In the canteen at Liverpool’s training ground in Melwood, two tables stand next to each other. At one, sit the players and coaches. Mo Salah munches breakfast alongside Jordan Henderson and Jurgen Klopp.
At the other, a group of non-descript men tuck into their morning poached eggs. They look nothing like the superstars their backs are pressed against. Yet the work of these geniuses, housed in a white office a few strides down the corridor from the cafeteria, has helped gain Klopp an edge in their pursuit of European glory.
They are known as the ‘laptop guys’ and without these individuals trawling through data, analysing and theorising, Liverpool could have been left clinging to hopes of rekindling the glories of former years.
Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur 2-0 in the final of the Champions League on Saturday night
They are led by Ian Graham, the club’s director of research. His bond with Klopp was forged early on when he provided the new Liverpool manager with an analysis of two defeats from his time at Borussia Dortmund.
‘You saw it! We destroyed them,’ blurted Klopp. Graham explained he had not seen the game, he had simply analysed the underlying data. It had been Graham, too, whose statistical model had scrutinised Klopp’s under-performing Dortmund side in a 2014-15 season that saw the German club in the relegation zone.
His conclusion was that Dortmund had been unlucky instead of incompetent. Liverpool were looking for a manager to replace Brendan Rodgers. Graham knew Klopp was their man.
When Klopp decided he needed a rest after Dortmund in the summer of 2015, Liverpool did not look elsewhere. They waited until the German was ready and brought him in the following October.
Tim Waskett works next to Graham. Waskett studied astrophysics before life as a football analyst. Then there’s Dafydd Steele, a maths graduate and former junior chess champion.
Perhaps the most fascinating member of the team is Will Spearman, one of the more recent additions. A Texan son of a professor, Spearman studied for a PhD in high-energy physics at Harvard before going on to work at CERN, searching for the Higgs boson particle. It was his dissertation that first provided a width for the ‘God Particle’.
A lot of credit has to go to the 'laptop guys' behind the scenes, who are crunching the numbers
Here is a man who spent years searching for the most minute measurement in physics, now trying to give Liverpool an advantage, no matter how small. His insight has proved crucial.
Of course, these boffins do not take all of the credit, but Liverpool have embraced the marginal gains more than any other club. It was Klopp who hired Thomas Gronnemark to coach his team throw-ins.
The analytics of Graham’s team have helped not only with Klopp’s appointment and tactical observations that the manager may want to pass on to his team, but also with the transfer scouting that has helped Liverpool thrive.
Graham’s formula, among many things, looks not simply at percentage of completed passes but at whether each pass a player makes leaves his team more or less likely to score a goal because of it. It is through this that Graham urged the club to sign Naby Keita.
Liverpool’s early transfer policy based on statistics and resale value did have flaws. The £16million purchase of Mario Balotelli in 2014 was hailed by the renowned Swiss CIES Football Observatory as the best value-for-money signing of that year, but turned out to be a disaster.
However, Liverpool have made three astonishing signings under Fenway that have laid the foundations for their current success.
Luis Suarez was signed as damaged goods from Ajax in 2011 and turned out to be a superstar, almost single-handedly turning Liverpool into genuine title contenders.
More recently, Mo Salah was signed from Roma for £34m in 2017 and has been the Premier League’s top scorer for two seasons.
It was also such analysis that encouraged the club to sign Philippe Coutinho for £8.5m in 2013. They sold him to Barcelona for £145m last year. The profit helped bring in Virgil van Dijk and Alisson, who have taken Liverpool to the next level. How far this club has come in less than a decade. Forty-eight hours after buying Liverpool in October 2010, John W Henry and Tom Werner watched their new club lose 2-0 at Everton to stay rooted in the relegation zone.
As owners of baseball’s Boston Red Sox, Henry and the Fenway Sports Group value the importance of harmony and smooth running off the pitch. Liverpool have it now.
The football side of affairs is run by sporting director Michael Edwards, who has been at Anfield since 2011 having worked for Portsmouth and Tottenham. Edwards heads a team of data and analyst specialists, with Klopp very much involved.
Sporting director Michael Edwards heads a team of data and analyst specialists
When Klopp arrived in 2015, he had a very good idea of what he wanted, with Sadio Mane and Gini Wijnaldum signed the following summer. In time, Klopp has begun to admire and appreciate the input of Edwards’s team — it was they who convinced the German that Salah was ready for the Premier League.
Chief executive Peter Moore is from Liverpool and a boyhood Red but has an American-based business background. Whereas his predecessor Ian Ayre got involved in
