And so it came to pass that a helicopter carrying Fernando Torres touched down on the wreckage of several earlier helicopters only thought to have been carrying Fernando Torres, and Fernando Torres raised his serene gaze from the book about helicopters that he had been reading on his helicopter and looked inscrutably out the window, leaving the rest of us to stare at his helicopter and wonder what it all could mean.
So what does today say about the fate of baseball? One of the reasons the NESV takeover of Liverpool was such a big deal was that it represented an incursion of the newfangled American prudence-and-calculators style of management into what was traditionally a hunches-and-gestures league. Alex Ferguson won 10 titles buying players he’s never even seen, and now Liverpool’s new sabermetrics-crazed Red Sox tycoons were parachuting in with actual laptops. They talked to Billy Beane, they installed Damien Comolli (apparently after a significant version upgrade), and they implied that they planned to steer the English club most likely to star in a film of Wuthering Heights toward a new, rationalist promised land. Stat-sheets and bargains ahoy.
In retrospect, I think the Wuthering Heights aspect of the club was a major reason why this story resonated. It wasn’t just that a football club was going to take a businesslike approach to the transfer market—Lyon already did that. And it wasn’t just that an English club was going to adapt to an American business model—Aston Villa had done okay, for the most part, under Randy Lerner, and the Hicks/Gillett “you’ll never mock a loan” strategy wasn’t exactly Mongolian. It was that Liverpool—grand, doomed, melodramatic Liverpool, the club whose emotional longitude was as far away from Moneyball as any club’s possibly could be—was going to embrace clerical sobriety and boring reasonableness. If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.
I wrote a piece on the stats angle of this story for Slate last week. But worrying about the stats angle presumed that NESV meant it, or at least—since John Henry seems mainly to communicate by mild implication—that all the articles about sabermetrics that suddenly popped up in the English press weren’t completely off base. But then, why would they have been? John Henry’s whole career has been based on getting rich by exploiting market inefficiencies. Why get mixed up with Liverpool if they planned to do things the same old way?
And yet, somehow, after the madness and helicopters, here we are, with Kenny Dalglish as manager, Fernando Torres getting a medical at Chelsea, supporters’ psychodials set to either “extreme swoon” or “radio chat show”, Charlie Adam apparently worth more than Mesut Özil and Andy Carroll a near equivalent to David Villa. It’s been a weird day, in other words, and while it’s not at all clear that these are the worst signings Liverpool could have made after Torres’s exit request sent them scrambling—at the time I’m writing this, it’s not even fully clear that they have signed these players, or even that Torres is gone—it’s still clear that they’ve been engaged in some kind of pretty horrendous scramble. And it’s hard to reconcile horrendous scrambles of any kind, much less the kind that involves maybe £60-70 million in cash outlay, with the patient, scrupulous, march-of-the-coupons approach pioneered by Lyon and Moneyball. Could you see Bill Belichick making moves like that?
Maybe not, but then, it’s hard to see Bill Belichick coaching in a game where players have as much power as they do in soccer. If today shows anything, it’s probably not that NESV are going to run Liverpool like it’s Chelsea (viz. a man is stooped over a giant pile of cash and is shoveling it into an oven) but that bringing moneyball to the Premier League necessarily means encountering a daunting amount of mess. There’s mess all over the practical level, obviously. For all we know, and it’s not all that unlikely, Liverpool thought Torres and Suárez were going to be an unstoppable near-rhyme together for the rest of history, and were caught so unprepared by Torres’s demand to get in a helicopter that they had to replace him with whoever they could, even if it meant spending £35 million on a player who’s scored 34 career goals. (One of the Lyon strategies Simon Kuper extracts in Soccernomics is “replace players before you sell them,” but that’s a tough break when you’ve been running your club for three months.) Your laptops can alphabetize the known universe, but when the unexpected happens, you might be stuck in any case.
But it’s not just unpredictability on the practical level that makes moneyball hard to import into soccer. It’s also the fact that, culturally, this is a game whose fans are still deeply reluctant to think about money as a central component of it. That may be overstating the case, but there’s something to the idea that unlike the major American sports, soccer has not conditioned its supporters with years of team relocations and stadium subsidies and mathematically-minded bestsellers and the ESPN Trade Machine and Bill Simmons calling every basketball non-star “Player X’s Expiring Contract.” When a player like Torres wants to leave a club like Liverpool, the reaction, from fans and the media, is an emotional tidal wave rather than a dispassionate evaluation. That’s true to some extent in America, too (see: the ashes of LeBron James’s Cavs jersey), but at least to me, it’s striking how much of the commentary in soccer turns on ideas like “Liverpool must hold onto Torres at all costs to prove they’re still a big club.” Could there possibly be a less moneyball-friendly argument in the world? But it’s impossible to filter out that kind of thing completely as long as the objective-statistics layer of the game is blurred underneath a power-projection/ego-agony layer, which, for any “big club,” it more or less always is.
