The Nowhere Men (17 page)

‘I know I’ll get stick but I just had to applaud him for that save. That shot was right in the bottom corner, and he swooped down with such a strong hand. His kicking was a problem today, but that is usually a strong point. As centre backs, we split and pull off to give him an angle if he needs it. But he drives the ball, about two metres off the ground, with fantastic accuracy and power. He’s getting better at communicating, and is learning all the time. Obviously, the higher he goes, the better the tuition he will receive. He’s a lovely lad but he’s not going to be with us for long.’

In football, it is every man for himself.

DAMIEN COMOLLI LANDED
in Nice just before Mel Johnson joined the queue to leave the Kassam Stadium, which had shrunk sufficiently to require only a 200-yard crawl from Frankie and Benny’s, purveyors of overcooked pasta to time-poor football scouts. It was a humbling retreat for the Frenchman, who considered himself
Général de brigade
in the Sabermetric Revolution, which was spreading from baseball with increasing speed. He took to exile with Napoleonic restlessness, and vowed to return.

In truth, he was not widely mourned. Johnson valued his faith and friendship, but Comolli was a classic victim of the conservatism of English football. The prevailing view of many within the game was crystallised by the frigid lucidity of Tom Werner, Liverpool’s chairman: ‘We have a strategy we need implemented and we felt Damien was probably not the right person to implement that strategy.’ The wider implications were summarised by a two-word tweet, posted by Henry Winter, the
Daily Telegraph
’s football correspondent: ‘
Moneyball
, RIP.’

That succinct appraisal of an ill-starred initiative, which involved 26 separate transfer deals and the ul-timate belittlement of a legend, Kenny Dalglish, resonated with those who resented the achingly fashionable application of science. The original intention of
Moneyball
, in essence the strategic use of statistical analysis to identify undervalued players, was in danger of being lost in the fog of a 60-year war between arithmetical scrutiny and gut instinct. The ghost of Wing Commander Charles Reep, hailed as ‘the first professional performance analyst of football’ by the
Journal of Sports Sciences
after his death aged 98 in 2002, stalked the ruins of the Anfield project.

Reep pared football to its essentials. He used rudimentary statistics, together with the tactical philosophies of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal from the 1930s, to develop a quasi-academic theory supporting the use of ‘direct passing’, or Hoofball, to give it a 21st-century twist. His passion gave him plausibility; Stan Cullis, the pre-eminent manager of the era, was convinced by Reep’s achievement as an ‘advisor’, in helping Brentford avoid relegation in the spring of 1952.

They collaborated in the aftermath of Hungary’s devastating victory over England at Wembley the following year, devising a pattern of play that purported to blend the artistry of the Magic Magyars with the artisan, ‘wholly English’ principles espoused by Reep. Wolves, under Cullis, won the League three times in the 1950s and, as Reep’s portfolio expanded to analysis of 2,500 games including a number of World Cup finals, his influence extended.

He was a regular contributor to academic journals, recounting his partnership with Cullis in a tome entitled
Are We Getting Too Clever?
His theories were implanted at the highest level of the game, through the Football Association’s arch-fundamentalist Charles Hughes and emerging managers such as Graham Taylor. The former England manager took issue with simplistic suggestions that his philosophy was flawed, but his trademark lament – ‘can we not knock it?’ – was an unwitting echo of another of Reep’s agonised treatises,
This Pattern-Weaving Talk Is All Bunk!

Football, like any major undertaking in sport or in life, cannot be dictated by absolutes. The Nowhere Men were an increasingly endangered species, but no one had found the magic bullet, the ultimate statistic which proved, beyond doubt, a player’s worth from a spreadsheet rather than a stream of consciousness, scrawled on the back of an envelope by a scout who felt football in his bones. That wasn’t going to stop their detractors trying, however.

Bill James, the founding father of
Moneyball
, regarded the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which drew 2200 delegates to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, as ‘the culmination of my life’s work’. His baseball theories, honed during night shifts as a security guard at a pork and beans cannery, and enshrined in Hollywood mythology by the film featuring Brad Pitt, had spawned an industry. The convention featured only one research paper and a single break-out session on football, but technical scouts from Premier League clubs were eager to learn at the feet of the master.

