He would make an excellent DoF going by his ruthlessness.
Ole Gunnar Solskjær | 2021/22 Discussion
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You were the one to bring 2015/16, I told you straight away that season was an anomaly given Leicester won the league by 10 points with a total tally of 81 points. The same points tally which Jose achieved couple of years later only for fans to turn their noses at. It was a freak season where City, Liverpool and Chelsea all under-performed.
Of course we don't, that's why results have to be judged relatively to other sides. I mentioned in my previous post that even though we did finish 2nd, that was not the correct assessment of the strength of PL clubs as Liverpool made the CL Final and were better than us.
Liverpool, City and Spurs improved massively (and continue to improve) because they have elite managers managing them while Jose was obviously past his sell by date. Their overall structure at the club is also miles better than us which is completely broken and they all have full backing of their respective boards. Not sure why you're repeating what we already know?
Stat models also suggested that United were a better side than the 6th place the table suggested in 2016/17, the following season the same models predicted us to be 3rd best side in the country which I already told you. Besides, stat model also predicted that type of results Ole was getting early on were clearly not sustainable which we have been seeing. You cannot use the stat models to bash one manager and ignore the same with current man in charge.
Joses' 'hoof and hope' football produced successive seasons of CL football, something which no manager since SAF has accomplished. His 3rd season meltdown was largely fueled by our boards inability to back him in the transfer market, if they had lost faith in him surely he should've been booted in the summer?
Besides, why are we acting surprised Jose didn't build for the future? He's the most short-term manager you can find, he'll buy experienced players using the chequebook with little thought for youth. But you and I already know this, so did the club.
This is the problem with this place, you cannot have a civil discussion without being accused of someones' fanboi. I could've also used colorful language to be needlessly aggressive with you but I didn't. If you can't help yourself then don't bother quoting me further. Once again under Joses' 2 full season we managed to secure CL place. Football wasn't pretty, but since when does Jose play good football?
Once again, I've already told you we knew what we were bargaining for when we hired Mourinho. He was going to use same tactics, same methodology which brought him success at other clubs. Just because he was our manager, he wasn't going to change his methods. And no matter how you dice it, he remains the most successful manager post SAF unless Ole or someone else can change that.
I still ask you to answer me this, what changed in space of 9 months where our squad went from under-achieving in 2017/18 season to not being good enough for the current man in-charge? Did they collectively decline during that period or they became useless as soon as previous season ended? Both Klopp and Pep had built their teams already, Spurs had consistently built a strong spine under Poch as well. There wasn't a huge investment by any of our rivals this window either, so what changed?
Same thing I said in another thread today, I like his strategy. He should definaltey move upstairs if things don't work out.
I like that Ole has no problem with sending away players that do not fit and that he takes a risk with this approach as he will be dependent on the youth this season. Not sure how much this is only him driving this rebuild forward or Ed and the Glazers finally realizing that they have been paying tons of money to players just not being good enough.
Let's see if his signings come good but it will take some months before a fair judgement can be made.
However, he does not come across as a clever enough manager being able to see the whole picture. He got his idea how to play without being able to adopt quickly enough.
I am not a fan of Mourinho and his football at all but at least other teams had a bit of a bad feeling playing against us as they knew while we will not be able to play them off the park it is always unpleasant to play against him.
Let's see if his signings come good but it will take some months before a fair judgement can be made.
However, he does not come across as a clever enough manager being able to see the whole picture. He got his idea how to play without being able to adopt quickly enough.
I am not a fan of Mourinho and his football at all but at least other teams had a bit of a bad feeling playing against us as they knew while we will not be able to play them off the park it is always unpleasant to play against him.
Many people on here would NOT like it: Ole is our DOF. He is planning long term, defines our style and identifies the targets accordingly. We are not going to hire a DOF because we have a manager now.
Comparing total points with different seasons is silly, it's only useful for that season. 2015/16 was not anomaly, 2014-15 was more or less same with Chelsea winning the league and City were just few points ahead of us. In both seasons Liverpool finished below Manutd. So yeah, different starting points for different managers. When Jose took over, his team was close to other teams in quality, when Ole took over his team is miles behind City and Liverpool.
I'm not repeating anything, I'm pointing out how Ole taking over ManUtd is so different from Jose taking over ManUtd. Jose was completely backed for 2 seasons and he wasn't convincing. Finished miles below City and CL was poor too.
Stat model suggested Manutd were 4th best (IIRC) in 2016-17, which is not far from truth. We were unlucky not to win many games, we created many chances and missed it. Also going by xG, we were 6th best in 2017-18, which was sort of proved with how half of the season was in 2018-19. We were in 6th position.
