Recruitment, performance, staff... In Liverpool, data is law

• Liverpool take on Villarreal in the Champions League semi-final on Wednesday night.

• The Reds can rely on a staff that gives pride of place to data, whether it is to recruit players, analyze performance or press on weak points during a match.

• The work on the data was launched by Damien Comolli, current president of Toulouse, about ten years ago.

If you are asked to name Liverpool legends, you will obviously answer, tit for tat, Steven Gerrard, Kenny Dalglish, Robbie Fowler or Gérard Houllier.

Add Damien Comolli to this little list and we'll be good.

Yes, we are talking about the president of the TFC, who allowed the Pink City club to go back to L1 on Monday.

Because the Reds, who are playing a Champions League semi-final this Wednesday against Villarreal, can thank the Frenchman, who arrived in 2010 on the banks of the Mersey, for having integrated data into the process of recruiting players, at the basis of the success of Jürgen Klopp's troops.

To put it simply, on arriving in Liverpool, Comolli resumed what he had begun to undertake at Tottenham in 2007. Although he was unable to continue his collaboration with the British agency specializing in data Decision Technology, which offered a huge database at Spurs, because of a contract between the two entities.

He ended up recruiting his two best assets, Michael Edwards and Ian Graham, who are still at the club today.

“Considerable upstream work”

“We have made more and more use of the stats, so that everything is peeled, that there is an increasingly reduced margin of error, explains Antonio Salamanca, former recruiter for Liverpool and… Villarreal.

Every Monday or Tuesday, I received data on players playing in my league.

There is considerable upstream work.

One of the first players from the Comolli era to be recruited by data was Jordan Henderson, then at Sunderland, in 2011. Despite a bumpy start, the midfielder is now one of the captains of the Reds .

To dive a bit into the secrets of data-driven recruitment, we asked Duan Baker, data football scout at Mamelodi Sundowns, South Africa, to walk us through the process:

We all work on the basis of two indices, the KPI (key performance indicator) and the KAI (key attribute indicator), which you modify according to your style, your team's playing philosophy.

You then draw up five to ten criteria that players at your club have in each position, with data for each criterion, such as speed.

As a result, the players to recruit that you will look for in your base must have data higher than those of your players.

A list of players who correspond to the set criteria is then drawn up.

»

The reality on the ground

fans will say

.

But the process is not over.

Once the profiles have been identified, clubs generally send scouts to observe the player anyway.

"The data helps to lead you in the right direction, but does not make you arrive at your destination," continues the South African.

One of the things you can't measure is the character, the leadership of the player.

“And all the additional factors that make the player adapt well to the country, to the city, to his new status, his new salary.

Meet the physicist who leads our data department...

Ian Graham tells the story of his journey from budding scientist to #LFC director of research in our latest Behind the Badge 🔴

— Liverpool FC (@LFC) June 15, 2020

Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "

", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our "I accept for today" button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.

Because, sometimes, the data may show that you have a nugget, failure can be bitter.

"I'm a 'data guy', so I believe more in data than in the judgments of scouts, but sometimes that's not enough," explains Henry Stott, current director of Decision Technology.

We have the example of Roberto Soldado who had great data and who was a total failure at Tottenham, and we still don't understand.

»

So why are there so few failures in recruitment policy in Liverpool?

“They understand the stats, but they are also attached to the human, judge Duan Baker.

Jurgen Klopp understands the modern player, he understands the difficulties of having characters like Salah and Mané.

We can also mention the Colombian Luis Diaz, who arrived this winter from Porto, who blended into the Scousers collective as if he knew Klopp's system to perfection.

Klopp also recruited thanks to data

Moreover, the German coach had also been recruited by the Reds on the basis of data: “His last season in Dortmund had been disastrous, says Ian Graham in the Freakonomics podcast.

I analyzed ten Bundesliga seasons and we realized that BVB were the second least lucky team over this period.

And our data showed that they were still the second best team in Germany.

»

Beyond recruitment, Liverpool uses data at all levels of the club.

It is thus involved in the club's technical and tactical decisions, with a performance analysis center which is one of the most developed in the world and a data staff of six people from different backgrounds: an astrophysicist, a former player of chess, alumni of the European organization for nuclear research, a doctor of philosophy… In short, sacred melting pot.

Chess and math

"We can draw data from many things," says Gautier Stangret, author of

.

When the players arrive at the training center, they fill out questionnaires to find out what they ate, how they slept.

All of this will be quantified to see what mental and emotional state the player is in.

A football result is not played much, the clubs are in a statistical arms race to tip a match to their advantage.

»

OK, but the chess player, who also happens to be a professional in the energy industry, what does he bring?

Henry Stott finds the idea ingenious: “A chess player can look at the board in a fraction of a second and then recreate the situation on a whiteboard and put the pieces back perfectly in the right place.

There is no waste of time.

And in football, it's the same mechanics.

The player looking at the situation in a fraction of a second will know what to do depending on where the players are positioned.

»

Live tracking, the next step

Liverpool thus relies on specially developed video imagery to analyze playing areas and works with artificial intelligence to know what a player should do in a specific situation.

“On a 2D screen, for example, we will analyze the gap between the side and the central every second and see that in the 70th minute, it grows, details Gautier Stangret.

So, at this moment, there is a loophole to be exploited there.

It's called live tracking and it's something that will develop if FIFA authorizes it, because it's an undeniable advantage for clubs that know how to use it.

»

“We have data on each ball that the players touch during a match, where it was on the field and what happened after, confirmed Ian Graham.

It's done by optical tracking, the same technology used to track missiles at the base.

But it's easier with a player than a missile.

They move more slowly.

»

From there to seeing the coaches with a headset on the edge of the field and the game plans in their hands like in American football, there is only one step that could easily be taken.

“With more possible changes, you have more possibilities to adapt to the situation, to bring the player into an area that the data has highlighted.

We're not there yet, but in US football, with a squad of 50 players, you can have an answer for everything.

“We will surely have to expand the recruitment cell.

Sport

Manchester United: Cristiano Ronaldo thanks Liverpool fans for support after son's death

Sport

Manchester City hooked by Liverpool remain top of the Premier League

• Sport

• liverpool

• Soccer

• Champions League

• Data

• Premier League

• Jurgen Klopp

• Villarreal