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The Transfer Committee

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WhyAlwaysMe?

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The committee consisted of Rodgers, scouts Dave Fallows and Barry Hunter, the man in charge of analysis Michael Edwards, owners Fenway Sports Group's (FSG) Anfield representative Mike Gordon and chief executive Ian Ayre.

Can anyone provide a bit more detail on Fallows, Hunter and Edwards?
 
I am reliably informed that for the last 5 months the transfer committee has been just one person, working undercover and biding his time. That man was Herr Klopp who will now step forward and carry out the remainder of his master plan.
 
How exactly is Ayre qualified to be in this commitee?!

He isn't. Nor IMO are Edwards and Gordon. Edwards should be just one resource to be consulted before a decision is made, and Gordon should decide if the money can be spared. End of.

The whole set-up stinks and I hope to goodness it will now be consigned to history. They don't even have an odd number of members to avoid a 3-3 deadlock FFS.
 
I don't really see a problem with a Committee structure but it shouldn't be purely football people, not a democracy and the final decision is the manager's. Whilst everyone on there has a role in relation to bringing a player to the club, it would be ridiculous if the manager isn't able to identify and prioritise the players he wants. Ayre and Gordon don't need to be involved other than setting financial parameters for the manager to work within. They've no qualification to be making football decisions.
 
Definitely disagree about the committee structure. Committees are bad enough in public organisations - they're a necessary evil there, because you can't have too much public decision-making power concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals, but they waste loads of time and tend to come up with compromise decisions which are often not what anybody really wants. In a business organisation like LFC they're a terrible idea, especially for things like transfers where you often have to move quickly, and ours was only FSG's second choice anyway after Rodgers refused to work under a DOF. I'll be amazed if it survives the change of manager, as I can't see either Klopp or Ancelotti being prepared to work in such a set-up.

Incidentally neither Edwards nor Gordon are football people, so I can't see a change of membership making any difference.
 
But I don't want to go back to the days when a manager just buys players who played for him already or happened to play well against us once or twice.
 
But a committee isn't the way to avoid that, IMO at any rate. Either get a quality DOF in or trust the manager and give him full control. A committee will just end up satisfying no-one, and taking ages about it too.
 
But a committee isn't the way to avoid that, IMO at any rate. Either get a quality DOF in or trust the manager and give him full control. A committee will just end up satisfying no-one, and taking ages about it too.

You get a DOF with the authority to make decisions with the input of the scouts,.analysts, manager considered.

You absolutely do not give long term decisions to someone whose shelf life is about three years
 
This. You have a set up and a Dof for long term continuity. The manager can then be replaced with someone who can fit into that profile without starting all over again.
Swansea are a good example in the PL.
 
Totally disagree. The buck stops with the manager so he has to be given the reins.

Whilst the DoF is nice in principle, and they do have a role in continuity, the man who picks the team must be given the players he wants.

The reality with football is that the manager has to be the most powerful person at the club when it comes to first team footballing affairs. A DoF can co-ordinate the overall structure of the club: youth setup etc, but can't be picking the players.
 
Totally disagree. The buck stops with the manager so he has to be given the reins.

Whilst the DoF is nice in principle, and they do have a role in continuity, the man who picks the team must be given the players he wants.

The reality with football is that the manager has to be the most powerful person at the club when it comes to first team footballing affairs. A DoF can co-ordinate the overall structure of the club: youth setup etc, but can't be picking the players.


The British model of the all-powerful manager doesn't seem to be common anywhere else. Why is that?
 
Barrett - The man who is calling the shots at Anfield and transfer committee
Mike Gordon, FSG President

Little was known of Gordon’s role at Liverpool before Brendan Rodgers credited the intensely private American with supporting his efforts in the transfer market shortly after becoming manager in 2012. Operating behind the scenes and with little interest in building his own profile, Gordon has become more influential at Anfield despite his reticence to accompany his growing importance with a public persona.

While his 12 per cent stake in Fenway Sports Group (FSG) is dwarfed by that of John W Henry, Liverpool’s principal owner, his influence on the club outstrips that of his most senior partner who recently took ownership of The Boston Globe newspaper. Such is Gordon’s authority that he informed Rodgers that his services were no longer required in a transatlantic phone call after Sunday’s Merseyside derby against Everton. He is also at the forefront of Liverpool’s search for a new manager.

Gordon grew up in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, but moved to Boston as a student and is married with four children. He enjoyed a hugely successful career in finance before getting involved with FSG. He worked for Fidelity, the American multinational financial services corporation, in the 1990s before establishing the hedge fund Vinik Asset Management with Jeffrey Vinik in 1996. When they shut it down in 2013 it had assets of morev than $6billion.