Same stat model also showed Ole got us 3rd most points in the league and should have got more points this season. Not sure where I'm using different criteria. Check the expected points for Ole's time in understat site, we were 3rd best.
And what did we achieve with those old players? Everyone knows 2nd season is always Jose's best season and we didnt anything. So Jose, using Jose's model didn't achieve anything significant in PL. We didn't challenge for PL/CL, he was completely backed for 2 seasons.
This is again the problem with these discussions, just because manager didn't get the signings he wanted doesn't mean he should lose it. Klopp, Pep, Poch all were not backed completely, they also failed to sign players they wanted. Klopp wanted to sign VVD in 2017 summer but he signed in 2018 winter, Pep lost bunch of players like Sanchez, Jorginho and signed Laporte/Mahrez much later. Did you see him throwing his toys out?
You are just making excuses for Jose's behavior instead of calling as it is, that his behavior was downright pathetic for a grown man.
Don't expect someone to hold back when you reply with 'agenda' 'fans like you lap it up' and more nonsense.
So something that worked for Jose didn't work. After spending so much money he didn't win PL, Jose wasn't hired and paid around 20 million to qualify for CL, he was signed to win PL/CL.
What has changed? Clubs around us, Liverpool went from top 4 team to undisputed top 2 team. Spurs made CL finals and signed proper midfielders, Arsenal finally opened up their transfer kitty and signed good players. All other clubs around us have improved compared to 9 months. Only Chelsea stagnated. Still I expect us to finish at least in 3rd position but if you can't see what has changed in 9 months then there isn't much to discuss.
Apart from other clubs, we have lost Herrera, sold Lukaku and relying on younger players to step up. We are taking short term hit for sure bit that's the approach club/ole believe is needed to move forward. Our squad is weaker as we didn't replace few players but we are banking on players with high potential, if they step up then the reward will be also higher.
Just because he got rid of Smalling does not mean he has turned it around. I think it is a mistake to sell Smalling at this particular period of time. He is still our third best defender and we need him if there is an injury. People talk about Tuanzabe but he has not proved himself in the PL at all. I personally do not think he is top class defender and keeping Smalling around would have been good idea. There are others who need to be off loaded before Smalling.
Its a loan deal,he can probably be recalled if we get too many injuries I would have thought?
That's because you're being obtuse.
Or maybe you are trying to be simpleton and can't look beyond 2nd place in the table.
I have made my points very clear, not sure what's so hard to understand.
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I'm sorry but I strongly disagree with this. The base at Chelsea and City was very strong with core players they already had at the club. I'm talking about likes of Fabregas, Costa, Azpi, Courtois, Aguero, Silva, Yaya, Kompany, De Bruyne etc. You understand the gist of it. Spurs with stability of Pochettino and shrewd transfer had also built up a strong spine of Lloris, Walker, Vertonghen, Alderweireld, Dembele, Son, Alli, Eriksen and Kane. Arsenal were pretty stable too with likes of Koscielny, Ozil, Sanchez in their ranks.
While the squad which van Gaal left had only one top player in form of De Gea. From defence to midfield to attack, it had to be rebuilt.The only team which needed as much rebuild as ours did were Liverpool. It goes without saying Liverpool and Klopp have done an exceptional job there.
My memory of Joses' first season is draws, that's all I can recall but I vividly remember us being extremely stable in his 2nd season. There were flurry of 4-0s too early on and he produced some big wins versus Top 6 sides. So while xG may not be high and we were unbelievably efficient, I'm confident our xGA would be pretty low compared to what we've seen under Ole.
Also, Oles' sample size is too small, and to draw a parallel with 2015/16 season. Chelsea, Spurs and Arsenal all collectively shat the bed towards the end of last season.
Once again, that's on the board and structure we have adopted at this club. Its antique and outdated, the shape of a squad should not work on whims and fancies of a manager. A DoF would've ensured the club follows a particular type of philosophy and the players along with the head coach/manager are recruited on those lines.
Where did I say that boards failure to back Jose justifies his behavior/attitude in 3rd season? He's a chequebook manager, if he doesn't get his way he loses the dressing room. This can be traced throughout his managerial career, so board set him up to implode and cost us a valuable season in the process.
This thread is an exercise to bash Mourinho. Once again, you've mistaken me for his fanboi. I am not, I'm only sticking up for him on here because I don't think everything that's wrong at the club can be pinned on him. We knew what we were bargaining for when we made that contract offer, the football, transfers, results, fallout we all knew what the outcome would be.
I don't disagree.
