Edwards went on to eulogise about his assistant,
Julian Ward, who was taking over as sporting director, while praising his other colleagues in the recruitment department as “geniuses… without doubt the best in their field in world football.” And Klopp? “Being manager of Liverpool is probably harder than playing (the shirt hangs heavy, so they say), but he has delivered so much joy to the fans and reasserted so many of the club’s historical values that he will go down in history as one of the club’s managerial greats.”
Rodgers, in contrast, had seen Edwards as a threat to his authority at a time when the workings of Liverpool’s “transfer committee” had created all sorts of politics behind the scenes. It was an awkward title and an awkward time. Rodgers was not a fan of the setup and it became a source of regret inside Anfield that the club’s owner had ever coined the name.
In reality, it was the kind of operation that could have been found at just about every major club, where there was an understanding that the manager was too busy to go on overseas scouting missions himself and become embroiled in negotiations that could take months. Edwards was part of a group that included the then chief executive, Ian Ayre, along with the analytics team, senior coaching and scouting staff and sometimes representatives of the club’s commercial department.
Rodgers still had the power to veto transfers and, early on, was probably entitled to question Edwards’ knowledge. Liverpool had made a flurry of signings —
Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto and Tiago Ilori, to name but three — who passed through Anfield without making a favourable impact. Lazar Markovic was the most expensive failure, costing £20m, and not everyone appreciated Edwards’ occasionally blunt, very matter-of-fact manner.
Markovic cost Liverpool over £1m per league appearance (Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Scouts were moved out, some unhappily. Mel Johnson, the talent-spotter who had recommended
Jordan Henderson, claimed in one interview that Liverpool missed out on
Dele Alli because the club relied on their “computer and stats-led” approach. The sport, Johnson complained, was “not played on a computer”, pointing out that experienced football people were being edged out. “Some of these IT guys have come straight out of university and landed jobs at top clubs, despite having no football background whatsoever.”
The politics eventually contributed to Rodgers, now at
Celtic, losing his job on Merseyside. Ultimately, though, he might have to accept that he underestimated Edwards, particularly when it came to the £29m signing of Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim.
Rodgers had not been keen on Firmino whereas Edwards and the scouting team were certain the Brazilian would be an ideal wearer of Liverpool’s colours. Chief scout Barry Hunter had tracked him in Germany and the numbers showed how, by being involved in 45 league goals in the two seasons up to 2015, Firmino was the second-highest performing Brazilian in Europe, second only to Neymar, then at Paris Saint-Germain. Rodgers remained unconvinced and, to begin with, Firmino was used on the right wing.
But it didn’t work out badly. “One of the questions I always get asked is: ‘Who was/is your favourite player?’,” Edwards wrote in his open letter. “That’s a really difficult question to answer, so I won’t even try. All I will say is my dog is called Bobby.”
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When Barry Fry was asked if he had any particular memories of Michael Edwards, the former Peterborough United manager had to apologise.
“I’m embarrassed to say no,” Fry, now the League One side’s director of football, told
The Athletic. “I don’t remember the boy at all, I’m sorry.”
Edwards had been part of a junior football academy in Southampton before being recommended to Peterborough for their youth system, going on to sign a two-year apprenticeship at London Road.
“Probably not the most talented, but he worked hard,” is the verdict of one former team-mate. “A proper squad player, who made the best of what he’d got. He was never going to be a star but he was always quite dependable. And very clever. He was probably old for his time, the way he thought about everything and the way he spoke. You could tell he had a good head on his shoulders.”
Edwards was a right-back who would occasionally be moved into a holding midfield role and, though he was not regarded as loud or a shouter, there was one occasion when he turned on two team-mates and accused them of thinking they were “big-time”.
“There were two colleges in the area,” another former Peterborough player says. “Some of us — the ones who never got the better qualifications — went to Huntingdon College. Michael went to Cambridge to do leisure and tourism with the more intelligent lads, one day a week. Academically, he was very able. On the pitch, you could see he understood the game.”