Gordon, who had started out selling popcorn at Milwaukee Brewers matches, always had a passion for baseball and in 2002 he joined up with FSG when they purchased the Boston Red Sox. After FSG’s takeover of Liverpool in 2010, he increased his stake in the investment vehicle and was installed on the club’s board of directors.

Of the disparate figures on Liverpool’s transfer committee, Gordon’s voice carries the most weight. Not only does the 50-year-old hold the purse strings, he also implements FSG’s vision which prioritises value and potential, and works closely with the manager and scouts on player identification and recruitment. Though based in the USA, Gordon is in regular contact with Ian Ayre and the other committee members who participate in frequent conference calls.

Ian Ayre – Liverpool chief executive

Ayre is the public face of Liverpool’s hierarchy, the man charged with overseeing the daily running of the club and providing a bridge between Boston and Merseyside. After joining Liverpool as commercial director in 2007, Ayre’s services were retained after FSG bought the club in 2010 and he remains one of their most trusted employees.

His role is to negotiate transfers — during the summer he flew to Chile to complete a £29 million deal to sign Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim. Though often criticised when deals are not concluded, the parameters that Ayre enters into negotiations with are always pre-determined by FSG.

Michael Edwards – director of technical performance

Edwards has become the most controversial committee member with critics asking why an analyst specialising in data and statistics has such an influential role in Liverpool’s transfer strategy. Yet his presence is a necessity given FSG’s commitment to informing their recruitment policies as fully as possible.

After graduating from The University of Sheffield with a degree in business management and informatics, Edwards’s career in football began when he became Portsmouth’s head of performance analysis in 2003. He moved on to Tottenham Hotspur in 2009 before joining Liverpool in 2011 having been headhunted by Damien Comolli.

Dave Fallows – director of scouting

Fallows was seen as a prize acquisition by FSG when they convinced him to join Liverpool from Manchester City in 2012. City’s disappointment at the departure of their first-team scouting and recruitment co-ordinator was reflected in their decision to place him on gardening leave to prevent him from joining Liverpool immediately.

The former Bolton Wanderers performance analyst is responsible for co-ordinating Liverpool’s scouting department and collating reports on potential transfer targets. A worldwide network of scouts report to Fallows who also provides the manager with a shortlist of candidates for whatever position he is looking to fill.
 
I completely get why Edwards & Fallows would be there, but Gordon & Ayre make no sense.

You have a money man who is familiar with US sports, with no previous football experience & a commercial director with no previous football experience.

Fallows as head scout, with Edwards as an analyst reporting to a DoF would make much more sense. Then arguably Ayre is tasked with negotiations.
 
The British model of the all-powerful manager doesn't seem to be common anywhere else. Why is that?


Because everywhere is shit compared to Britain...of course...!

The problem with the whole Committee / DoF is that it hits a brick wall if the manager doesn't pick them, and he's less likely to if they aren't his preferred option because men are stubborn bastards. We've already seen this with the likes of Markovic and Sakho.

I think its right there is a structure to challenge the manager as well as present options. My preference is that its the one picking the team and who commands the players who gets to select the players whereas the DoF is responsible for setting out the vision for the club and appointing managers who fit that mould. If the manager is trying to buy shite, then the question is whether he's the right man in the first place - and thats for the DoF to decide/account for.
 
Maybe Edwards position at the club and on the committee is under threat if Klopp brings his data and video analyst Peter Krawietz with him.
 
Because everywhere is shit compared to Britain...of course...!

The problem with the whole Committee / DoF is that it hits a brick wall if the manager doesn't pick them, and he's less likely to if they aren't his preferred option because men are stubborn bastards. We've already seen this with the likes of Markovic and Sakho.

I think its right there is a structure to challenge the manager as well as present options. My preference is that its the one picking the team and who commands the players who gets to select the players whereas the DoF is responsible for setting out the vision for the club and appointing managers who fit that mould. If the manager is trying to buy shite, then the question is whether he's the right man in the first place - and thats for the DoF to decide/account for.


I guess the point was that if managers having full control is the exception rather than the rule, the problems you highlight have likely been solved.

It feels like part of the problem at Liverpool is that we hired Rodgers without a clear structure and vision in place. We started off wanting a Director of Football, which was rejected by Rodgers and then after the fact tried to come up with something else that did kind of the same job. I don't know if that caused friction and stubbornness on Rodgers part but obviously there has been a lot of speculation that it has.

