After years of rumors about pimply geeks with laptops plotting a takeover of English soccer, the game's statistical rebels have received a full-throated welcome into the hallowed grounds of the Premier League.
As a new season begins Saturday, all eyes will be on Anfield, where—10 months after Boston Red Sox owners John Henry and Tom Werner purchased Liverpool—the legendary club will flaunt the trappings of a $170 million spending spree that amounts to a pricey bet their data-driven approach can find value that others have missed.
Since the new owners' arrival, Liverpool has spent roughly $30 million each for Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson; another $13 million on Scottish midfielder Charlie Adam; nearly $40 million for Uruguayan forward Luís Suárez; and a record $57 million for striker Andy Carroll, now the most expensive English player ever.
That isn't exactly what went on in Boston, where general manager Theo Epstein collected Kevin Millar and David Ortiz for relative peanuts in 2003 and watched them help the Red Sox win the World Series the next year. But a careful study of the attributes of Liverpool's new recruits reveals a fairly similar formula behind the club's approach.
Broadly, Liverpool's spending spree crystallizes all the risks and mysteries associated with adapting analytics to a game where the jury is still out on their value. After all, there are so many scouts, would-be agents and lay observers on the lookout for talent that the idea of fielding a team with undiscovered value would appear absurd.
Every Premier League club has a team of number crunchers, but it's unclear how much influence they have or which of the numbers they produce are actually useful. Even Henry, who owes much of his fortune to his mathematical approach to the financial markets, sees a limit to the use of data in a free-flowing game like soccer, as opposed to baseball, where events can be isolated and statistically adjusted.
"Determining what goes into a goal is much more complicated than determining what goes into a home run," Henry wrote in an email this week.
There is widespread agreement that no one has come up with the algorithm that reveals a player's value to a team. "I'm not aware of anyone who has cracked the code," said Nelson Rodriguez, executive vice-president of competition for Major League Soccer, who consults regularly with European clubs. There may be too much information. Data-tracking companies collect some 300 measurements per game on about 2,500 player movements. Still, Rodriguez said clubs continue to search for a winning formula, taking their cues from the data-obsessed franchises in U.S. pro sports.
In truth, Liverpool may be a bit late to the numbers party. Warren Barton, the former England international and a commentator for Fox Soccer Channel, said coaches would review statistics with players each Monday when he played for Newcastle United and Derby County in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The numbers can also be deceiving, Barton said. A player may cover a lot of distance, suggesting superior fitness, but not display much speed or intensity. A midfielder may have an 80% pass completion rate, but the passes may be short or hit sideways to sure-footed teammates.
To cut through the confusion, Liverpool seems to have gone at the problem with a rather simplistic—if expensive—approach that speaks to the owners' experience with the data-centric Epstein-led Red Sox.
"There is no question that Damien Comolli is cut from the same cloth as Theo Epstein," Werner said of the bespectacled director of football who joined Liverpool last November following the club's takeover.
The great discovery made by Red Sox senior adviser and stats guru Bill James a generation ago was that baseball teams could score more runs if they could get more runners on base, in whatever fashion, and thereby create more scoring chances.
Liverpool finished sixth in the Premier League last season partly because of its record of scoring just 59 goals in 38 games. That was far off the pace of Manchester United, which scored 78 goals. In four of the past five seasons, the top four teams in the standings were the four highest-scoring teams, the lone exception being 2009-10, when Manchester City finished fifth but scored more than Tottenham, which finished fourth.
To solve the shortfall, Liverpool has gone on a mission to create more scoring opportunities—to get more runners on base—even if that has meant betting the house on a group of players who, other than Suárez, have little international or Champions League experience.
For instance, Downing, Adam and Henderson were all among the top-eight chance-creators in the Premier League last season, according to statistics provider Opta Sports. The average Premier League midfielder creates roughly 1.21 chances per game, but Adam created 2.06 chances per game last season on average, while Downing and Henderson made 2.24 and 2.22 chances per game respectively.
Those three also produced some 750 crosses—centering passes that create scoring opportunities—last season, with an accuracy rate of more than 24%, slightly ahead of the league average. Five of Adam's eight assists last season came from crosses, while no Premier League player has made more successful crosses the last three seasons than Downing. Since the start of the 2004-05 season, only four players have created more chances than Downing in Premier League games—Frank Lampard, Cesc Fabregas, Steven Gerrard and Ryan Giggs.
"He's much more than a winger—the stats show it." Comolli declared on Liverpool's web site after Downing's arrival.
Conventional wisdom suggests those numbers should improve if the trio is crossing to a classier collection of forwards and midfielders than on their previous clubs. The hope is that a good portion of the crosses will connect with the 6-foot-3 Carroll, whose specialty is heading the ball into the net.
Still, there are those who question whether bombarding an opponents' area with aerial crosses is an effective tactic. The rate of completed crosses that produce a goal rarely exceeds one in four. The probability of scoring from a cross is just 5%.
But Liverpool also has Suárez, the Manny Ramirez of the side, who has two of the planet's most creative feet. Suárez arrived last season after scoring 102 goals in nearly four seasons at Ajax. He is prone to toddler-like temper tantrums and was suspended last year for biting an opponent, but he has a massive upside if Liverpool can cool his head.
No matter what the numbers say, it's a safe bet that the days of bargain-hunting are over. If nothing else, Liverpool's spending spree certainly shows that. "Everyone you buy nowadays costs a fortune," said Roy Evans, the former Liverpool manager. "That's the going rate—you just have to live with it."