It didn’t work out, though. Edwards left Peterborough without making a first-team appearance and had to make a new career for himself. He went back to college and enrolled for university, obtaining a degree in business management and informatics. He returned to Peterborough to start his first teaching job in the town, but colleagues say he missed being around football and was not enthused by his new profession.
His breakthrough came in 2003 when Portsmouth agreed to take on Prozone, the football data company. Other clubs had already signed up and Simon Wilson, one of Edwards’ former Peterborough team-mates, was in the relevant department at nearby Southampton.
“I said to Simon we had won a contract with Portsmouth and needed an analyst,” Barry McNeill, then Prozone’s business development manager, says. “He rolled off a few names and said, ‘There’s one guy I know who’s probably not happy where he is, why don’t you have a chat with him?’.”
Edwards was in his early twenties. “We found him working as an IT teacher,” McNeill says. “He clearly had pretty low motivation for that vocation. I interviewed him at a service station between Peterborough and the M1. I explained Prozone, showed him the technology and within a month he was on-site at Portsmouth’s training ground.”
Though Edwards might not have enjoyed teaching, McNeill thinks the experience hardened him for the football business. “The first few years (of teaching) are the toughest because you are totally out of your depth. You need a spine. That was probably great preparation.”
This was a time when data was still relatively new to football and, all these years later, it is strange to hear one of Edwards’ fellow analysts say that “it was only The Lying Rag on a Monday that had passing and possession stats”.
Redknapp had been persuaded by his assistant, Jim Smith, that Prozone was worth a go. Smith had been the first-ever manager to take it on at Derby County. Steve McClaren, one of Smith’s assistants at
Derby, then took it to
Manchester United. Sam Allardyce, then at
Bolton Wanderers, was another advocate. And, as soon as word got out that Sir Alex Ferguson was using it at Old Trafford, other clubs started to follow.
“I would be in Sam’s (Allardyce) office after games,” McNeill says. “If they had beaten Portsmouth, Sam would say to Harry, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why have you not got this? Why don’t you have it? It is as expensive as your cheapest squad player’. He would almost embarrass people to jump on the bandwagon. Harry would have taken a lot more of that from his peers and Jim Smith would have been having a word in his ear.”
Even so, it took a while for Redknapp to get to grips with it.
“There is a famous story where ‘Eddie’ is trying to get through to Harry,” one of Edwards’ former associates says. “This is folklore in analyst circles. Harry said, ‘Does your computer say we are going to win today?’. Eddie said ‘yes’ quite flippantly. They lost and Harry quipped, ‘Maybe your computer can play next time’. Nobody even knows if it is true, but we all repeat it.”
Smith, left, convinced Redknapp that Prozone was the future (Matthew Lewis/Getty Images)
In Edwards’ early days, Redknapp called to ask why he could not get anything out of a CD-ROM filled with player data. It turned out Redknapp had put it into the CD player of his car.
Edwards had his own office at Portsmouth and was of an age when he could mix with the players without it seeming unusual. “On the team bus, for example, he would be with the lads and we would play Mario Kart,” Gary O’Neil, their former midfielder, says. “You might have an eight-person league and Ed would be in it. He didn’t overstep the line, though. He wouldn’t be on lads’ nights out because he was, technically, staff. We were good friends and he came to my wedding.”
O’Neil, now the manager of
Wolves, remembers Redknapp never previously being stats-oriented, but something must have gone right because Edwards followed Portsmouth’s manager to Spurs in 2009.
“Michael came to Portsmouth as a very young analyst,” Redknapp says. “I remember a massive game, the year we stayed up (2005-06), at
Fulham. We were second-bottom and he put this video together to play on the coach. He was scared to show it because it took the mickey out of me. I thought it was a great laugh. He was a smashing lad and when I went to Tottenham I took him with me.”
Edwards stayed at White Hart Lane for almost two years before Damien Comolli, then Liverpool’s director of football, headhunted him as part of FSG’s instructions to implement a new data-led approach, in keeping with their management of baseball’s Boston Red Sox.
Comolli had previously been at Spurs, whose chairman, Daniel Levy, was dismayed to discover Liverpool had taken away another of their key men.
