Liverpool’s outgoing director of research says that the data points to the Reds not being as bad as some people may think this season.
Dr Ian Graham, credited as one of the key components of the data and recruitment revolution that took place at Liverpool following the takeover by Fenway Sports Group in 2010, is to leave his position with the club at the end of this season.
Another key member of the Reds data team, Will Spearman, will assume Dr Graham’s responsibilities from next season and will likely have plenty to digest given Liverpool’s on-pitch struggles in 2022/23 when compared to their remarkable feats of 2021/22, where they came close to claiming what would have been an unprecedented quadruple.
The Reds finished on 92 points in the Premier League last season but lost out on the title on the final day to Manchester City. Now, with just 15 games remaining and sitting seventh, and having claimed just 36 points and facing the very real prospect of of missing out on the top four and Champions League qualification, the best points haul Liverpool could manage now with a 15-win streak would be 81 points, 11 less than last season’s total.
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There have been plenty of suggestions as to why the drop off has been so stark, with the lack of action in the transfer market when it came to addressing deficiencies in midfield and defence near the top of may peoples’ lists.
But Dr Graham, speaking at the Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit in London on Wednesday, claimed that things may not be as bad as some may think.
Dr Graham said: “In this situation when the team has been going through a difficult time but the underlying numbers or underlying performances aren’t as bad as results would suggest, that is the time when it is nice to be the data person as it is a very easy message to sell inside the club that we aren’t as bad as everyone says we are and we’re not as bad as even you may think we are.
“Given the difficulties we’ve had achieving results, our underlying performances are good. And in the long term we should worry about underlying performance and not the results in the last three games.
“I think it was Arsene Wenger that said he wasn’t interested in the result of the next game, he was interested in the result of the next 10 games.
“It is a much more difficult message to sell when we have had a season like last season where the message was we weren’t a 90-plus points team. Very few teams in history have underlying performances that are 90-point performances, so that message of ‘we’re not as good as you might think we are’ based purely on results is a little bit more difficult to sell.
“Inside a club, when we are doing worse than performances suggest, is the time to get people onside as you have got a very positive message that very few other people in the club are giving.
“When future results reflect the underlying performance that gives some basis for you to say ‘look, the data analysis has some grounding in reality’. I’m not saying our performance was good against Real Madrid but some of those goals had large elements of luck or unexplained variants included in them."
Graham, who wasn’t quizzed on the reasons for his Liverpool departure during the interview, revealed that his conversations with the Reds’ coaching staff was limited and that they key to implementing the data analysis came from how the message was relayed to coaching staff and how it manifested itself out on the training ground.
“At Liverpool we are in a lucky situation where our owners come from a quantitative background so I can explain things in technical terms to our owners,” said Dr Graham.
“My old boss (Michael Edwards) who was the sporting director also had that technical background which made the gap a lot smaller to bridge between technical language and football language.
“I rarely spoke to the coaching staff, all of our analysis went in detail to our video analysis department, our sports science department, and they used their expertise to translate that into a message that was much more easily digestible for the coaches.
“The coaches fundamentally did not care about data analysis, and nor should they, because they have 10 other more important things to worry about. As long as they received the correct message that the data analysis was telling them, that was the important thing.
“All that came very easily at Liverpool.”
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