TFC's Tactical Autopsy Thread

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It is like we are better against teams that are better.

The Wolves disease

Not entirely surprising.... Being able to consistently overcome parked buses often represents the final piece of the puzzle for an upwardly mobile team.... Whereas so-called 'better' teams end up dictating/allowing a more open game. Tactically there's an obvious irony there unless you can boast superior man-power across your XI, but longer term who wants to be Chelsea or Atletico playing turgid defend and 'counter only when you must', Maurinho-ball year after year.
 
Not entirely surprising.... Being able to consistently overcome parked buses often represents the final piece of the puzzle for an upwardly mobile team.... Whereas so-called 'better' teams end up dictating/allowing a more open game. Tactically there's an obvious irony there unless you can boast superior man-power across your XI, but longer term who wants to be Chelsea or Atletico playing turgid defend and 'counter only when you must', Maurinho-ball year after year.

Personally I wouldn't mind a season of grinding out 1-0 wins with defensive style. I feel it is the kind of thing required to win a league. We have done the whole play better and lose thing and did it very well, perhaps the best, particularly in the Leicester and Chelsea seasons. No one would begrudge Poch now of results if the sacrifice was the football turning turgid. I watched Gary Doherty. Whether this set of players would implement it, or it is in the manager's DNA is another matter. If we win the Champions League, there is a good chance it will be on sheer grit and/or divine intervention. All of our savvy plans seem to get punched in the face, not that I wouldn't love to outplay Liverpool. I believe anything is possible on our day.
 

Jürgen 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 when Klopp’s face lit up. “Ah, you saw that game,” he said. “It was crazy. We killed them. You saw it!”
Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was 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.

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 N.F.L. 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 favor: 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.


Two Sundays ago, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in the sport’s history. It lost only one of its 38 games in the Premier League, yet it finished second. Manchester City, the defending champion, edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of its 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 is owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, while Manchester City has a business relationship with the New York Yankees.
At the same time as it was trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in England, Liverpool was competing against the top teams from other countries in Europe’s Champions League. In the semifinals of that tournament this month, it overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team. On June 1, it will face a Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final.
More than other major clubs, Liverpool incorporates data analysis into the decisions it makes, from the corporate to the tactical. How much that has contributed to its 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 analyzed 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 semifinal, 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 toward 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 toward Barcelona’s penalty area.
By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the semifinal 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 favorite to advance to the final, and the outcome of the first game validated that assessment. After that, someone who wanted to win $100 betting on Barcelona needed to risk $1,800 to do it.

For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool was dominant. It won 10 titles in England’s top division. It won the European Cup, which preceded the Champions League, four times in eight years. Liverpool F.C. was so successful that for a time it figured as one of England’s most visible exports. Fan clubs were organized throughout Europe, and in places that hadn’t previously followed the sport, such as Australia and across America.
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 Woolwich. 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 N.H.L.’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 major 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 was 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 $480 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 A.P.B.A. 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.

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 quarterfinals. 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 semifinal, 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 counterattacks. 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.
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, Mohamed 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 centering 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 ballhandlers aren’t especially adept, so its coaches prioritize keeping the ball far from its goal. In 2016, Iceland advanced to the quarterfinals of the European championships, beating countries many times its size, including England — and tying the tournament’s eventual champion, Portugal. In none of those games did it 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’s 2003 book “Moneyball,” about how the Oakland A’s baseball team found an advantage by evaluating players using different criteria than 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.”
Chelsea created the Premier League’s first analytics department in 2008. Woolwich 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 like Chelsea and Woolwich have resources at their disposal that allow them to accumulate the best talent. Compared with them, Liverpool was essentially in the position of those 1990s A’s teams. A different approach was necessary for it 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 analyzing 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, the 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 it 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 it 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.
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 the 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 defense toward 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 farther 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.

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 realized 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.
Graham was laboring through a two-year post-doctorate at Cambridge when he realized 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 A.S. Roma, in Italy. At that point, Salah was considered to have little chance of ever succeeding in England.

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 $41 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 recognizable 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 $173 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 $16 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 $170 million for Coutinho. Soon after, Liverpool spent more than $200 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 neighborhood, 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.
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 N.F.L., 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.
 

Jürgen 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 when Klopp’s face lit up. “Ah, you saw that game,” he said. “It was crazy. We killed them. You saw it!”
Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was 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.

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 N.F.L. 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 favor: 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.