And where “ego-agony” and “Liverpool” appear in the same sentence, it’s not going to be a good day for the neutral application of mathematics. I’m not saying Comolli or John Henry or even Kenny Dalglish were motivated to overpay for Andy Carroll just to prove they could. But there are just so many wraiths and ghosts and weird sensitivities and old sources of pride at Liverpool, so much other stuff, and it’s all so deeply ingrained in the culture inside the club—remember, Liverpool loves other stuff; this isn’t the Oakland A’s—that it’s impossible to imagine a lot of that doesn’t come flooding out, I mean into the minds of the people making decisions, when the clock suddenly starts running and everything goes nuts. We’re Liverpool, for @#$%’s sake. If you spear a rhino in the thigh, it’s going to thrash, as Rafa Benítez probably likes to say.
Now, again, none of this means that Liverpool haven’t had a good day, or a good January, in terms of improving the squad. I’m reserving judgment until we know who’s actually in it, but at first glace I like Suárez and Carroll together, and as much as I love him, Torres isn’t worth £50 million soaking wet. (Well, maybe if you throw in the helicopter.) It just means that there are some interesting structural reasons why a regime of Puritan fractions has so far failed to overthrow the club’s usual sentimental chaos. Which, for lovers of sentimental chaos, may not be a bad thing after all.
Read More: Liverpool, Statistics
by Brian Phillips · January 31, 2011
I think NESV have been thrown by a number of things. Certainly the “sentimental chaos” as you say, but also how important a manager is to a soccer club. Not just in terms of on the field results but also the off the field feelings of the fans. He is way more important than in baseball for example, and the whole Dalglish soap opera has been a baptism of fire for them in that regard.
(Incidentally that Slate link is wrong).
@Russell Whoops, that’s fixed, sorry. This is what happens when I put a piece together before any of the events it analyzes have definitely happened yet.
EDIT: Also, yeah, I’d say that the importance of the manager is one of those cultural factors that makes the Billy Beane approach hard to implant in the Premier League. When I was talking to stats guys for that Slate thing last week, one of the points that kept coming up was that they want to see the manager as essentially middle management—someone who’s in charge of short-term results and motivation, while the really important big-picture stuff (including all transfer business) is handled higher up the chain. But that’s a totally revolutionary approach in a game that tends to lionize managers as populist autocrats who bear sole responsibility for everything that happens at a club. And some of the less dogmatic “new way” guys conceded that that approach might not even work in soccer, since chemistry, players gelling together, and day-to-day motivation are much bigger contributors to wins and losses, relative to baseball.
I’m not convinced that they’re all Moneyball simply because it’s defined a great deal of their business in the USA. I mean, they shelled out 50m simply to win the privilege of talking to Daisuke Matsuzaka, let alone the added millions it took to secure his services.
NESV are not averse to spending money, and I’m guessing today was their big show of force to let the EPL know that they’re here, and unafraid to spend even if they did lose Fernando Torres.
@James T Yeah, the Daisuke saga definitely hits at a more reckless side of NESV that might be seduced by the dark side at Liverpool. At the same time, though, unless I’m misreading the numbers, the Red Sox have been pretty profitable over the years—they tend to lose $20 million one year and make $40 million the next—and they make a bundle from their TV channel, too. Not sure Liverpool are in quite that strong a financial position, although Tom Hicks would chime in here to point out that H&G did increase the operating profit of the club (!).
One thing that struck me about the moneyball approach is that it got the As to the playoffs but they always struggled once there. Moneyball and thinking can get you a long way, but can it get you to the very top (eg. the Arsenal approach)?
Who’s the sucker at this particular poker game? John Henry or Roman Abramovich?
I was angered by the timing of Torres leaving us, now I’m just laughing that we paid 35m pounds for a player who’s currently injured from falling off a bar stool in a casino. I’m not negative though, it’s way to early to pass judgment on Carroll and Suarez- both big risks, but at this moment at least I’m glad that we went for it. And while the prices were ridiculous, you can still hear the denizens of RAWK shouting netspend! from the rooftops.