Overall, how other clubs are conducting their business is not within a managers' control. That's on the board for allowing rival clubs to leapfrog with the investment they made in last 3 windows. Nobody stopped them from spending big. If they had lost faith in Mourinhos' judgment of transfer market, then they could've hired a DoF and setup a transfer committee to help him out. If not, they could've sacked him and hired a fresh manager.
Also, you're confusing the 9 months window which I spoke about. It's from June 2018 to March-April 2019 and how quick the opinion on the squad changed.
My original point was Cafs' assessment of squad in the summer of 2018, how it went from being capable of more than 81 points to not being good enough for CL places around March-April of 2019 when Ole was struggling. Only Liverpool spent big last season. Arsenal added Torreria, Sokratis and Leno. Spurs didn't sign anyone whereas Chelsea replaced Courtois with Kepa and added Jorginho. This is what has bothered me all along, either Mourinho was a genius to extract that much performance from a shit squad or the squad wasn't as shit as it was made out to be.
Lets agree to disagree. There is no point, you keep saying this thread is to bash Jose, pinning everything on him and on the other side you keep making excuse for everything, blaming everyone but him. Board should have known, we knew beforehand what Jose was, board let others to overtake us. Nothing on Jose and his shit outdated methods or his transfers.
Also first paragraph and last paragraph sums the argument. Big up other clubs strength in 2015-16, play down the strength of clubs in 2018-19.
That’s right, turning it (the club) around will take more than a year.
I like Smalling as a player, yet I could appreciate why Southgate omitted him even from the squad, for clearly lesser players: If you want to play a certain way, he will impede your play. If you have Maguire and Lindelöf and want them to play off high pressure with Pogba or McTominay, if you want to allow Wan-Bissaka and Shaw to go upfield earlier in the build up play, and then you get an injury to Lindelöf or Maguire? Then with a Tuanzebe, a Jones or even a Rojo, you would have a less defensively solid CB, but be able to play the same way. With Smalling, WB would have to stay lower, both Pogba and McT would have to come low to get the ball out safely, we lose possession lower in the field, and win it back lower in the field.
Moving on Smalling is testimony to the will to build with a particular idea of football in mind, and one that is suitable to this club. Same goes for Lukaku, Sanchez and Fellaini. Even at the expense of handiness in the short term.
Honestly, it appears you don't even read what I say about the player anymore. You're just generalising from my view that hes not that good and using it to deflect from the topic at hand, which is Jose. Hate is a terriblly strong word. I don't hate any player, just so you remember for next time.
So you give Jose credit for the first season only, but nothing for the following year where we improved from 69 points to 81 points, with the 3rd best goal difference in the league, conceding only one goal more than Manchester City. He deserves no credit for this. In fact you say he took us backwards in this period. Its an interesting viewpoint, il give you that.
Nonsensical. Ole hasn't turned anything around yet and no, Woodward created the mess we are in and it started way before Jose came in. Except player relationships, Jose hasn't turned the club much worse than it would have been.
Anyways, OP checks out. So hey ho!!
Anyways, OP checks out. So hey ho!!
Yeah everyone is celebrating that Ole has turned it around by offloading Smalling. Must be too hard to say anything good about Ole.
Also you forgot your daily 'He can't manage big club' post.
Below in spoiler or at this link is a quite brilliant long read analysis from Bruce Schoenfeld at New York Times on Liverpool's transfer strategy during the Klopp era, which they also applied in the hiring of Klopp himself.
Its basically a very highly tuned and specified algorithm, which develops the parameters for each position within the Klopp system and way of playing, and then allows scouts to find players that fit the specifications. England's cricket One Day International squad undertook a similar strategy when they rebooted 4 years ago, and through playing a totally new way of playing, became world champions this summer .
I was quite skeptical of this approach before reading the details of such an approach but both examples are evidence that when you get the right people to implement such an approach, it works wonders. But you need a manager to know what he wants to do beforehand, and be fully confident that his approach will beat all the rest, if it's fully implemented.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/magazine/soccer-data-liverpool.html
How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory
By Bruce Schoenfeld
May 22, 2019
Liverpool’s Sadio Mané during the team’s Champions League semifinal against Barcelona on May 7. Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
The club is finishing a phenomenal season — thanks in part to an unrivaled reliance on analytics.
Liverpool’s Sadio Mané during the team’s Champions League semifinal against Barcelona on May 7.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
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.
Liverpool and Barcelona during the Champions League semifinal on May 7. Liverpool won the match, 4-0.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
Liverpool’s Joel Matip and Barcelona’s Luis Suarez collide during the Champions League semifinal.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
Fans at the semifinal on May 7.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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. Arsenal 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 Arsenal 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?