All of that can be avoided by clearly setting out the role to prospective candidates and then only hiring someone who is willing to do that role. A certain amount of leeway is always afforded to the best of the best or those who end up proving themselves but ultimately you can only really start pushing back (within reason) if you're consistently demonstrating you're indispensable.
 
[article=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3262490/Liverpool-s-head-technical-performance-Michael-Edwards-laptop-guru-did-number-Brendan-Rodgers.html]Each morning, when Liverpool's principal owner John W Henry and director Michael Gordon wake up in Boston, their inboxes ping with emails from the club's head of technical performance.

Michael Edwards, who is based at Liverpool's Melwood training ground, has become FSG's go-to guy in England after aligning himself with the data-driven model of the group's baseball team, the Boston Red Sox.

This cosy relationship with FSG, dropping the owners emails throughout the day and increasing his power at the club, led to a strained relationship with former manager Brendan Rodgers.

Edwards encourages staff to use his nickname 'Eddie', giving a matey feel to the working environment. It is understood Rodgers has another name for him.

Edwards fell perfectly into place with FSG's Moneyball strategy, the statistical model designed to extract maximum value in the transfer market. Clearly, with the club 10th in the league and paying up to three times the going rate for players, it needs refinement.

Despite a lack of playing experience at any relevant level, Edwards, who earns £300,000 a year, has a big say on Liverpool's notorious transfer committee. He would arrive for meetings with Rodgers, managing director Ian Ayre, chief scout Barry Hunter and head of recruitment Dave Fallows armed with the latest data on potential targets.

The committee have yet to explain how they came up with the figure of £29million to sign Brazilian forward Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim, who finished eighth in the Bundesliga last season.

Divock Origi, billed as 'a world-class talent' by Rodgers when he was signed from Lille, could not even come off the bench in the club's last two league games. There are countless other errors.

After each Liverpool game Edwards emails analysis and data to the club's owners in America, detailing where the match was won and lost. It has made for grim reading this season.

Edwards has used his relationship with FSG to strengthen his hand at the club, becoming a trusted source of information to a group of people who are obsessed with statistical analysis.

There is a relationship with Bill James, the American stats guru who is employed by the Red Sox to provide Henry and Gordon with data for their baseball team.

Edwards can tap away at a laptop and within seconds tell you how many assists the 24-year-old Turkish left back Eren Albayrak has made for Rizespor this season (four).

Edwards and his team of analysts have invented a new language for football. Strikers are all about goal expectancy, chances created and the percentage of successful passes in the final third. Old-school managers just want to know if the boy can put the ball in the net. Defensive midfielders are judged on interceptions and the number of challenges won in the centre of the pitch.

The increasing influence of analysts, young men who have no experience of scouting or recruiting players, has meant the end of the road for good football men such as Mel Johnson. He was the scout who recommended Liverpool sign talented young winger Jordon Ibe from Wycombe but was sacked, shamefully, in November 2014. Former academy director Frank McParland has also left.

Instead a new breed sits in air-conditioned offices, cutting up videos from matches all over the world and burying their heads in the stats. Edwards, along with his vast team of analysts, constantly monitors the opposition, providing detail about playing positions, style, routines, set-pieces and other important matchday information.

They profile players based on their last 10-20 appearances, gathering information and helping Rodgers build a presentation for his players before matches that was usually a maximum of 10 pages on each team. It is a useful, but far from infallible, tool.

Edwards, who is in his late thirties, began his career as part of the video analysis team at Portsmouth before leaving to work with Harry Redknapp again when he became Tottenham manager.

There, Edwards struck up a relationship with Ian Graham at Decision Technology, a data firm collecting statistics on players from all over the world.
Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy paid Decision Technology a fortune each season for their services, trusting their analysis and using Edwards, in his newly created role as head of performance analysis, to make sense of it all.

Edwards was head-hunted by Damien Comolli when the Frenchman became director of football at Liverpool, turning down an increased salary of £250,000 a year at White Hart Lane to join the Anfield revolution. Levy was distraught.

Since then he has emerged as a senior figure at Liverpool, empowered by FSG to make the call on big transfer targets after gaining their trust since his arrival in 2011.

His relationship with Rodgers deteriorated shortly after the former Liverpool manager signed a contract worth £6m a year just a week after Liverpool finished within two points of claiming the Barclays Premier League title.

They clashed over transfer strategy, although Rodgers went on record to insist that he always had the final say over the recruitment of players earmarked for the first-team squad.

In the end, Edwards had his number.[/article]
 
So he was at Tottenham, with their distinctly variable transfer record, and was headhunted by Superstatto Comolli to come to LFC.

