The words 'sabermetrics', 'baseball', and 'liverpool' all in the same article.
Hollywood-style plots would be bad box office at Liverpool
Anfield's new owners appear to subscribe to the Oakland A's philosophy that winning teams can be built on the cheap
Paul Hayward guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 October 2010 14.22 BST Article history
Coming soon to a movie theatre near you: Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, the story of how the trampled-on Oakland Athletics rocked baseball using statistical models to unearth buried talent and win for the little guy. Coming just as fast to Anfield, by the looks of it: a Premier League variant to stop Liverpool spending £20.3m on another Robbie Keane and £17m on Alberto Aquilani when better software and a lower payroll would do.
Trace the movements of Liverpool's new American owner before Tom Hicks and George Gillett were finally ousted and they indicate the adoption of the sabermetrics talent-spotting model the men behind New England Sports Ventures copied from the Oakland A's at Boston's Red Sox, the Rip Van Winkle of major franchises.
Liverpool's new proprietors are already talking as if the home run they hit at Fenway Park can send a second ball fizzing across the Mersey.
Two reconnaissance stops were the clue. At Fulham, where Roy Hodgson, coincidentally, was manager, success sprang from the restoration of stalled careers – Danny Murphy, Bobby Zamora, Zoltan Gera – and the digging out of hidden treasure (Brede Hangeland). At Arsenal, NESV was touring the Bloomingdales of worldwide scouting: a club where analytical models were so ingrained that Arsène Wenger shipped out Gilberto Silva for taking a fraction of a second longer to redistribute the ball than he had a season earlier.
For all its beauty Arsenal's playing style is based on a dictatorial imposition of geometrical principles, and Gilberto was slowing up the slick ice hockey pace, so out he went. There is a universe of difference, though, between using empirical evidence in the service of art and trying to build a title-winning side on the cheap, which is what many Liverpool supporters will fear NESV is trying to do.
"At the Red Sox we invested a lot in management and the scouting system," says Tom Werner, the NESV chairman. "We believe the foundation of any good sports club has to be the experience, valuation and understanding of scouting." Aghast at Liverpool's £103m wage bill and £260m gross spend between 2003 and 2010 (the league's fourth highest), these value-hunters are returning to a template authored by Billy Beane, Oakland's general manager, which said, in the starkest terms, the world is full of bargains and game?changers whose brilliance is concealed by ignorance or circumstance.
Without salvation, sport would be shorn of one of its most reliably corny plot lines. With the fall has to come the possibility of an ascent, of redemption. Except that football can't be reduced to a set of mathematical criteria in the style of baseball or the NFL, though some have already tried.
Prozone, a useful tool, will yield insights into ground eaten up or pass completions but it tells us little about temperament, courage, dedication or the ability some players have (and others lack) to cope with the demands emanating from 70,000 spectators.
Bill James, who devised the sabermetrics statistics Beane put into operation, wrote in the 1985 edition of his Baseball Abstract: "I didn't care about the statistics in anything else. I didn't, and don't pay attention to statistics on the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don't start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that? It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language."
Good luck with that. The same is demonstrably not true of football. Hodgson has already displayed his talent for spotting a good 'un lower down, and will do so again at Liverpool, where he may have no choice. But baseball players are measured by a narrow range of skills. Pitching and batting are easily monitored by results. Speak to any Premier League manager and he will tell you the promising 17-year-old you once saw light up his stadium was cut because he lacked the necessary character to survive in the first-team squad. In time NESV may find that some of the people making these judgments are really quite good at what they do.
In football, players who slide down from the top of the pole tend not to rise so high again. Glenn Hoddle's second?chance academy in Spain, a laudable initiative, is not hiring planes to fly reprogrammed discards back to the Premier League.
The urge in matters of scouting is to defend not a computer model but the human eye, intuition, knowledge, the moment of revelation. There was no Moneyball when Liverpool spotted Kevin Keegan or Alan Hansen or when Manchester United, to quote Sir Alex Ferguson, first saw on a parks pitch a young, spindly Ryan Giggs – "a dog chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind".
