WEEKEND COLUMNISTS It has taken too long, but at last European football clubs are starting to learn from American sports.
Mike Forde, Chelsea’s performance director, visits the US often. “The first time I went to the Red Sox,” he says of the Boston baseball team, “I sat there for eight hours, in a room with no windows, only flipcharts. I walked out of there saying, ‘Wow, that is one of the most insightful conversations on sport I have ever had.’ It was not: ‘What are you doing here? You do not know anything about our sport.’ That was totally irrelevant. It was: ‘How do you make decisions on players? What information do you use? How do we approach the same problems?’”
Forde, holding forth excitedly from his comfy chair at Chelsea’s health club, is tapping the statistical revolution that has swept American sports. The revolution’s manifesto was Michael Lewis’s 2003 baseball book Moneyball. Earlier this year, Lewis proclaimed: “The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport.” In soccer, Forde is spreading the virus.
Forde worked at Bolton Wanderers before Chelsea, and he looks like a football man: trim, graying, regional accent, nice suit. That helps him deal with hidebound football men who are wary of fancy numbers spouted by dowdy statisticians. “Letting even a top-level statistician loose with a more traditional football manager is not really the right combination,” says Forde.
He studied psychology in San Diego, and that early American experience proved key. He often visits Billy Beane, hero of Moneyball, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and a soccer fan who grills him on English football’s latest goings-on.
Recently, though, Forde has been studying basketball, a sport more like soccer. “Basketball is ahead of us,” Forde admits. However, he says England’s biggest football clubs now have people in roles like his. “We as a nation are probably more open to the American experience than maybe the French are, the Italians are. Maybe we will be quicker to adapt the Moneyball ideas because of that.”
Adapting those ideas began a decade ago, when clubs started to buy data on the number of passes, tackles and kilometres run for each player. Forde remembers the early hunt for meaning in numbers. “Can we find a correlation between total distance covered and winning? The answer was invariably No.”
People from England rugby told Forde possession won matches. But that did not work in soccer. “If you had 55 per cent possession, the chances of winning were less than if you had 35 per cent possession.”
But the data can help clubs evaluate individual players. After all, says Forde, “most of the elite clubs are probably spending 70 per cent of their revenues on 2.5 per cent of their workforce. Really all we have got is talent.”
Forde sees his task as “risk management”. For instance, he studies data covering a player’s career to avoid the trap of signing someone when he is in top form. A footballer, explains Forde, spends minimal time in the ideal state of flow. “The player thinks that is his normal standard. It is not. My job is to see what form he regresses to.”
The search is still on for the best data to evaluate players. If a forward is tearing up the French or Dutch league, you need to predict his strike-rate in the tougher Premier League. Forde says: “We created our own algorithm: if the guy scores 15 goals in France, is that 10 in England?” Finding criteria to assess defenders is harder. “Is it tackles? Well, look at Paolo Maldini: he made one tackle every two games.”
The holy grail would be discovering the key to victory. “I do not think we are there yet,” Forde admits. But he says: “If you look at 10 years in the Premier League, there is a stronger correlation between clean sheets and where you finish than goals scored and where you finish.” Billy Beane would have been proud.
