Mohamed Salah: When Liverpool has almost lost the progress and how the “Moneyball” strategy revitalized the club
Graham was Tottenham consultant since 2007-2012, but “they never had the ambition to do more” of data while he said that “Liverpool was the first team to have an internally analysis department”.
He was in Liverpool from 2012 to 2023 and was a fundamental part of the “Moneyball” strategy – the statistical method of the Major League Baseball Athletics used in the 90s to recruit players – which the owners of Liverpool Fenway Sports Group (FSG) have adopted in the club.
“Moneyball is really the concept of” can we get more value for money from our team? Can we get more performance for expenditure? Because, if we can, this means that we can compete with clubs with a budget higher than us, “said Graham.
“We started with about seven or eight different championships, when I left probably we were taking data from about 60 different championships in order to really understand what the players could do on the pitch.”
Graham worked under the former sports director of Liverpool Michael Edwards, who left the club in 2022 before returning as CEO of FSG football in 2024.
The couple was part of a transfer committee which, together with the Liverpool manager, would have “made a consent decision on the best players to be signed”.
Liverpool had appointed Klopp as manager in October 2015 and his will to commit himself to the use of data in the recruitment was in contrast with his predecessor Brendan Rodgers.
“Previously, we had solid debates with Brendan on which players to sign and the two differences were our ideas on which players would have improved Liverpool were very different from Brendan’s ideas,” said Graham.
“Brendan, understandably, put a great prize on the experience of the Premier League, while we felt that those players were often overrated by the market and the players of other markets, such as Mo Salah and Roberto Firmino, were underestimated.”
Graham explained that Rodgers “came with a preconception that the player he wanted to sign was the only solution for that position” and that “it was very difficult to convince him otherwise”.
In Klopp, Graham said he found the “missing piece” and, in some cases “, a manager who seemed to see what the data saw”.
He added: “He (Jurgen) is very happy to thank us for our suggestions for stopping some of the least sensitive signatures, which at the time caused great topics but, in retrospect, could see that this was a good process for the signature of the players”.