James, an august figure with a bushy beard, was evidently at home in a world in which earnest young men in pinstriped Oxford shirts and chinos spoke of ‘franchise value’ and ‘the metrics of physicality, strength and flexibility’. Apart from one pertinent intervention in the major set-piece debate – ‘Usually the public desperately wants you to do one thing, at a time when the coaching staff wants you to do something entirely different’ – James allowed others to speak for him.

Scott Boras, who controls 175 Major Leaguers as baseball’s so-called ‘super agent’, exuded the astuteness, detachment and candour of his trade. He mocked perceptions of the analytic movement as the province of ‘geeks, nerds, and cheerleaders from Harvard’ and envisaged a future in which the financial and intellectual rewards of professional sport would attract the best and brightest, regardless of their affinity with athletic endeavour:

‘Everyone is looking for an edge. Internal metrics are already being kept as state secrets. There’s a trend for hiring NASA engineers to write programs. Where can we progress from there? We should be training psychologists to understand the game and the players, because we know talent can be a state of mind. How can players be so hot and cold? How can they be so sound for ten days, and lost for five?’

Rocco Baldelli represented the other source of fresh talent, refugees from the locker room. A former Major League outfielder, forced to retire at the age of 29 by a mysterious metabolic disorder, he was kept on by the Tampa Bay Rays to work in scouting and player development. ‘I don’t want to use the word secrecy, but there is a time-sensitive nature to the stuff we do,’ he explained. ‘We are only limited by our ideas. We sit around for hours, looking for unique ways to look at the game. The information is there, and more is coming. The cycle of trying to define value never ends.’

Jeff Luhnow, general manager of the Houston Astros, highlighted the moral ambiguities football would face, as it spread its net, ever wider, in search of raw material. ‘Baseball is now buying in the Dominican Republic and Latin America,’ he said. ‘We are spending millions of dollars on fifteen-year-old kids. That brings with it a whole range of issues. We’re dealing with false ages, coaches operating as agents, and problems with performance-enhancing drugs.’

Mark Shapiro, president of the Cleveland Indians, advised his audience: ‘You are going to be second guessed, no matter what. There is a swirl of emotions around decision-making in recruitment. You can’t explain decisions for multiple reasons, and you get more free advice than you can cope with. These are not the jobs where you want short-term approval ratings. The full valuation of a recruitment decision can take four or five years to emerge. Only then can you factor in the human element, and determine whether you are wrong, or right. Players are not assets, they are human beings.

‘When we first started out, in 1992, technology was an Excel spreadsheet. We worked with stat books on our laps. Now there are so many technological elements involved. But we still apply language, honed over fifty years of watching the game. No machine is ever going to spill out the answer for which we are all searching. There is still an art to it.’

The human element struck a chord with Scott McLachlan, who, as Chelsea’s head of international scouts, was a pioneer of performance profiling in football. He oversaw the collation of intelligence, such as transfer tendencies. He was responsible for database design and management of recruitment statistics, such as player migration trends. Like Everton’s James Smith, he was a graduate of South Bank University, where he earned a Masters degree in sports coaching science. Unlike Smith, he reported to Technical Director Michael Emenalo, rather than the first team manager.

Each club has its own culture; Chelsea’s was intensely political, and driven by the autocratic certainties of owner Roman Abramovich. McLachlan drew strength from the diversity of the clubs for which he had worked. Mentored by Roger Smith at Wimbledon, he spent three years in a youth development role at Northampton before working under Sir Clive Woodward at Southampton. He specialised in technical scouting at Fulham, where he flourished under chief scout Barry Simmonds and chief executive Alistair Mackintosh:

‘The Fulham CEO could see the future, before the whole
Moneyball
thing became a parody of itself. He believed we could combine analysis and metrics with scouting. It was frustrating, because in football getting something new across is like uphill skiing. I am going to four or five matches a week, because I don’t want to lose touch with the essence of the game, but at Chelsea my role has changed. It is more managerial. I have about twenty scouts working to me. It is my job to educate them scientifically, to tailor their observation and analysis to data presentation. I’ve got to stop them using silly clichés, like the boy does this and that, and get them to focus on trends and averages.