Two Sundays ago, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in the sport’s history. It lost only one of its 38 games in the Premier League, yet it finished second. Manchester City, the defending champion, edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of its 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 is owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, while Manchester City has a business relationship with the New York Yankees.
At the same time as it was trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in England, Liverpool was competing against the top teams from other countries in Europe’s Champions League. In the semifinals of that tournament this month, it overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team. On June 1, it will face a Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final.
More than other major clubs, Liverpool incorporates data analysis into the decisions it makes, from the corporate to the tactical. How much that has contributed to its 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 analyzed 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 semifinal, 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 toward 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 toward Barcelona’s penalty area.
By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the semifinal 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 favorite to advance to the final, and the outcome of the first game validated that assessment. After that, someone who wanted to win $100 betting on Barcelona needed to risk $1,800 to do it.

For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool was dominant. It won 10 titles in England’s top division. It won the European Cup, which preceded the Champions League, four times in eight years. Liverpool F.C. was so successful that for a time it figured as one of England’s most visible exports. Fan clubs were organized throughout Europe, and in places that hadn’t previously followed the sport, such as Australia and across America.
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 Woolwich. 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 N.H.L.’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 major 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 was 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 $480 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 A.P.B.A. 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.

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 quarterfinals. 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 semifinal, 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 counterattacks. 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.
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, Mohamed 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 centering 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 ballhandlers aren’t especially adept, so its coaches prioritize keeping the ball far from its goal. In 2016, Iceland advanced to the quarterfinals of the European championships, beating countries many times its size, including England — and tying the tournament’s eventual champion, Portugal. In none of those games did it 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’s 2003 book “Moneyball,” about how the Oakland A’s baseball team found an advantage by evaluating players using different criteria than 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.”
Chelsea created the Premier League’s first analytics department in 2008. Woolwich 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 like Chelsea and Woolwich have resources at their disposal that allow them to accumulate the best talent. Compared with them, Liverpool was essentially in the position of those 1990s A’s teams. A different approach was necessary for it 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 analyzing 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, the 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 it 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 it 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.
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 the 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 defense toward 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 farther 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.

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 realized 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.
Graham was laboring through a two-year post-doctorate at Cambridge when he realized 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 A.S. Roma, in Italy. At that point, Salah was considered to have little chance of ever succeeding in England.

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 $41 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 recognizable 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 $173 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 $16 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 $170 million for Coutinho. Soon after, Liverpool spent more than $200 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 neighborhood, 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.
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 N.F.L., 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.
Think I've just found the cure for my insomnia. ...
:sonpoint: :dierpochhug:
 

Jürgen 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 when Klopp’s face lit up. “Ah, you saw that game,” he said. “It was crazy. We killed them. You saw it!”
Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was 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.

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 N.F.L. 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 favor: 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.


Two Sundays ago, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in the sport’s history. It lost only one of its 38 games in the Premier League, yet it finished second. Manchester City, the defending champion, edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of its 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 is owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, while Manchester City has a business relationship with the New York Yankees.
At the same time as it was trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in England, Liverpool was competing against the top teams from other countries in Europe’s Champions League. In the semifinals of that tournament this month, it overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team. On June 1, it will face a Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final.
More than other major clubs, Liverpool incorporates data analysis into the decisions it makes, from the corporate to the tactical. How much that has contributed to its 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 analyzed 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 semifinal, 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 toward 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 toward Barcelona’s penalty area.
By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the semifinal 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 favorite to advance to the final, and the outcome of the first game validated that assessment. After that, someone who wanted to win $100 betting on Barcelona needed to risk $1,800 to do it.

For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool was dominant. It won 10 titles in England’s top division. It won the European Cup, which preceded the Champions League, four times in eight years. Liverpool F.C. was so successful that for a time it figured as one of England’s most visible exports. Fan clubs were organized throughout Europe, and in places that hadn’t previously followed the sport, such as Australia and across America.
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 Woolwich. 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 N.H.L.’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 major 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 was 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 $480 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 A.P.B.A. 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.

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 quarterfinals. 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 semifinal, 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 counterattacks. 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.
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, Mohamed 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 centering 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 ballhandlers aren’t especially adept, so its coaches prioritize keeping the ball far from its goal. In 2016, Iceland advanced to the quarterfinals of the European championships, beating countries many times its size, including England — and tying the tournament’s eventual champion, Portugal. In none of those games did it 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’s 2003 book “Moneyball,” about how the Oakland A’s baseball team found an advantage by evaluating players using different criteria than 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.”
Chelsea created the Premier League’s first analytics department in 2008. Woolwich 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 like Chelsea and Woolwich have resources at their disposal that allow them to accumulate the best talent. Compared with them, Liverpool was essentially in the position of those 1990s A’s teams. A different approach was necessary for it 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 analyzing 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, the 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 it 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 it 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.
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 the 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 defense toward 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 farther 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.