But there are just so many wraiths and ghosts and weird sensitivities and old sources of pride at Liverpool, so much other stuff, and it’s all so deeply ingrained in the culture inside the club—remember, Liverpool loves other stuff
All so true, really great writing as always
I have a friend – a stats-fanatical freak for the Kansas City Royals, a mandolin player & a missionary to boot – who, when he’s home, goes to a game at Kauffman Stadium & spends most of his time hunched studiously over a scorecard, coloring in little boxes & jotting down numbers & backwards “Ks”. Now, I’m relatively new to this, but I can’t imagine my friend at Anfield – anywhere, mind you, not just the Kop – unless its him with his head between his knees, hyperventilating into a paper bag. The question for me is: The metrics & statistical modeling of ownership is one thing, the mercurial movements of soccer as a game another, but what if any role does fan culture play here? Baseball, too, has is share of wraiths & ghosts – much more, I’d say, than any other American sport – but they’re the kind that one glances out of the corner of one’s eye or in a sudden shudder of cold air as one reads the newspaper or balances the checkbook; they haunt, as opposed, I’d say, to the ghosts of Anfield, which strike me as being actively invoked. Stats are meant to repel ghosts; songs, to invite them. Can a sabermetrics-happy ownership effectively impose their pie-charts & spreadsheets when the Liverpool faithful are holding a seance outside?
Incidentally, I think you meant it to be funny, but there is something very sad & soulful about your first paragraph. Gorgeous writing. Bravo.
One more thing, then I’ll shut up: Kansas is home to Allen Fieldhouse, one of America’s great haunted mansions. The Rock Chalk chant is literally meant to call up the ghost of Phog Allen.
@Ronit
Only time will tell on that one.
But Roman has more to lose from a situational standpoint; Henry’s situation and actions are reactionary while Romans are self imposed.
Thing is, the EPL has no Draft system. American sports do have it. That makes for a huge difference and one that, in my opinion helped NESV to put the money on the table to go and get Andy Carrol.
The reasoning is “Management of expectations”. In the US, teams can go into “rebuilding mode”, in the EPL, a club like Liverpool would never walk that road. Fans will not allow it.
Thus it became clear that they needed a substitute for Fernando and his magic Helicopter: Enter Andy Carrol.
It’s all about getting fans through the door. In the US you can do it with the promise of first round draft picks. In the EPL, and in The Kop, you do it with old-fashioned english powerful center forwards that wears the number 9 shirt (and a very, very good uruguayan player) .
Cracking article as always Brian.
It seems a little strange to me that all commentary on Liverpool/NESV spending such ‘huge’ sums misses the fact that Torres went for £50m and Carroll and Suarez arrived for a reported £57.7m outlay.
That’s surely only a net spend of £7.7m this January.
Yes their star striker left, but to replace him Liverpool got an established but still youthful international in Suarez (one of the stars of the World Cup don’t forget) and a highly regarded, home-grown talent in Carroll.
If Torres had stayed, Carroll wouldn’t have arrived and Suarez’s transfer could have been seen as a large expenditure and possibly a statement of intent. As it is, it seems like pretty good business as well as a well thought out and executed contingency plan, all achieved at minimal cost.
@M.G. I don’t think you’ve got the right comparison here. If anything, that part of the Moneyball formula plays better in soccer than in American sports where playoffs are the king. The point that Beane has always made about the playoffs are that they are largely a crapshoot. In the regular season in baseball, you’ve got 162 games in a season and, thus, over that long haul, the deviations to the high and low side tend to somewhat even out (not really, but more so than in other sports with fewer contests). In contrast, the playoffs contain such a small number of games relative to the regular season that you can’t expect any team’s true level of play to come out. Now, to bring the analogy back to soccer, the whole point of the league is to be the best over the course of the season. Thus, we might expect things to even out. Where you would think the “Moneyball” approach would fail – if we think that any approach that looks for inefficiencies to maximize value has any consistency in different environments and over time, a doubtful assumption, at best – would be in the Carling and FA Cup and the Champions League, where small sample size is king. Regardless, I think this any Moneyball comparison has limited utility if we confine it to the specifics involved in baseball; different markets will exhibit different asymmetries and inefficiencies at different times.
@Rich Pye Thanks, Rich. When I wrote this they were still reportedly on the cusp of paying £15 million for Charlie Adam and £11 million for the lightbulb salesman who’d just knocked on the front door at Kirkby, and I meant the piece to be more about the scramble than about the sums and signings.
