A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make a football team successful, and many of the off-the-feild contributors to that success are often overlooked. Well, publicly at least.
But beyond the manager, his staff and players, there are also fitness coaches, nutritionists, physiotherapists, scouts, analysts and now more commonly, data scientists.
PhDs and football don’t traditionally go hand in hand, and for many years the benefits of analytics in the game were either overlooked or sometimes even ridiculed. Yet now a data science department is considered a must-have for any forward-thinking football club.
The key brains within such departments remain unheralded in the public eye, often working frantically behind the scenes, shaping key decisions both in terms of tactics and transfers.
Yet despite that, their influence is rarely credited. This week though was one of the rare occasions when some of the brightest academics working within the game came together to celebrate their success and reveal some of the secrets behind their achievements.
At Wembley on Tuesday, StatsBomb held their revered annual Conference. The company has established itself as one of the industry leaders when it comes to football data and analysis. They put on a yearly event which brings together industry leaders to share insights from the most forward-thinking and data-driven sports organisations around the world.
One of the standout presenters in this year’s edition was William Spearman, a lead data scientist at Liverpool. He operates as part of a six-man team that also contains respected names such as Dafydd Steele, Mark Stevenson, Mark Howlett and Ian Graham. All were in attendance at the event in Wembley, as was Michael Edwards, Liverpool’s renowned former Sporting Director.
The Liverpool contingent also attended last year’s conference where director of research Graham presented a talk covering a range of interesting topics, including a theory on player acquisitions, and why there are six reasons a transfer can often fail.
Spearman’s own talk centred around the benefits of computational algorithms and simulations which can help aid decisions in the transfer market. The finer details of such talks are not able to be disclosed in full, which is understandable given the confidential nature of football at the highest level and indeed the fine margins that often prove decisive in battles for honours at the top.
However, other intriguing work of Spearman’s is already firmly in the public domain, the most notable of which is the pioneering work he released on the concept of ‘pitch control’. An oversimplified explanation of the same is that it’s a concept for measuring who has control over areas of the pitch, although Spearman explained the idea much more clearly himself in an interview with Liverpoolfc.com back in February.
“Basically, it’s just the regions of the pitch that one player or a team are in control of, so, if a team were to try to pass to that point, that team would be in control. It shows how you can close off space, and how you can create space with runs.
“It’s the fundamental notion of how you control space and how space is valuable. We call it ‘off-ball scoring opportunity, which is an extension of the idea of pitch control.”
The ideas and work undertaken by the likes of Spearman and his colleagues has become one of the big secret weapons behind Liverpool’s success, but Spearman admits it’s been an unusual journey to get to where he is.
In that same interview with the club’s official website earlier in the year, he said, “Unlike many people working in football, I grew up being really bad at most team sports, I still am, and that’s probably not a surprise given that I am one of the nerds of the place!
“I was much more focused on individual sports and science and maths. I was in my early 20s when I first got interested in team sports and I started watching American football. I had friends in Boston and I became a huge fan of the New England Patriots.
“The thing I’d really enjoyed about physics was working on a problem that there’s no established solution for. 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.
He elaborated further, “It’s a much more complex sport and that’s what makes it much more interesting to me. You’ve got 22 players on a large field. There is a high degree of coherence to their interactions yet it is individual brilliance that is often decisive.
“In American football the play starts and stops and you can measure what happened at the end of it. But in football, goals are relatively rare so you have to try to quantify how you get to those places where you can score.
“You look at things where you don’t have a distinct outcome, you look at things where it’s not clear if it was good or bad. It’s just a beautiful game and you can enjoy it on so many levels. Just watching it, it’s great seeing the fantastic goals and the great passes, but it just has so much depth to it.”
While Spearman and his colleagues may spend the bulk of their time out of the spotlight, they’ve played key roles in assembling an elite Liverpool side who’ve scooped every top honour possible in recent years, and they’ll continue to play an important role in the Reds’ success going forward too.
