Henry's Failed Coup, Edwards' Vision & Klopp's Finishing Influence

How Spurs’ opening data gambit drove the Reds’ revolution. And why it matters to Liverpool today.

The use of data in football is not new, in fact in today’s game it’s arguably one the biggest factors in lots of the decisions made: from spending £100m on a player to how much sleep the star midfielder gets on a Tuesday. The range in between is a myriad of variables that were often down to randomness, a manager’s hunch, or full blown negligence.

The focus of part one of this analysis is a look back at the Reds’ former world beating success in transfers, the use of data and how it convinced football to adopt a lot of the methods. Rory Smith’s book ‘Expected Goals: The Story of How Data Conquered Football and Changed the Game Forever’ finishes with a chapter called ‘Merseyball’. That will be the main driver, along with other sources, but make sure you buy the book if you’re interested in this sphere of the sport.

In fairness, the majority on TTT will already know large parts of the story, but there are certain - absolutely vital - bits of information I was unaware of when listening to the audio version of this book that made me ponder a few things about our current set up.

Areas we could improve, potential sacrifices we’ve had to make to assuage the increasing influence of Klopp within the sphere of transfers. But crucially, asking the question: is it still working regardless? Does it matter? Have we actually still got a similar structure without talking about it publicly?

Before that though, a brief look at the main contents of the book and how the use of data in football has evolved:

• 1950s and Charles Reep started counted passes, shots etc after becoming frustrated with his beloved Swindon Town’s playing style. He concluded most goals were scored after a chain of three or fewer passes.

• Brazil first used psychometric tests to prepare for a World Cup in 1958.

• AC Milan’s so-called ‘Mind Room’ - established in the 1980s - combined player data with cognitive training, neurology and stress reduction therapy taking detailed data on all of it.

• Sam Allardyce, Bolton Wanderers manager in the early noughties, used data from Reep to conclude his team had a 70% chance of winning if they scored first. He also saw that a third of his team’s goals came from set pieces and that keeping 15 clean sheets in the season helps avoid relegation.

• The advanced data analytics of Arsenal who used a Microsoft developer Sarah Rudd to create Stat DNA. As well as Hendrik Almstadt who urged Arsenal to buy the young Kevin De Bruyne, yet was ignored.

• Why Liverpool were regarded as the market leader in using data for football analytics in all areas of the club, but crucially transfer policy. A key figure was Ian Graham in particular. But also his former relationship with a data company called ‘Decision Technology’, which in turn helped Tottenham Hotspur reach the Champions League Final and come close to winning the league; Liverpool, of course, won both - and everything else.

• How Brighton and Brentford “armed with numeracy and oodles of data… lifted relatively small clubs into the top division. They’ve identified undervalued players and found data-led ways to score from the set pieces – free kicks, corners, even throw-ins – that other clubs waste.”

Merseyball

A month after John Henry (and FSG) bought Liverpool he was meeting a company called ‘Design Technology’ in late November in London. He was a blank slate in terms of understanding football, but had a key vision on how he wanted the club’s identity and methods to change.

John Henry, with Damian Comolli (a figure not regarded as a traditional data scientist, or quant as the Americans called them) was alongside him as they arrived at the headquarters of Decision Technology. They met with company director Dr Henry Stott, who was happy to discuss Liverpool’s interest, but wary of their current contract with Tottenham Hotspur (where Comolli himself had been impressed).

Henry explained his intentions with the newly acquired football club, Stott explained - on a surface level - what his new company did, and what he thought about the Reds’ predicaments back then.

John Henry then explained he wanted to buy Decision Technology.

“Taking it in house at Liverpool. Placing it at the heart of the club’s attempt to become a beacon for the use of data in football. Stott explained that the contract with Spurs could be broken. Henry suggested they could still complete the contract while under Liverpool’s control. While legally possible, Stott explained it wasn’t within the spirit of the deal at White Hart Lane.”

The Reds’ new owner left. Stott went away to do more research. The deal could not be broken, and nor could they even take Liverpool on as a separate client because of the conflict of interest.

John Henry, never one to give up easily on something, decided if he could not have the whole company, instead he’d try to buy “the brains rather than the whole body”.

Roberto Firmino

The first foray into data being accepted in football was our smiling Brazilian legend. Brighton and Brentford might have being using data in the lower leagues, exploiting statistical edges through methods forged in the gambling markets, and succeeding under the radar while often being mocked; for data to be truly accepted though, Rory Smith suggests that football needed one of the giants to start using it, and of course becoming successful. Step forward Bobby.

The deal itself though was complicated by the rift between Micheal Edwards and then manager Brendan Rodgers. The latter thought his lack of goals was a big issue and wanted Benteke instead, proven in the Premier League. The disagreement led to Edwards putting forward Lukaku as a compromise. That was also rejected. The often-mocked transfer committee was at an impasse.

Michael Edwards

Edwards was ‘poached’ from Spurs by an offer from Liverpool. Smith recounts,

“he was not strictly a numbers man. He had a degree in informatics. How human behaviour interacts with digital information from Sheffield University. He was a youth player at Southampton, and Norwich, only for his career to be curtailed by injury.”

He went to work at Prozone. And they sent him to Portsmouth. Harry Redknapp loved how he was outgoing, unafraid to speak his mind, and knowledgeable about the game. His notetaking was legendary, and was able to translate complex information into easy to understand points for players to understand. Redknapp took him to Tottenham to reshape their analysis team. Though in that role he found that players “just did not respond to statistics that Prozone provided.” Crucially though, Edwards himself also shirked at some of the data points being used, describing them as “trivial, with others actively harmful.”

His skepticism about data soon changed when he started to work with… Decision Technology. He liked “their ability to strip emotion and bias from the game.”

His arrival at Liverpool was a shock. The job he needed to do was huge. The club’s structure was a mess, even though FSG has been there for over a year.

There was no data department. No advanced analytics. It was hugely lagging behind the forward-thinking Tottenham. Edwards’ task to not only bring Liverpool alongside Spurs in the frontier of data, but to be the pinnacle. Despite countless meetings with various data providers, none of them compared to… Decision Technology.

Simon Kuper, in his review of the book, backs up this theory and goes further to suggest if the public is aware of the methods a club is using then they may not be as ahead of the game as you might think.

But Smith misses the true recruitment star: Tottenham Hotspur. Spurs in that decade regularly challenged competitors at the top of the table while averaging an annual net spend of just £283m, half that of Chelsea and less than half that of the two Manchester clubs. Smith does discuss Spurs’ early use of analytics: the data firm Decision Technology was contracted to the club until 2018. But even its staff don’t know whether anyone at Spurs so much as read its stream of reports. What happens inside Daniel Levy’s Spurs is a black box. I’m guessing, though, that they have replaced Decision Technology with world-class in-house analytics.

Smith’s focus on Liverpool over Spurs illustrates the book’s limitations. The great barrier in football writing is access: clubs rarely give it. So when insiders do talk, the temptation is to exaggerate their roles.

This is a key factor in some of the assertions to follow about the Reds’ current set up, and why what appears and is speculated on from the outside is not the reality of what goes on inside the club.

The rest of this article is for subscribers only. It includes a section on Ian Graham, how the mocked committee became the envy of the world, but only with the influence of Klopp and his approach to experts. The fallout, the key figures leaving and if that successful model still exists.