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 realized 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.
Graham was laboring through a two-year post-doctorate at Cambridge when he realized 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 A.S. Roma, in Italy. At that point, Salah was considered to have little chance of ever succeeding in England.

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 $41 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 recognizable 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 $173 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 $16 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 $170 million for Coutinho. Soon after, Liverpool spent more than $200 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 neighborhood, 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.
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 N.F.L., 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.

Jesus Christ - stop it. You’re clearly spamming now. Spoiler that shit you arsehole. Why are you doing this? You’re coming over like a spiteful child. Just fuck off. Bin vote casted.
 
Jesus Christ - stop it. You’re clearly spamming now. Spoiler that shit you arsehole. Why are you doing this? You’re coming over like a spiteful child. Just fuck off. Bin vote casted.

What is the fucking point of you? You just appear from time to time like a menstrual pop tart, blubbing like peptic fish wife.

Got to question why the fuck would you even be in a thread, started by me, titled “tactical autopsy”?

You seem to need me more than I need you?
 
TomHotspur TomHotspur
I've dragged your match thread post over here, hope you don't mind, that way we won't breach the "Proper Fan Protocol" by daring to do anything other than burst with pride.


- Starting Kane was always going to get a lot of criticism if we lost and hindsight as ever is a great thing but I still back Pochs call. Kane is our best player, our outfield leader, an animal and the ultimate big game player. I actually thought he looked pretty okay sharpness wise, it was just he was playing against the best centre back in the world who as has happened previously, didn't give him a sniff. Not starting Lucas may have been wrong, personally I would have started him ahead of Son actually, but I still don't think it would have made any material difference.

- I think the way Liverpool set up just completely bamboozled Poch and the team. I've never seen them play the way they played last night. I can only imagine Poch set us up with the anticipation they were going to press the fuck out of us as they usually do. But that never happened, they let us have the ball constantly and it looked like we just didn't know what to do with it. In fact I'd be quite confident that hardly any prep was put in from us in the last 3 weeks in relation to trying to break them down. Klopp deserves quite a lot of credit for this as it shows a tactical flexibility that I didn't really know he possessed.


I have no problem with the decision to start Kane either given the choices on offer, I just wish he'd gone 433 and had Son and Moura either side to provide some more energy and more of the leg work because even on full chat he's not the busy cunt - press wise - he used to be, and back from injury there's often some lethargy and clumsiness with him. (And of course the extra important benefit of an extra body in that CM to help us play out and transition and cover their most potent lateral threat.)

But it's the second paragraph I'm struggling with on various levels.

I don't understand why you say the way Liverpool set up bamboozled Poch. Firstly, they didn't just sit deep from the get go, the came out and pressed us first half, and prevented us from playing out from the back, constructing moves and separated our back group from front four. I saw numerous times us being forced into passing back and Lloris then being forced into passing to players under pressure. I checked to see if the data supported this and it does, we didn't make a single successful pass into their area first half, they tackled 7 times in our half first half, only two second half and they were both virtually on the halfway line.

Secondly, Liverpool have been far more pragmatic this season, I've seen almost this exact blue print - come out with energy and press a bit, get a goal and then sit back, invite the opponent on and try to counter - so many times from them, I just don't get how you or Poch could say this is an anomaly. In fact, both games against them, but especially the away game followed a similar pattern.

But most importantly, if Poch was expecting early pressure, as with your theory, why set up the way he did, like he wasn't expecting to be pressed higher up, with 2 cm's against their three - I mean Liverpool play a CM3 every week, and usually three grafters - and when they press, their FB'S get up and support it too, creating 8 v 6 against a 4231, and with Sissoko as one of a double pivot, giving us only one CM of two comfortable under that expected pressure, and the other fresh from a long lay off ?
 
TomHotspur TomHotspur
I've dragged your match thread post over here, hope you don't mind, that way we won't breach the "Proper Fan Protocol" by daring to do anything other than burst with pride.





I have no problem with the decision to start Kane either given the choices on offer, I just wish he'd gone 433 and had Son and Moura either side to provide some more energy and more of the leg work because even on full chat he's not the busy cunt - press wise - he used to be, and back from injury there's often some lethargy and clumsiness with him. (And of course the extra important benefit of an extra body in that CM to help us play out and transition and cover their most potent lateral threat.)

But it's the second paragraph I'm struggling with on various levels.

