Liverpool have moved to appoint Will Spearman as the club’s new director of research.
Spearman, who is currently the Reds’ lead data scientist, has been promoted to the new role and will begin his post from May. He will replace Dr Ian Graham, who had previously held the role since 2012.
Dr Graham has been a highly influential figure at Liverpool since his appointment. He announced his intention to leave Anfield back in November, but agreed to continue to work until May to give the club time to find a successor.
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Liverpool hired Dr Graham in 2012, and he has been a key figure behind the scenes on Merseyside. He has also been important to the club’s transfer policy, as well as other forms of analysis.
Dr Graham was one of the key people at the club behind the decision to sign Naby Keita. The Reds signed the midfielder from RB Leipzig in 2017, with the move being formally completed a year later, but there was interest much earlier than that.
A report in the New York Times explains how Dr Graham, using his research and statistics, recommended that Liverpool sign Keita back in 2016. It was claimed that the Reds’ director of research saw Keita as a “phenomenon” - with him also having a major say on the decision to move for Mohamed Salah from Roma in 2017.
Spearman will now take on the responsibility of head of research at Liverpool from May onwards. But what do we know about him?
Since initially joining the club in 2018, Spearman has been involved in a number of projects within the club. This ranges from individual match analysis, all the way up to transfers and scouting.
He holds a doctorate in physics which he earned from Harvard University. And if that wasn’t enough, Dr Spearman has also worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.
According to Training Ground Guru, Spearman is "at the vanguard of a new breed of practitioners who have brought advanced mathematics and physics into English football." He previously helped launch HUDL, developing a model to quantify the control of space on the pitch in football, a role that brought him to the attention of Liverpool.
In an interview with the club last year, Spearman explained where his love for football came from.
“You’ve got 22 players on a large field,” he told Liverpoolfc.com last year. “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.
“As I started playing with the data and watching as a fan I fell more in love with it and over time it became the primary sport I was interested in, pretty quickly supplanting my initial interest in American football.”
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