‘What is crazy is that, to pick a moment in time, two hundred and sixty-nine million was spent in the transfer window in January 2011. How much of that was down to quantitative analysis of the facts? How much objectivity was used in the signing decision? How much involved real scrutiny of the data? If you are going to make a capital investment of fifty million in one player, how are you going to discover what you are getting for your money?

‘Let’s make a comparison: say I need to buy an office printer. I know I need to buy one that will produce fifty thousand colour copies each year, for an average of five years. I can research the purchase and monitor the risk. In football that doesn’t apply. That’s why we at Chelsea are looking at how we measure and quantify talent. That’s why we are seeking links with performance scientists from all over the world.

‘In football we make big decisions on peer group testimonials. We try and interpret their potential without really knowing them. Who is our player? Does he play for the money, his family, or the glory? What is his mindset? Even the army has a twelve-week training period, during which they can weed people out. We don’t find out about our people until the money is down. That’s an issue when you’ve paid millions for someone you don’t really know. You need to try to protect yourself.’

A simple aim, but complicated given the atmosphere created by the random collection of alpha males who inhabit the average Premier League club. These are inherently unstable platforms on which to test theories often formed in the vacuum of academia. The miscellany of opinion, developed across the generations in football, makes innovation appear irregular to an influential minority. All teams have elements of social engineering; any formula, designed to designate value or potential, must factor in the nature of the modern player.

According to Bill Beswick, the sports psychologist who came to prominence by working with Steve McClaren for Middlesbrough, Manchester United and England, ‘We have to change the culture from human doings to human beings.’ His analysis is inevitably emotive. It is the polar opposite of the clinical certainties of the analytic movement. It challenges anaemic algorithms and the rituals of scholarly disengagement:

‘The eight-year-old boy runs from his dad’s car to play because it is fun. Then he gets to be quite good. He’s with a club, and people start to treat him differently. Everyone gives him the ball, because he’s the best player. His under ten coach says, “I know I should be developing him, but I want to win.” Gradually, he’s seen, not as a kid, but as a five-bedroom detached house. There might be three other kids in the family, but now they traipse behind their mum and dad, to watch the Golden Boy train.

‘Two things can happen. The kid doesn’t make it. He’s fifteen or sixteen, and has been left desolate, emotionally damaged. Or the kid makes it. He’s one of those who breathes in, and crosses that white line. He’s one of those who have made a decision what to do with their lives. He becomes an eighteen-year-old millionaire by signing his first major contract. All those kids he left behind are waiting for him, in the car park, after the match. He loves the game, but there are all these people around him. They all want a piece of him.

‘What chance has he got? It is all about coping with pressure. The anxiety of the coach might be killing the players. If our kid is lucky, he might not be the biggest or the quickest, but he will have the best attitude. Performance follows attitude. He won’t dwell on setbacks. All great athletes fight themselves, fight the loss of belief, but they prevail. That’s why I say that calling any kid talented is a very dangerous thing to do.’

Each to his own. Ben Knapper, Arsenal’s principal performance analyst, returned from Boston with a preacher’s ardour. His role, in what he terms ‘the chaos of a season’ is to inform, and discreetly educate, Arsène Wenger, his senior coaches and scouts. It is a delicate, diplomatic process which involves thinking on his feet. His background – two seasons at Scunthorpe United, followed by a stint working for analysis providers Prozone – did not allow much scope to develop the street wisdom required in a dressing-room environment:

‘We are data rich, in terms of GPS, medical and performance data, but we are in our infancy in interpreting it, so the coaches can get something meaningful from the process. We are miles behind the guys in the States, in terms of how data impacts on decision-making. It is a huge cultural issue, because it is a new field, and it is not for everyone. You can have the best information in the world, but unless you can engage with the people who matter it is worthless.