I accidentally stumbled into the world of entrepreneurship and the internet in the late 1990s. We created businesses that relied on data and upended a marketing orthodoxy made famous by John Wanamaker when he said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In that new digital realm we measured our marketing spend in real time, to the penny, and were able to calculate the return on that spend immediately. This precision mentality, coupled with genuinely meritocratic cultures, created workplaces that have changed the business landscape beyond recognition. The culture pioneered at places such as lastminute.com and match.com are now commonplace but 20 years ago were unique.
When we came to football ownership 18 months ago I was interested to understand how a similar focus on the relative importance of culture and data science could improve Grimsby Town. Having read around the subject, in my view the holy trinity of books on data and football are: The Numbers Game, by Chris Anderson and David Sally; Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski; and Football Hackers, by Christoph Biermann. Moneyball by Michael Lewis tells the story of the data strategy that helped the Oakland Athletics to success in 2002 through recruiting “undervalued” players. Although I hoped this would be true for football, Anderson and Sally conclude that the similarity between baseball and football is weak. In football, there are too many variables. They write: “We have examined tens of thousands of European league and cup games over the course of a hundred years … and we have come to the conclusion that football is basically a 50/50 game. Half of it is luck and half of it is skill.”