Spurs had an exclusive agreement at the time with a data company called Decision Technology and Liverpool wanted to see if they could muscle in. Edwards, however, persuaded his new bosses to leave Decision Technology alone and target Dr Ian Graham, the data scientist who helped run their operation.
The two men were on the same flight to an analytics conference in Boston, Massachusetts. It was an eight-hour flight and, 37,000 feet in the air, Edwards convinced Graham to join him as Liverpool’s head of research. The task was aided by the fact Graham was a boyhood Liverpool supporter. Graham, who held a Cambridge doctorate in theoretical physics, informed Spurs when he returned to England and that began a working relationship that continues to this day.
Graham took a key role at Anfield until quitting in November 2022, Liverpool’s worst season of the Klopp era, to start his own venture. A couple of months later,
he launched Ludonautics, a sports advisory business, and was reunited with the man with whom he had shared so many professional highs. Edwards took a consultancy role, giving him a level of independence that was not always there during his years at Anfield.
What people sometimes forget about Klopp’s title-winning season at Anfield is they did it while spending considerably less than the majority of Premier League clubs.
Liverpool’s net transfer spend of £92.4m from the previous five years was less than
Watford’s, not even half that of
Brighton & Hove Albion or
Aston Villa and a fair bit behind Mike Ashley’s Newcastle United. There was only
Crystal Palace,
Sheffield United,
Southampton and
Norwich City from England’s top division with a lower net spend in that time. Manchester City’s total was £505.6m, Manchester United’s £378.9m. And that, in no small part, was due to Edwards’ expertise.
All of which makes it easier to understand why Liverpool have been almost obsessive in their attempts to persuade him to return to the club.
As one person with inside knowledge of analytics told
The Athletic in 2020, speaking anonymously to protect their relationships: “They have barely had a failed signing. I don’t think that can continue, I don’t think anyone is that good. If you get 15 out of 15 transfers right, it can’t always be that way. He (Edwards) is over-performing and it will regress to a mean at some point.”
It was certainly a far cry from the time, in 2017, when an online petition was set up by a disgruntled Liverpool fan campaigning for Edwards to be sacked. The petition rustled up 36 votes and the first comment — “he’s useless, just useless” — did not age well.
It was Edwards who convinced Liverpool about the potential of
Andy Robertson at
Hull City to flourish at a higher level and become one of the outstanding full-backs in world football.
It was Edwards again who insisted when Barcelona signed Coutinho in 2018 that a one-off clause was written into the deal to stipulate that the Catalan club would have to pay a £100m premium to sign any other Liverpool player over the following two years. He knew Barca might come after their elite players and had the foresight to make sure it could not happen unless it meant some mind-boggling sums.
Colleagues talk about the period in 2018 when Edwards had it in mind that Real Madrid, their opponents in that season’s Champions League final, might increasingly be attracted to the idea of signing Salah, Firmino or Mane. Liverpool’s response was to tie all three to new contracts, none with release clauses.
Michael Edwards (circled) in the 2019 Champions League celebrations (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Edwards can be tough. He was unflinching when Can, coming to the end of his contract, told the club he would sign a new one but wanted a release clause in it. There was a stand-off. Edwards refused to budge and Can was allowed to leave on a free transfer rather than the club setting a precedent.
What will never change, it seems, is Edwards’ reticence when it comes to letting us hear what his voice sounds like.
“You’d never imagine the guy sat in the tiny Prozone portacabin at Portsmouth would go on to be the guy who plays such a big role at the biggest club in the world,” says O’Neil.
Good luck, too, trying to find a photo of Edwards on the pitch with the Champions League trophy from the night Liverpool beat Tottenham to become six-time European Cup winners, adding Madrid, 2019, to the list of Istanbul, 2005, as well as Rome, 1977 and 1984, plus Wembley, 1978, and Paris, 1981.
Klopp invited all his staff onto the podium to join in the celebrations. Edwards, however, preferred to keep to the edges and take photographs of the jubilant Liverpool supporters. He consoled some of his former colleagues from Tottenham, including Levy, and helped make sure Liverpool’s kit man got a picture with the trophy.
Then the quiet man of Anfield disappeared into the background, just the way he likes it.