Nicked from RAWK (who nicked it from somewhere else)
Hard to imagine that we didn't have an analytic department (whatever it is) during Rafa's days at Liverpool. I thought he was possessed with numbers just as bad.
Cut and pasting this from ESPN Insider subscription service....apologies for the formatting.
In 1988, a teen from Beziers, France, named Damien Comolli moved with his mother and brother to San Francisco and there, as these things often happen, a peculiar passion was born. The family's time in the Bay Area was to be short lived, so Comolli quickly swallowed up all the particulars of the region. And at that time, there was no greater local passion than baseball, as the Bash Brother A's and the Humm Baby Giants were two of the top teams in baseball.
Comolli, a soccer player who had attracted attention from several club teams in France, became enthralled with the game played with a ball and bat.
Comolli returned to France in 1989 and signed with AS Monaco's youth team, though he admittedly wasn't very good -- and thus his playing days didn't last very long. He thrust himself into a post-playing career in soccer, first becoming a coach for AS Monaco's youth teams where he achieved a great deal of success. Yet Comolli never forgot about the A's and Giants and he often sought as much information about the teams as he could.
Comolli got his big break when Arsenal's legendary manager Arsene Wenger hired him as a scout in 1997. In many of his conversations with his mentor Wenger, Comolli was often reminded that while players could be fickle and a manager's perception may be subjective, the statistics never lied. Comolli had never thought about soccer in terms of numbers.
"[Wenger] looked at it from a perspective of 'when does he need to sell players?' " Comolli says. "He started using statistics, and I'm sure he was the first one, to look at players and see when they started to decline physically, especially in fitness. When I left Arsenal and went on my own, I grabbed his philosophy and I wanted to do more with it."
Around that time, Comolli's Oakland A's fandom led him to a book called "Moneyball," which, without overstating it, changed his life. Comolli became fascinated with how the cost-conscious A's had found a way to identify players using statistical analysis. He was particularly awed by the team's general manager and the book's protagonist, Billy Beane.
"I tried to understand how they use numbers, both in terms of trading, recruitment and how they analyze their teams," Comolli says. "My interest in baseball increased by getting into more details."
Comolli began to wonder whether statistical analysis could change the way English soccer teams operated. Through a mutual friend, Comolli contacted Beane in 2005 and the two became close friends. Beane, a soccer fanatic, was eager to share his ideas.
For all the grief "Moneyball" gets for having turned baseball from a game focused on players into one in which players are statistical equations, the book and its theories have had a profound effect on sports -- and may one day revolutionize English soccer. In November, new Liverpool owner John Henry hired Comolli away from French Ligue 1 team Saint-Etienne and made him the most powerful statistically inclined front office executive in the English Premier League.
In 2005, Comolli had tried bringing "Moneyball" to the Premier League as the director of football at Totthenham Hotspur but was met with resistance. Though Comolli's moves at Tottenham -- which included the signing of Gareth Bale, Luka Modric, Benoit Assou-Ekotto and Younes Kaboul -- eventually helped the team reach the Champions League appearance for the first time last year, Comolli wasn't there to enjoy the success. He had been fired in 2008 in part because of his perceived radical ideas. Now with a supportive owner in Henry, Comolli will have autonomy to turn Liverpool into a soccer version of the Boston Red Sox.
"People seem to think, especially here in the UK, the 'Moneyball' concept is that you don't spend anything and you are successful," Comolli says. "It's not right. To me the 'Moneyball' concept also applies to what the Red Sox are doing. They've got a lot of resources that they use properly, they create value and are very competitive. There isn't only one way of applying the 'Moneyball' principles. There are a lot of ways. That's why I think if we do it well, we'll be able to compete against clubs that are spending more money than us."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During A's games, Billy Beane will often receive a simple email: "Hey, I'm watching your game on my computer."
That wouldn't be so peculiar if not for the fact that the sender was a Frenchman living several time zones away in Liverpool, England. In fact, it's not unusual for Damien Comolli to be watching an A's or Red Sox game at 3 a.m. When the English transfer window closed just before midnight on Aug. 31, Comolli, after having worked an 18-hour day to secure the sale of several players who had bloated the Liverpool payroll, had gone home and watched the Red Sox-Yankees game on his computer. The next night he stayed up until 4 a.m. watching the two teams.
"By virtue of his new employer he has to act like he likes Boston more than he likes Oakland now," Beane says. "I know better."