I don't understand why you say the way Liverpool set up bamboozled Poch. Firstly, they didn't just sit deep from the get go, the came out and pressed us first half, and prevented us from playing out from the back, constructing moves and separated our back group from front four. I saw numerous times us being forced into passing back and Lloris then being forced into passing to players under pressure. I checked to see if the data supported this and it does, we didn't make a single successful pass into their area first half, they tackled 7 times in our half first half, only two second half and they were both virtually on the halfway line.

Secondly, Liverpool have been far more pragmatic this season, I've seen almost this exact blue print - come out with energy and press a bit, get a goal and then sit back, invite the opponent on and try to counter - so many times from them, I just don't get how you or Poch could say this is an anomaly. In fact, both games against them, but especially the away game followed a similar pattern.

But most importantly, if Poch was expecting early pressure, as with your theory, why set up the way he did, like he wasn't expecting to be pressed higher up, with 2 cm's against their three - I mean Liverpool play a CM3 every week, and usually three grafters - and when they press, their FB'S get up and support it too, creating 8 v 6 against a 4231, and with Sissoko as one of a double pivot, giving us only one CM of two comfortable under that expected pressure, and the other fresh from a long lay off ?
I think that Liverpools game plan was certainly different to how they had played against us both times in the league, and in their Champions League games against Bayern and Barca. You're right they did press us at times and force us backwards but there was no real intent from them to take the game to us and create chances, from what I could see anyway. There was no real serious attacking threat from them at all, compared to when we usually play them and every time they come forward I'm afraid they're going to score.
Now this may or may not have been a tactical tweak from Klopp. It may well have been down to the fact that they scored so early so their players mentally went defensive, or due to nerves, because Klopp could constantly be seen on the touchline roaring at them to push up further.
With regard to your 2 cms point, the only thing I can think of here is that Poch was hoping Dele would act as the man to put pressure on the base player of their 3 cms similar to how he did with Jorginho against Chelsea, but for most of the game Henderson Wijnaldum and Fabinho were all just stationed right in front of the back 4, so it rendered our midfield diamond redundant.
 
so it rendered our midfield diamond redundant.
We didn't use a diamond, Tom.
You're right they did press us at times and force us backwards but there was no real intent from them to take the game to us and create chances, from what I could see anyway. There was no real serious attacking threat from them at all, compared to when we usually play them and every time they come forward I'm afraid they're going to score.
During our build-up phases, Tom, they generally pressed up high/shut off passing lanes in the first half. That is why we had to go long so often.

And look at this.

 
We didn't use a diamond, Tom.
Yeah meant triangle there, my bad.

During our build-up phases, Tom, they generally pressed up high/shut off passing lanes in the first half. That is why we had to go long so often.
Yeah this is true, but I still think they were much more reactive rather than proactive in their approach than we were anticipating. I'm not saying this was the reason we lost the game or anything, but in a final with such a long winded build up where it's probably possible for overloads of information on the opposition to become an issue, it may have played a part.
 
I think that Liverpools game plan was certainly different to how they had played against us both times in the league, and in their Champions League games against Bayern and Barca. You're right they did press us at times and force us backwards but there was no real intent from them to take the game to us and create chances, from what I could see anyway. There was no real serious attacking threat from them at all, compared to when we usually play them and every time they come forward I'm afraid they're going to score.
Now this may or may not have been a tactical tweak from Klopp. It may well have been down to the fact that they scored so early so their players mentally went defensive, or due to nerves, because Klopp could constantly be seen on the touchline roaring at them to push up further.
With regard to your 2 cms point, the only thing I can think of here is that Poch was hoping Dele would act as the man to put pressure on the base player of their 3 cms similar to how he did with Jorginho against Chelsea, but for most of the game Henderson Wijnaldum and Fabinho were all just stationed right in front of the back 4, so it rendered our midfield diamond redundant.

I may be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure that game was very similar in some respects (Liverpool's general pattern) to the league game away where they were aggressive early on, got a lead then gradually shelled it and we dominated the second half, having re-jigged our format slightly.

Liverpool have been doing that passive aggressive thing all season though, especially once they have got a lead, sitting, soaking and using the pace of their front three on the counter. Almost every game Ive watched them has has long phases of them doing this.
 
I may be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure that game was very similar in some respects (Liverpool's general pattern) to the league game away where they were aggressive early on, got a lead then gradually shelled it and we dominated the second half, having re-jigged our format slightly.

Liverpool have been doing that passive aggressive thing all season though, especially once they have got a lead, sitting, soaking and using the pace of their front three on the counter. Almost every game Ive watched them has has long phases of them doing this.
You could be right mate, it was just an observation I made whilst watching the game, during which time my heightened emotional state could easily have blurred reality. If it was a game play strategy you've seen used frequently by Liverpool this season I'll take your word for it.
 
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