The Red Sox Invasion of the UK Starts In Liverpool

August 12th, 2011

New US owners spend $170 buying players

Riots permitting, the new English soccer season is due to start this weekend and all eyes will be on Anfield, where, 10 months after Boston Red Sox owners John Henry and Tom Werner purchased Liverpool, the legendary club will flaunt the trappings of a $170 million spending spree that amounts to a pricey bet that their data-driven approach can find value that others have missed.

Purchases

The new owners’ have so far spent roughly $30 million each for Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson; another $13 million on Scottish midfielder Charlie Adam; nearly $40 million for Uruguayan forward Luís Suárez; and a record $57 million for striker Andy Carroll, now the most expensive English player ever.

Unlike Boston

That isn’t quite the Boston story, where general manager Theo Epstein collected Kevin Millar and David Ortiz for relative peanuts in 2003 and watched them help the Red Sox win the World Series the next year. But a careful study of the attributes of Liverpool’s new recruits reveals a fairly similar formula behind the club’s approach.

No formula

There is widespread agreement that no one has come up with the algorithm that reveals a player’s value to a team. Liverpool’s Stewart Downing, Charlie Adam and Jordan Henderson were all among the top-eight chance creators in the English Premier League last season. There may be too much information. Data-tracking companies collect some 300 measurements per game on about 2,500 player movements. Still, Rodriguez said clubs continue to search for a winning formula, taking their cues from the data-obsessed franchises in U.S. pro sports.

Numbers

The numbers can also be deceiving, Barton said. A player may cover a lot of distance, suggesting superior fitness, but not display much speed or intensity. A midfielder may have an 80% pass completion rate, but the passes may be short or hit sideways to sure-footed teammates. To cut through the confusion, Liverpool seems to have gone at the problem with a rather simplistic approach that speaks to the owners’ experience with the data-centric Epstein-led Red Sox.

Discovery

The great discovery made by Red Sox senior adviser and stats guru Bill James a generation ago was that baseball teams could score more runs if they could get more runners on base, in whatever fashion, and thereby create more scoring chances. Translated into football this means Liverpool has gone on a mission to create more scoring opportunities, getting more runners on base, even if that has meant betting the house on a group of players who, other than Suárez, have little international or Champions League experience.

Chance creators

Downing, Adam and Henderson were all among the top-eight chance-creators in the Premier League last season, according to statistics provider Opta Sports. The average Premier League midfielder creates roughly 1.21 chances per game, but Adam created 2.06 chances per game last season on average, while Downing and Henderson made 2.24 and 2.22 chances per game respectively. Those three also produced some 750 crosses, centering passes that create scoring opportunities, last season, with an accuracy rate of more than 24%, slightly ahead of the league average.

Liverpool!

We hope you got your numbers right, Liverpool! We’ll be watching!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2011 at 8:14 am and is filed under Economy, Finance, Money, Personal / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website