Mané clashes with Barcelona’s Sergi Roberto during the semifinal.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
About half an hour into a game at Anfield last January, the midfielder Naby Keitareceived 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.
Liverpool sold Philippe Coutinho (second from right) to Barcelona in 2018, helping it finance the acquisition of several new players.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
Liverpool’s manager Jurgen Klopp (wearing cap), Mohamed Salah (on Klopp’s right), and team celebrating their 4-0 win against Barcelona. Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory
By Bruce Schoenfeld
May 22, 2019
Liverpool’s Sadio Mané during the team’s Champions League semifinal against Barcelona on May 7. Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
The club is finishing a phenomenal season — thanks in part to an unrivaled reliance on analytics.
Liverpool’s Sadio Mané during the team’s Champions League semifinal against Barcelona on May 7.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
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.
Liverpool and Barcelona during the Champions League semifinal on May 7. Liverpool won the match, 4-0.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
Liverpool’s Joel Matip and Barcelona’s Luis Suarez collide during the Champions League semifinal.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
Fans at the semifinal on May 7.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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. Arsenal 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 Arsenal 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?
Mané clashes with Barcelona’s Sergi Roberto during the semifinal.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
About half an hour into a game at Anfield last January, the midfielder Naby Keitareceived 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.
Liverpool sold Philippe Coutinho (second from right) to Barcelona in 2018, helping it finance the acquisition of several new players.Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
Liverpool’s manager Jurgen Klopp (wearing cap), Mohamed Salah (on Klopp’s right), and team celebrating their 4-0 win against Barcelona. Joachim Ladefoged for The New York Times
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.
And somehow you said "I hate Jose".
I have explained why I said he took us backwards. First season team was playing well and unlucky not to win more games, second season it was all papering over cracks and it was about time everything opened up, and it did last season. When you don't play or have proper system, results are not sustainable.
I don't see how any manager can paper over cracks over the course of a season and still land 81 points. My view is the car crash of last season stems from pre season where he took on the board, they didn't get his defenders (rightly or wrongly) and certain influencial players fell out with him. I'd have backed the manager in those sorts or circumstances, not financially speaking but in terms of control over the players, but it culminated differently and he ended up sacked. Rightly so? Sure. But that was half a season of a mess, not 2.5 years.
We brought Jose in for results, not a rebuild. That was evident at the time too. We were just not relevant anymore and Jose at the very least made us relevant again when he took us to 81 points and 2nd place in year 2.
I don't have a qualm with anything you say about Jose for year 3. I just don't think he was a mess for 3 years.
This is one huge myth. Klopp spent 450mil euros in Liverpool.
I didn't say he was mess in all 3 years, I said overall he took us backwards. We were close to City, Liverpool and other clubs when he took over, by the time he was sacked, Liverpool and City were miles ahead.
So we brought Jose for results, not a rebuild. Ended up with nothing. Results is not just 2nd position, we didn't sign Jose to win Europa/league cup. We signed him to win PL/CL which he failed. For there was no rebuild, no results and the squad quality was also poor.
Jose made us relevant? Lets just say agree to disagree.
No, but there is a trend here that Ole is fully blameless from anything that will happen this season which is something I don't agree with. So far there's nothing that suggests he's not on the same line as the board regarding the squad so we can't excuse him by saying the board fecked up the squad as him. Here Stones says clearly he's happy with the squad as it's. If the manager agrees with the board ideas then I can't exclude him from the blaming game, which is something many here are preparing for.
There's enough to suggest he's not on the same line as the board, he's just (luckily) not in the habit of publicly dragging the board or the squad through the mud like Mourinho.
Just some things he said that the Ed/the board didn't manage (i.e. they're not on the same page regarding):
1. Any player that leaves needs to be replaced.
2. Transfer business needs to be done before the start of pre-season
The board have failed him on both. They didn't bring in a CM, they didn't replace Lukaku and it took them the entire transfer window to close the AWB and Maguire deals. Does that mean he's going to do a Mourinho and start saying stuff like "I'm not happy with this squad"? Of course not, that would do a real number on morale and since the transfer window has shut there's nothing anyone can do about it now anyway. Ole has recognised from the start that there's been far too much negativity surrounding the club which benefits nobody and will only ensure players won't want to come here so he aims to rectify that by not airing our dirty laundry. Take the Alexis situation for example. Ole has always been positive about him in during pressers saying stuff like "he works hard in training" and "he's a quality player" while it's obvious that he's actually trying to get rid of him (and many others).
Liverpool and City are miles ahead because they hired world class managers and gave them shit load of money.