Without a doubt, Comolli's friendship with Beane has shaped his career. At first, the conversations with Beane were casual. Comolli learned that statistics could be used not only to analyze one's own team, but also for player procurement. Beane's approach even seemed even more fitting for English Premier League football, where the season champion is determined by the regular season standings. There was no uncertainty of a playoff system that Beane detested. And while there's no single soccer metric that is as important as on-base percentage, Comolli figured out that there was one number that correlated most with the teams at the top of the table: passing percentage. That stat became the principle from which Comolli bases his moves.
"Let's take the [San Francisco] Giants last year," Comolli explained. "After the season, and going into the playoffs, nobody thought they would raise their game like that and win the World Series. It was almost impossible to guess. But in football, I don't think that could happen. I think the best team over 38 games without playoffs always wins. And throughout the season you can almost track which are the best teams. And the best teams are the one who are most successful at passing the ball."
After their initial meeting, Comolli and Beane decided to take a trip together to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Beane was fascinated at how intense Comolli could be while watching games. Comolli noted every movement and analyzed every play. His mind worked like a computer. During breakfast at a hotel in Munich one day, Comolli, then fully engaged in the transfer window while still at Tottenham, closed three deals in three different languages with three different agents, which floored Beane.
"And I thought negotiating a contract with Scott Boras was tough," Beane jokes.
When Comolli was fired by Tottenham, Beane encouraged him to hold onto his beliefs, despite the harsh criticism Comolli received in England. Almost immediately after the Liverpool sale, Beane contacted his friend Henry -- who had tried to hire Beane as Boston general manager in 2003 -- and suggested he hire Comolli, who had taken a job with Saint-Etienne shortly after being fired at Spurs.
"I've got a pretty good feel for the type of executive and the type of system John wanted to run," Beane says. "I knew Damien and knew what he believed in and I thought it was the perfect match."
Less than two weeks later, Henry hired Comolli.
The first moves Comolli made after taking the Liverpool job, other than completely building the team's analytic department, which was non-existent prior to his arrival, was to hire scores of scouts -- which some would say would be anti-Moneyball. But by that time, the Moneyball ideologies had evolved. Despite what many thought, Moneyball was never about one simple principle such as OBP. It was about an approach.
When Comolli took the job at Liverpool, the club remarkably didn't have any scouts based in the UK. Such deficiencies, Comolli knew, would lead to a lack of data.
This summer Comolli spent $75 million on three British players (Charlie Adam, Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson) who he hoped would help improve on Liverpool's 75 percent passing percentage last year, which ranked seventh in the EPL. Comolli's evaluation of the three players hadn't simply been based on stats.
Though perhaps the biggest move Comolli has made at Liverpool was selling disgruntled forward Fernando Torres to Chelsea last January for an astounding $79.5 million. Torres, who had been one of the team's most dynamic players, had suffered in form after several injuries and had played only a bit part in Spain's World Cup win. Like Wenger, his mentor, Comolli was wary of waiting to long to sell the striker, and thus far his timing looks perfect. Torres has been seen as a massive disappointment since joining Chelsea.
"It's about creating value and making right decisions," Comolli says. "Base your decisions on something that is objective and not only subjective. And there are three aspects of that. One: The use of analytics. Two: The use of scouts. Three: Check background, check the personality and character and attitude. … I didn't invent anything. I watched how baseball teams acted. I thought it was an absolute waste of money and time and talent to not to try to use it in football."
About the only hiccup in the friendship has been that Beane, who had been a Tottenham fan prior to meeting Comolli, now must root for Liverpool. Beane tries to watch as many Liverpool matches as he can and he will often e-mail Comolli with his thoughts and analysis of the match less than an hour after it has ended.
"It sounds sacrilegious when you think about the passion some people have over one team or another, but I'm allowed to switch wherever Damien goes, which immediately torpedoes any credibility I have as a football fan," Beane says. "I'm a fan of executives. Damien knows I'm a closet Arsene Wenger fan anyway."
These days, Beane is the one often querying Comolli for information. Beane has determined that English football is far ahead of baseball in conditioning and nutrition, which may lead to developing what has become the Holy Grail for analysts: stats predicting games lost due to injury.
In the next week, Comolli will visit Beane in Oakland. Each year, the two spend time together, whether it's in Europe or in the States. Usually Beane tries to steer the conversation toward the EPL, though Comolli likes to focus on another passion: Oakland A's baseball.
Jorge Arangure is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.
Hard to imagine that we didn't have an analytic department (whatever it is) during Rafa's days at Liverpool. I thought he was possessed with numbers just as bad.