To my mind, getting £50m for Torres is very good business, buying Suárez for £23m is perfectly sane, and paying £35m for Carroll is a big risk. He might well turn out to be worth it; my point is just that paying that much more than anyone thought he should sell for at the time isn’t the act of a club that’s out to exploit market inefficiencies.
@Jesse G. Right on there, Jesse [re playoffs and the A's].
In general, I think too much emphasis is being placed here on the exploiting-market-inefficiencies part of Moneyball. The broader point of the “Moneyball Revolution/Evolution”, I thought, and one that is likely easier to port into soccer, is the important of all your little pieces. In baseball, that means walks, OBP etc — stats that are (still) never glamorous, yet, when taken seriously, show their importance. I don’t think Arsenal really takes this approach to heart; Arsene etc just buy cheaply and smartly….yes, often exploiting market inefficiencies, but more often still avoiding the grafter, the hard DMF or CB that the team needs.
Perhaps The Great Moneyball Player of Our Time is Park Ji Sung. Not the most glamorous, and not even the most used player for Man U, but the number of key games that he has played in [Arsenal games, CL matches...] – and performed well in the course of – is really outstanding. His workrate, discipline…all of those somewhat stereotype-sounding yet apparently somewhat- true characteristics of Asian soccer (see, e.g., Jonathan Wilson http://bit.ly/b93aDR and the fascinating Christian Collet article http://bit.ly/ge8TBF)…its not usually beautiful, or ole-inducing, but it’s damn important and seriously undervalued
I don’t follow MLB as closely as I did 6 or 8 years ago, and I’ve got emotional issues around the Red Sox due to the ’04 WS, so maybe I’m way out of it, but I don’t really tend to think of Boston or NESV as particularly Sabremetric or Moneyball.
It all feels like some strawman mirage generated by the goatee of Kevin Youkilis. Maybe because Youkilis was mentioned on every other page of that damn book (Youkilis, Kevin Youkilis, YOUK!).
I understand that they hired Epstein just after his senior prom, and they pay Bill James to send them emails and/or Excel docs or whatever it is that he secretly does for them, but they also spend a LOT of money. And yesterday they spent a LOT of money (albeit mostly courtesy of Mr. Abramovich’s itchy wallet fingers). Seems pretty standard.
Anyone got some “NESV is obviously Moneyball” bullet points they can straighten me out with?
@Tim Well, Michael Lewis says they are. And they certainly think they are (I mean, it was Billy Beane who recommended Comolli for the Liverpool job in the first place).
But yeah, with the Red Sox, it’s not that NESV has been reluctant to spend a lot of money so much as that in determining how to spend their money they’ve relied on metrical analysis to find the players who their formulas tell them will maximize their return on the investment. Obviously every team does that now (my genius brother-in-law does this for an MLB team, actually) but the Red Sox were at least somewhat ahead of the curve and achieved spectacular success with it. There’s also a Moneyball-inspired tactical dimension (e.g. they quit bunting before everyone else).
More generally, John Henry’s whole bio is about eliminating human emotion from business decisions and trusting the numbers (check out the section on JWH & Co., Inc. on Wikipedia). And that’s definitely the narrative that’s taken hold in the English media. So yesterday was interesting, even if only as a referendum on the accuracy of that narrative.
@Brian Phillips
“He might well turn out to be worth it; my point is just that paying that much more than anyone thought he should sell for at the time isn’t the act of a club that’s out to exploit market inefficiencies.”
I made this point, or a variant on it, in an email to the Guardian yesterday. Soccer’s a hell of a game to try and earn a big ROI in because the system isn’t set up like North American sports to let teams scoop big profits. There’s too much competition. There’s no systems of wage restraint like we have in our professional sports. And, given soccer’s popularity relative to hockey or baseball, there seem to be many more people willing to lose a pile of money owning a soccer team.
All of this makes exploiting market inefficiencies while winning sort of difficult. If Roman Abramovich is willing to lose 70 million pounds a year to win, you have to find an awful lot of market inefficiencies to compete with that. The problem gets worse when you throw Man City, Real Madrid and Barcelona into the mix.
From a pure efficiency standpoint, the Carroll move strikes me as crazy. He’s injured now and likely to play what, ten games this year? Liverpool’s six points out of fifth and nine points out of fourth. It seems awfully unlikely that they’re going to run down Chelsea and Spurs for fourth place this year. Why spend the money now? Surely they get more for their 35MM in the summer.
