Moneyball.
It’s a term that not so long ago formed the zeitgeist of modern soccer. As a buzzword it was used so often it grew tired and lazy, losing its true meaning as directors, coaches and everyone else threw it around in an attempt to present themselves as the vanguard of what was new and cutting edge.
Of course, it wasn’t so difficult to see through those who had no clue what a real Moneyball strategy was. Some used it to legitimize blatant penny pinching. Others uttered the term to make themselves appear smarter than they really well. Along with ‘tiki-taka’ it was an expression that came to outline a certain era of soccer.
This week marks five years since Aaron Sorkin’s film adaption of “Moneyball,” a book originally written by Michael Lewis charting the now fabled 2002 season enjoyed by the Oakland Athletics baseball team. It focused on the philosophical methods and ideas of Billy Beane and how he revolutionized his sport with a new way of thinking—a way of thinking that went against the grain of what every baseball-minded person thought they knew. But that has since dissipated. It’s been a while since Moneyball was uttered in sincerity.
The release of the 2011 film made soccer types believe they could follow the precedent set by Beane. Liverpool were at the forefront of this movement, with the club’s owner John W. Henry a great advocate of the Moneyball model having adopted it as owner of the Boston Red Sox. He even tried to hire Beane.
Sabermetrics analysts were employed at Anfield, looking at every aspect of a player’s statistical fabric, the idea being that by looking at the numbers and figures a certain formula can be found for a winning team. Damien Commoli, as Liverpool’s director of football, was the club’s Moneyballing figurehead.
He sought to turn Liverpool into the Oakland As of the Premier League. Commoli used statistics to determine which players to sign in the transfer market, making a move for left fullback Jose Enrique from Newcastle United because he had a high pass completion rate and he was one of the best players in the league at breaking into the final third.
It didn’t work, however, as Commoli lasted just 18 months at Liverpool after a number of expensive failures in the transfer market. The Moneyball mentality walked out the Anfield exit door with him in April 2014, with other clubs such as Stoke City—also seen as footballing advocates of the sabermetrics system—ultimately losing faith in pulling off a statistical revolution.
So is the concept of Moneyball in soccer dead? All that lingers is a wavering appreciation of statistics’ importance to the game, but clubs no longer consider it the most significant criteria when determining the worth of a player, otherwise Manchester United wouldn’t have splurged a world record transfer fee on Paul Pogba this summer.
There’s no real incentive for Premier League clubs to adopt a Moneyball model any longer. Beane and the Oakland As came up with the strategy as a way of competing against the big names and elite teams of Major League Baseball. They were, by comparison, minnows and needed a way to bridge the gap. Sabermetrics was the way to do that.
But Premier League clubs, with their broadcast revenue that dwarves anything received by any other division of clubs anywhere in the world, don’t need to bridge the gap. They have money to do that, and spending an inflated fee on an obviously good player is easier than rummaging through spreadsheets in the hope of finding a player who has been undervalued.
It could be argued that English soccer’s wealth is precisely why it should continue borrowing ideas from the Moneyball model. If every Premier League club is filthy rich, swimming in a sea of gold coins and green notes like Scrooge McDuck, they should be seeking to get more for their money than their rivals can. £30 million—a fee affordable to most Premier League clubs—gets you a good player in the transfer market, but sabermetrics could theoretically get you an even better one.
There has been something of a backlash to the proliferation of statistics in soccer, with some managers viewing it as a questioning of their capacity to spot a talented player. Moneyball, in its true form, may well have died, but its influence is still being felt, at least in some form.
Sportsnet’s Soccer Central podcast (featuring James Sharman, Thomas Dobby, Brendan Dunlop and John Molinaro) takes an in-depth look at the beautiful game and offers timely and thoughtful analysis on the sport’s biggest issues.
