
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5/31/2019 Liverpool show Moneyball works in soccer, too

Business Sport England

Liverpool show Moneyball works in

Updated May 31, 2019 — 10.10am,

'We killed them'

Klopp practically shouted. “Did you see that game?”

“No, no, it’s just …”

Analytics has famously inﬂuenced the tactics in professional baseball and

This month, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in

Klopp analysed no data at Dortmund. In this, he was like most managers.

By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the

Rich men change the game

In October 2010, through what was essentially a bankruptcy proceeding,

counter-attacks. The plan worked, mostly. In the opening minutes of the

Before taking the kick, he caught Origi’s eye. Then, as Alexander-Arnold

Or consider time of possession. Teams rarely score without the ball, so

For these sorts of reasons, soccer was assumed to be unsuited to the

Chelsea created the Premier League’s ﬁrst analytics department in 2008.

“Ahhhh, Naby,” he said.

Graham’s weightiest responsibility is helping Liverpool decide which

Keita’s shifting roles made a muddle of the conventional statistics used to

Better than average chance

Hidden talent search

Graham hardly noticed. He was immersed in his search for inefﬁciencies –

In 2014, Chelsea acquired the contract of the Egyptian attacking midﬁelder

Every match is a struggle

Playing in the Premier League is unique, according to the English soccer

Graham recommended that Liverpool acquire Salah, who was thriving in

At Melwood, the club’s training complex in a residential Liverpool

'It has to be Messi'

At one point, Spearman went to get coffee. He returned with a question

Spearman hasn’t had much to do with Liverpool’s recent success. He does

— The New York Times

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