An aside: as a Blackpool fan, I was thrilled that they didn’t get Charlie Adam. If you’re looking for a real Moneyball team, Blackpool might be the one. We’ll see if they can stay up but to go from being relegation favourites to making the Premier League and from being favourites to break Derby County’s record to looking like staying up strikes me as a pretty astounding success, all the more so when they’re spending nothing. It’s a shame that the business/sport coverage over there is so dodgy because I suspect that there’s a story there. Or it really is all Charlie Adam, in which case Liverpool probably should have just paid 15MM pounds.
@Brian Phillips Sir, excellent and thanks. I was caught up assuming you either uncover the hidden truths of the game via Excel, or you just spend loads of money. I guess if you got loads of money anyway, why not do both?
Andy Carroll’s transfer fee was the eighth largest of all time.
It’s a pet peeve of mine (one of many) that moneyball is reported in the UK as being solely about buying players cheaply, when really it’s about valuing a different set of skills that a player may have.
I’m pretty certain that this didn’t come into effect when Liverpool signed Carroll, and that in the end they behaved in the same way as I do when bidding for something on ebay. After a rational beginning it quickly descends into an irrational desire to have the item no matter how ludicrous the final price.
@Brian Phillips Let’s put things in perspective.[1] £35 million isn’t just a lot of money; it’s a million-more-than-Barcelona-paid-for-David-Villa of money. It’s three times more than Sevilla paid for Álvaro Negredo, and it’s four times more than Valencia paid for Roberto Soldado – both of whom have scored more goals than Carroll so far this season.
You can’t help suspecting that English clubs’ scouts are scared to get on a ferry and scout, and that they’d only heard of Suárez (for whom, I agree, the price was about right) because he (a) scored more goals than anybody in any European league last year and (b) was splashed all over the back page of The Sun after doing the dirty on Ghana in such how-dare-he style at the World Cup.
BLUFs[2] like Carroll are, if not exactly ten a penny, at least take-your-pick-for-ten-million-or-so in all the other big leagues. But, judging by Capello’s struggle to settle on a reliable 9, home-grown BLUFs do seem to be somewhat thinner on the ground in England. So why pay an oligarch’s ransom for one?
1. I know how much you dig it when comments start like that.
2. Big Lads Up Front]
@M.G. Well, the baseball playoffs are essentially a crapshoot. Look at some of the ways those heyday A’s lost. The Jeter Flip play in 2001, a bizarre Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS where all they needed to clinch was for Eric Byrnes to touch homeplate (he was safe by a mile), etc. You can tell approximately zero from the results of one baseball game…you can tell only slightly less than zero from 4 out of 7. The A’s failing to win the 2000-2003 ALDS has nothing to do with much of anything.
@Daniel thanks for the links to the Wilson and Collet articles
Jesse G, Daniel, Dan Salerno, interesting points all. I’ve been schooled, thank you!
You know who loves this fee for Carroll? Dzeko – you can probably audibly hear the weight lifting off his shoulders as he imagines trying to settle in for the next 3-4 months.
On the surface, Suarez + Carroll is at least equal to Torres plus 10 million. They’re both younger than he is, and offer distinctly different options (Carroll a giant target, Suarez a more creative player yet still a deadly finisher). My issue with Liverpool is, Carroll is a much weaker option than could have been had over the summer. Any non England/Newcastle fan would take Fabio Coentrao (the world’s best young left back, likely to be on the move this summer, who coincidentally plays Liverpool’s weakest position), Jesus Navas, or Juan Mata (both of whom would offer desperately needed width and creativity) over Carroll in a second. Suarez is fairly priced though, because he is a great finisher who is still young and improving.
@Ronit No problem, Ronit, enjoy. Wish Collet would write something more!
If you include Babel’s transfer to Hoffenheim, Liverpool’s net spend in January is barely £2m.
Also I ought to mention a superb analysis of the Torres/Carroll saga-ette, and Moneyball as applied to soccer generally, at Craven Cottage Newsround. The author makes the salient point that Moneyball is not about scraping success on a teeny budget, it’s about making decisions for a reason, which is exactly what NESV have done here:
http://cravencottagenewsround.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/so-much-for-moneyball/
@Rich Pye. I believe you are foregetting the sale of Ryan Babel for app £6.5m.
And 8 plus months later what do we think of the deals now?