Liverpool fans may expect the club to have highly-intelligent people working behind the scenes at the club - but that might not extend to a scientist with a PhD in physics from Harvard.
William Spearman, who joined the Reds in March 2018, has taken an unusual route into football.
Now working as Liverpool ’s lead data scientist, he first started looking into sports analytics shortly after working on the project to discover the Higgs boson particle at CERN.
Born in Chicago, Spearman began by delving into American football and baseball - but it was football that ultimately captured his imagination.
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“The thing I’d really enjoyed about physics was working on a problem that there’s no established solution for,” he told Liverpoolfc.com .
“But towards the end of my PhD, I found myself repeating the same type of analysis others had done previously.
“I wanted to work in an area that wasn’t as established, so sports data seemed really interesting to me.
“I was very interested to learn about the work being done in American football and baseball and then I got my first taste of proper football data and that was just fascinating.
“It’s a much more complex sport and that’s what makes it much more interesting to me.”
As his appreciation of the beautiful game continued to grow, Spearman’s next step to joining the Reds on Merseyside came when he and a friend decided to analyse the use of space within football.
Termed 'pitch control', the work demonstrated how teams can close off and create space through their collective movement throughout a game.
It was during a London presentation of his analysis in 2016 that Spearman met Liverpool’s research team - Ian Graham, Tim Waskett and Dafydd Steele - who also came from similar academic backgrounds.
“I remember thinking, ‘that’s cool, there are two physicists and a mathematician working for a football club', and that’s actually when I first started following Liverpool because they had people like me working for the club,” Spearman said.
“I realised then that by coming at this from a new perspective we can really develop some interesting ideas on the mathematical modelling side with the data. It was really exciting.”
Since joining Liverpool in 2018, Spearman’s skills have been used in pre and post-match analysis, as well as recruitment, and have coincided with the club lifting both the Premier League and Champions League.
Through the use of in-depth analytical tools, he provides a data breakdown of both Liverpool and opposition players and produces a statistical perspective on each match, which is then used by the club’s analysts and Jurgen Klopp’s team.
Spearman also develops data models that are used and analysed when studying possible targets in the recruitment process.
Having got on well with Liverpool’s research team, when a job arose at the club, Spearman took the decision to move to England.
“I was aware that Ian was one of the best in the business and that his team was one of the best. I’d fallen in love with the football data and I wanted to work on it as much as I could,” he said.
“It was a big life change but I wanted the opportunity to make an impact that is tangible.
“For me, I enjoy finding fulfilment in other ways: challenging questions, doing something that is exciting for people, being involved in something that is bigger than myself.
“Seeing the passion of Liverpool fans, the passion of sports fans, that was really exciting to me.”