That does not fill me with confidence about his ability to add value to the club.
 
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So he was at Tottenham, with their distinctly variable transfer record, and was headhunted by Superstatto Comolli to come to LFC.

That does not fill me with confidence about his ability to add value to the club.

Yup.

Big question marks have to exist over his ability too.

The tension between him and an ego driven clueless manager was inevitable. That's pretty much the running theme in Moneyball

I've always felt Luis Alberto was his idea. There's a theory by one the analytics dudes that says anyone getting over ten assists is worth considering.

Alberto had twenty in the Spanish second division. So I've no doubt Edwards pushed for that signing.

There's been little evidence of any well reasoned analytics involved in our transfers. Edwards is potentially part of the problem.

But the role is essential
 
I don't actually mind the idea of a committee, as such. I think that concept has become a distraction in the discussion. It's a bit like talk in politics of 'Europe' rather than specific institutions, arrangements and policies. The issue for a football club is how a group of people interact and how responsibility is assigned.

So long as there's an excellent scouting network, good lines of communication, and the manager both nominates his first choices and has the final say, I don't really care if there are other people involved.

There's always been an unofficial transfer committee at football clubs. There's a great deal of nostalgic talk of Geoff Twentyman. but it wasn't really as if he and Shanks just agreed on a player and we went out and got him. The directors always got involved. The money men got involved. We didn't always get our first choices.

And as for battles and disagreements behind the scenes, they've always been there, too. Noel White, for example, was a chronic meddler when Kenny was manager, and we missed out on a few players because of internal debates. More constructively, Peter Robinson was always prepared to question managers when he doubted the target and/or the price.

I quite like the idea now of internal discussion. It's just important that it all emanates from the manager's specific plans.

One problem with how the committee has behaved over these recent years is that, too often, it's become obsessed with positions and types rather than individual players. Rodgers asked for a certain player, and Edwards and Co duly started compiling a huge list of alternatives based on the position the individual played. That often ended up diluting the original idea, with less and less focus on specific character, game intelligence and individual ambition, and more on the simple comparison of stats. That leads to an Aspas being added to a list headed by Costa.

The emphasis has to go back to specifics. And there has to be a more flexible, prudent distribution of resources in any one window. If you can't get your first, second, third or fourth choice left back, then invest more of the budget in getting your first choice striker, rather than throwing away money on a fifth choice left back who probably won't be played.

And just make the whole thing clearer to the public. If the manager has the last word, then cut out all the shady briefings and all of that nonsense and move on as a team.
 
Nice smear job in the Mail there.


It really is, isn't it? I know nothing about Edwards bar the snippets that have been posted here, and he may well be shite at his job, but this article smacks of Harry Redknapp style stick it in the back of the onion bag tripe - the idea that football should stay as it was in the past when the world was a rosey place and men all wore flat caps and ragged their convertibles down country lanes and kept down the working classes.
 
Macca, as someone who spent far too many hours of his working life dealing with (including sometimes having to sit on) committees, I respectfully disagree. In my view the difference between a formal committee and an informal "committee-type" arrangement is actually crucial in a fast-moving business context. The former will invariably stultify pretty much everything it touches, more or less by its very nature, as your paragraph beginning "One problem with the committee" aptly describes. I don't believe such nonsense is avoidable under a formal committee set-up, with attenders there to fulfil - and justify - their particular formal roles. The less formal approach you describe in your third para.will bypass such games-playing a lot more easily, because those participating in it aren't on show, and it did after all coincide with a much more successful period in our history.
 
Macca, as someone who spent far too many hours of his working life dealing with (including sometimes having to sit on) committees, I respectfully disagree. In my view the difference between a formal committee and an informal "committee-type" arrangement is actually crucial in a fast-moving business context. The former will invariably stultify pretty much everything it touches, more or less by its very nature, as your paragraph beginning "One problem with the committee" aptly describes. I don't believe such nonsense is avoidable under a formal committee set-up, with attenders there to fulfil - and justify - their particular formal roles. The less formal approach you describe in your third para.will bypass such games-playing a lot more easily, because those participating in it aren't on show, and it did after all coincide with a much more successful period in our history.

Oh, I quite agree. I've been stuck on committees myself. But that's my point - the discussion about a committee as such has distracted people from the idea of how it can and should work. An informal arrangement is far preferable. There will inevitably be a number of people involved, so all of this 'committee or the manager' stuff is simplistic and not very helpful. It makes sense to have a regular group of people involved, so if FSG want to call that 'a committee,' then fine, so long as it's run in the proper spirit.
 
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