Sacrilege, four times over. When you adopt a club like Manchester United, the rulebook is parcelled to you very early. Either via the back pages of sports magazines, internet forums, social media, or former players, it is made clear that you must not talk kindly about Liverpool or Manchester City. Not even Arsenal or Chelsea, to be honest, but they can be granted the odd praise. Steer clear of the sworn enemies, however.
Since the final whistle at the Wanda Metropolitano last year, this is my fourth piece of writing in honest praise of Liverpool. By the time you read this, I might even be thrown out of a couple of WhatsApp groups. But, what the hell. Today, I want to talk about an aspect of Liverpool Football Club that makes the Data Engineer in me giddy with pride.
Before we enter the sophisticated labs of LED screens and stock market-esque analysis, a quick glance through history. The story goes, back in 1950, Wing Commander Charles Reep of the Royal Air Force attended every match Swindon Town Football Club played that season. He would take with him a pen and some notebooks to scribble down patterns of play. By the end of the season, Reep had pored through his analysis enough times to come to a conclusion: most goals in football come from moves of three passes or fewer. FiveThirtyEight call it possibly the first actionable sports strategy derived from data collection.
It took time, but football coaches and administrators finally realised that every decision in life is derived from some sort of data analysis and that their sport should ideally tap into a great innovative power. They can be a stubborn bunch, those guys, so maybe it took someone to wonder how they never order Chinese take-out for the point to hit home.
Today, we have elaborate optical-tracker setups at every major football stadium in Europe. Most clubs have entire teams to break video and spatial data down for self and opposition analysis. But, Liverpool have gone the extra distance.
(Ian Graham in his natural habitat. Photo credit: David Vintiner for The New York Times)
Deep inside their Melwood office is a room that looks more suited to the Apple campus in Cupertino, California. Men in spectacles, polished shoes, and neatly-ironed shirts walk around with 50-page dossiers in their hands. There are graphs and snippets of Python code on the monitors. Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s owners, are well-known for their inclination towards using data in sports. In 2012, they offered the operational keys of Boston Red Sox to Billy Beane, the man and brains behind Moneyball.
Ian Graham is Liverpool’s Director of Research. He has a doctorate in theoretical physics from Cambridge and has, over the last few years, devised a bespoke database to track players and teams from across the world. During Liverpool's search for a new manager in 2015, it was his detailed analysis of Jurgen Klopp’s final few months at Dortmund which convinced the board that a 7th place finish in Bundesliga shouldn’t cloud their inference on how good Dortmund really had been during the 2014-15 season. He refused to trust the naked eye and ran the numbers on a bunch of close losses Dortmund had suffered that season; and the result couldn’t be clearer. By October, Klopp was lifting the Liverpool scarf at Melwood. He often credits the guys in the back of the room for bringing him to Merseyside.
Graham's research and analytics team are also in charge of profiling potential transfers. While most of the credit for Liverpool’s excellent first-team scouting and transfer activity in the Klopp-era should land on his doorstep, Naby Keita’s scouting and acquisition stands out as a shining example of what can be achieved with informed decision-making. Graham first noticed Keita’s numbers in 2014, when the Guinean midfielder was playing at Red Bull Salzburg. Graham’s statistical model calculates the difference between a team’s likelihood to score a goal before and after a move. He then assigns that number to the player who made the move. Naby Keita doesn’t have the passing numbers of an elite central-midfielder, neither is he a defensive phenomenon. What Graham saw, way back in 2014, was Keita’s ability to move the play forward almost every time he got the ball. He often attempted passes which, if completed, would've put his team in substantially likelier positions to get a goal. In 2016, Graham took the numbers to the board; in 2018, Keita was theirs. In Liverpool’s final home game of the season, against Chelsea no less, Naby Keita did this.
American sports, in general, are a long way ahead on this road, but Liverpool’s recent successes has conveyed the power of nerdy engineers and scientists to a larger, more stubborn, audience. That some person with a keen eye for numbers and decision-making, but absolutely no ability with a football, can potentially influence a team of Liverpool’s stature is great news for sport’s inclusivity. It’s a sign of doors opening for those who want to marry what they love with something they’re good at.
This (and also the previous, because I didn’t write a newsletter last Sunday) Week:
Articles
Self-promo time: I wrote about how the current West Indies test team often sell themselves short at the doorstep of success
NPR article: Hiroshima; Nagasaki; Toyama?
This amazing 2016 article by Sharda Ugra on Dr. Talimeren Ao, the first captain of the Indian football team
M Night Shyamalan talks to The Ringer
Books
Movies(And Other Things) by Shea Serrano: Been reading this for the last couple of days. The author evaluates movies through questions you wouldn’t have thought of. One of them: who had it the worst, or second-worst, in Kill Bill?
Psmith, Journalist by PG Wodehouse: It’s Wodehouse.
Fin.