But whatever the outcome of the final, the club’s ascent has already started to make number-crunching acceptable, even fashionable, in England and beyond. How much that has contributed to its recent performance is itself hard to measure. More than other major clubs, Liverpool incorporates data analysis into the decisions it makes, from the corporate to the tactical. On June 1, it will face a Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final. In the semifinals of that tournament this month, it overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team.
(In the Premier League, as elsewhere in soccer, a victory counts as three points in the standings and a draw counts as one Liverpool set the record for the most points in a season, 97, by a runner-up.) In an added fillip for North American fans, Liverpool is owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, while Manchester City has a business relationship with the New York Yankees.Īt the same time as it was trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in England, Liverpool was competing against the top teams from other countries in Europe’s Champions League. Manchester City, the defending champion, edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of its league games since January. It lost only one of its 38 games in the Premier League, yet it finished second. Two Sundays ago, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in the sport’s history. He just happened to be coaching one of the unluckiest teams in recent history. Graham’s conclusion was that the disappointing season had nothing to do with Klopp, though his reputation had suffered because of it.
Dortmund had finished seventh during Klopp’s last season at the club, but the model determined that it should have finished second. Then he evaluated each of Dortmund’s games based on how his calculations assessed the players’ performances that day. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was about to fire, Graham fed a numerical rendering of every attempted pass, shot and tackle by Dortmund’s players during Klopp’s tenure into a mathematical model he had constructed. Graham was starting to explain what his printouts showed when Klopp’s face lit up. He noted that Dortmund had numerous chances against the lightly regarded Mainz, a smaller club that would end up finishing in 11th place. He began talking about a game that Borussia Dortmund, the German club that Klopp coached before joining Liverpool, had played the previous season. Graham spread out his papers on the table in front of him. Then he hoped to persuade Klopp to actually use it. Graham wanted to show Klopp, whom he hadn’t yet met, what his work could do. Jürgen Klopp was in his third week as Liverpool’s manager, in November 2015, when the team’s director of research, Ian Graham, arrived at his office carrying computer printouts.