Graham championed the signing of Naby Keïta but his five years at the club were marred by injury and a loss of form CREDIT: PETER POWELL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Klopp, the book records, first wanted Mario Götze over Mané and initially preferred Julian Brandt to Salah, although when I point that out, Graham is defensive of Klopp. “You are falling foul of hindsight,” he says. “When we were having those discussions, you cannot take anything from their future careers into account.” Both the German players, says Graham, were on the list and worthy of consideration. The difference was that, unlike Rodgers, Klopp was ready to be persuaded.
‘Better to be a serious nerd than a frivolous nerd’
Graham is different to the characters one usually encounters in football. He is not interested in burnishing reputations or anything else that gets in the way of identifying any error that, once eliminated, will improve his model. It would be fair to say he is no more likely to turn up for an interview in a pair of Balenciagas than he is to ignore standard deviation. Although he has certainly not forgotten any of the vitriol directed at him or Edwards over the years by football people or journalists.
Much of it is quoted in the book and I read one back to Graham in which he is described as, among other unflattering epithets, “a serious nerd”.
“Better to be described as a serious nerd than a frivolous nerd,” he says. “If you sign up to work for Liverpool you sign up to this nonsense. You shouldn’t have to but that is the way it is.” He points out that when The New York Times interviewed him before the 2019 Champions League final, the journalist asked Graham for a list of detractors and on-the-record sceptics about data analysis. The journalist then contacted all of them for the opposite side of the argument. None were, by then, prepared to do so.
Brendan Rodgers
Rodgers expected to have the final say on talent identification and recruitment CREDIT: Craig Brough/Action Images via Reuters
“I tried to be truthful with all the things we did wrong as well as the things we did well,” he says. “And I was trying to say … those reports I quoted were what the outside world thought of us in 2015.” Later we return to the subject when I ask Graham if the book is an attempt to reclaim data analysis from those who seek to portray its architects as outsiders, intent on stripping away the mystique of the game.
“I wanted to be honest about what role data analysis played,” he says. “There is this caricature that is too positive, of geniuses. That this mysterious stuff they do is such an edge. We are not geniuses. It’s not mysterious. It brings an edge but only when it is implemented properly. The stuff we do doesn’t make any difference if you don’t have someone like Michael making the decisions. If you don’t have Jürgen who can attract players and has a good tactical plan.”
His partnership with Edwards is critical. The latter was a former academy player with an IT degree and an early career with ProZone, the first big football data company. Edwards could inhabit the conventional football world – of players, managers and agents – while understanding enough about the sophistication of Graham’s work to help him improve his model.
Graham is a football fan like the rest of us – and grew up absorbed by it. A career in data analysis has not changed that. Rather it has, he says, deepened his appreciation of the game’s beguiling complexities. He points out that one does not have to understand the mathematics behind Bach’s Well-Tempered Scale to appreciate Bach, although doing so can add a new dimension. Needless to say, Graham does understand the mathematics behind the Well-Tempered Scale.
He is blunt about how the same advantage has been wasted at other clubs in the past. Strong data analysis departments at Arsenal and Barcelona were largely ignored for years. ‘How to... ’ makes clear that no one at Liverpool can understand what on earth is going on at Manchester United. “Nearly everyone,” Graham notes, can improve performance via expenditure “with the notable exception of the Glazer family”.
In the end, the results were plain to see. During the 2017 summer that Liverpool signed Salah for £37 million, Graham points out that Chelsea spent £58 million on Alvaro Morata, Arsenal signed Alexandre Lacazette for £46.5 million and Romelu Lukaku joined United for around £90 million.
Year after year, Liverpool outperformed their budget. Edwards’s great challenge is to do it again, without Klopp. The Beatles have partly reformed, although the line-up is missing one of either Lennon or McCartney, depending on how you look at it. As for Graham, also gone, who might he have been in the original ensemble? The shrewd observer may say, George Martin.
‘How To Win The Premier League’, by Ian Graham is published by Century, Penguin Random House. £22, available now
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