If we hire Simeone tomorrow and give him 450m for the next three seasons he will not only challenge but I’d wager he could also win the PL.
Jose spent as much as Klopp and thats without losing any big players.
Giving Simeone 450 million wont change anything.
Wait...
That’s the same as Mourinho. So you’re saying Mourinho was backed as well?
He doesn't need to go full in public and says the board is shite and didn't bring him what he wants. He could just tell Woodward face to face that and express to him that he's not happy with the squad and we should have got more, but nothing proves that, as the tweet says, there's no more signings because Ole is happy with a squad as it's. It's not a quote made in public, it looks like an inside information from inside the club, which Luckhurst also reported. If the manager is happy with the squad as it's, then I can't exclude him from the blame game, like many are preparing to for this upcoming season. It's all good being positive in the media about anything but let's be honest this isn't enough to win or play well.
As far as I'm concerned the 2 quotes you mentioned were before the summer business started ? Honestly I don't find any evidence so far that suggests he's not on the same line as the board except people hoping for that. Till something emerges from inside the club that proves that what Stones reported is nonsense, then putting excuses for him as a manager regarding what the board did in the summer doesn't have a base.
If Ole does well I'll praise him and if he does bad I'll criticize him without any excuses if it's true that he's happy with the current squad. What's going on here is some people wanting to praise him for the good and blame the board fully and totally for any upcoming loss.
1. I'm liking what I'm seeing in transfer activity, both in and out.
2. If not for the penalties business soap opera we could be joint top.
3. There's tentative evidence of a fast fluid attacking shape.
4. I worry about Ole's fearful frozen expression when we need a B plan.
In conclusion, if there's more of 1 and 3 he deserves more strategic patience.
2. If not for the penalties business soap opera we could be joint top.
3. There's tentative evidence of a fast fluid attacking shape.
4. I worry about Ole's fearful frozen expression when we need a B plan.
In conclusion, if there's more of 1 and 3 he deserves more strategic patience.
Simeone won La Liga and finished before Real or Barca on much smaller budget, inheriting a team that was inferior to United let alone compared to them.
Not to mention 2 CL finals and EL.
If you don’t believe Klopp isn’t the reason behind Liverpool’s success you are dead wrong.
Hiring a world class manager and giving him resources to compete is probably the only way now if we want to challenge. Everything else is romanticism.
Not sure how you read posts, I said Klopp is the biggest reason for Liverpool's success. I also said Simeone won't change anything as football is moving towards more attacking game. Defensive managers will drop many points to win the league. He can achieve something in CL as it's a cup competition, I doubt he will beating this City/Liverpool team who are getting 95+ points.
i dont disagree but you can only get rid of players who have offers and who want to go the club asking for them. Beggars cant be choosers.
He’s doing quite well in a league that has two better teams than Liverpool and City, with a fraction of their budget - how do you explain that?
Hmm, unless you mean they were better than Liverpool and City, that's simply untrue.
Since Fergie retired Barca and Real have been better than both City and Pool.
Yeah but right now they're not, that's all I'm sayin'.
I would explain that by saying the two better teams you mentioned are not better than Liverpool and City.
In last 5 years, Atletico Madrid gained more than 80 points once, in last 6 years twice. That's not good enough to win La Liga and not good enough to win PL.
Let’s see if they keep it up this season. Barca imploded last year against Pool otherwise both Real and Barca record against City and Pool is quite impressive. Also both Barca and Real score more points than either team bat last season.
You better check the H2H between the teams in CL since Fergie retired then. Apart from last season both Barca and Real were comfortably better.
Real last year blip was on missing Ronaldo. Athletico finished ahead of them. Barca has Messi going strong - no one at Liverpool or City can compare to him when on fire.
You conveniently missed the part being fraction of their budget. You saw what happened when Klopp was given ton of money. Without them and Van Dijk, Salah etc he wouldn’t finish on 97 points.
The whole point of internal communication is that it's invisible to the outside world. Leaking stuff to the likes of Luckhurst is, again, simple PR business, and is standard practice for Ed as we all know. Do you really think Ed would feed info about how Ole isn't happy with him/the board to the press? Come on. Nothing negative ever gets out about the board or Ed unless you have a manager like Mourinho who leaks stuff to the press himself (via Castles I believe it was?). I don't see Ole doing stuff like that.
Obviously being positive alone isn't going to win us trophies but at least it helps in fixing the negative image the club have gotten post-SAF.
Yes the quotes are from before pre-season which is why they show what Ole really wanted. It shows Ole went into PR-mode when it became obvious the board couldn't deliver.
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