Interesting bit on on Ian Graham's involvement in recommending Coutinho, Salah and Keita + 'revelation' that the Coutinho money financed the Alisson, van Dijk and Fabinho moves
Ian Graham, the director of research for Liverpool Football Club.
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 Arsenal. 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, Mohammed 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.”
Ian Graham, the director of research for Liverpool Football Club.
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 Arsenal. 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, Mohammed 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.”
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