Data analyst wants to make football smarter – 10/17/2023 – Sport

Ian Graham doesn’t look like a revolutionary. He has a distinctly academic air: affable, extremely intelligent, a little clumsy. He is not a natural salesman. He doesn’t like giving interviews. Every 10 minutes or so he allows a mischievous and eccentric sense of humor to overcome him. He feels this makes it risky to appear in any media outlet.

It’s hard to deny, however, that he is a successful insurgent. Twenty years ago, he was one of the first to explore the idea that football could better understand itself by examining the vast amount of data produced by players in each game. Although he cannot be considered a pioneer in the field of data analysis in football, Graham helped shed light on the existence of this universe in sport.

Over a decade at Liverpool, he demonstrated the importance of data analysis in football. From scratch, he built a data department that has come to be considered one of the most sophisticated in sports. His systems, methods and insights have transformed a club that had long been a drifting and declining giant into a beacon of innovation.

There are two ways to evaluate your influence. The simplest of them is the football pattern: victories and defeats. During his time at Liverpool, the club was crowned champions of England — for the first time in 30 years —, Europe and the world. He reached the final of the Champions League, the sport’s biggest game, three times in five seasons.

But a better measure, perhaps, is the trail he left rather than the trail he blazed. When he joined Liverpool in 2012, the fact that an elite team could employ a real scientist — he has a PhD in polymer physics but uses his title only as a joke — was seen as extravagant or absurd.

Football had long resisted outsiders, those who had not established their credentials in the sport as players or coaches. Ball professionals had a particular contempt for academics. Sport still saw itself as too dynamic, too fluid, too poetic to be reduced to the banality of numbers. The idea of ​​a data department was still something new in itself.

When Graham left Liverpool earlier this year, however, data analysis was proving to be a necessity for the club. It is widely accepted that any serious club wanting to compete in the continent’s top leagues should consult this information to sign new players and evaluate performances.

Almost every major team in Europe has a data analysis department, increasingly including experts with a scientific background. Graham would perhaps be forgiven in the fact that the revolution he helped instigate is complete. In his opinion, however, it has barely begun.

Gravity

For Graham, there are two reasons why football is more complex than theoretical physics. The first is that “exact science”, according to its own definition, has the advantage of being limited by a set of indisputable rules. The laws of physics are non-negotiable. Particles behave in predictable ways. That doesn’t happen in football. “In physics, you don’t need to take into account that gravity works a little differently in Germany,” he said.

The second reason is that elite sports do not offer the “great luxury” of controlled experimentation. European football does not operate in sterile laboratory conditions. There is no opportunity to formulate, test and modify a hypothesis. “It’s very emotional, very reactive,” Graham said. Fans and executives demand instant gratification.

The long-term future extends, at most, to about six weeks. At the latest, until Christmas. The only thing that no one in football has, as a rule, is time.

Graham attributes much of his success at Liverpool to having time. This, he said, was the key ingredient in the “special sauce” the club developed. “The first thing he told the owners was that they shouldn’t expect to hear from me for six months,” he said. “That’s how long it would take to build all the structures we needed. Every time there was something more urgent, we were able to hire someone else to do it.”

The fact that few — if any — other teams have this privilege limits football’s ability to make the most of the great advances made in analytics in recent years. Even Brighton and Brentford, the two English clubs now serving as Liverpool’s heirs at the forefront of the sport, with their data-driven fairytale rises to the Premier League, must keep up in an area that is evolving at a rapid pace.

“If you look at what people are doing outside of sport, people who have time to try new things, it’s often much more advanced,” Graham said. “The tools available, the technology, the data are all much better now. If you were to start building a system today, you would have a much higher baseline. Within a club, you have to stop developing at a certain level. There is so much daily work that there is no time for research.”

This is not the only limiting factor. Clubs operate in distinct silos: the work they do with data is largely proprietary. The fact that teams do not share knowledge or disseminate best practices makes sense in the sporting field. But, in addition to being antithetical in the scientific sphere, this serves to reduce the potential impact of the data.

Teams that haven’t had the foresight to be among the first to embrace data analytics are, by Graham’s estimates, “10 years behind” in comparison to clubs like Liverpool, Brighton and Brentford. Those who had the interest but not the resources are also behind. “Teams that could benefit most often can’t afford to do that, or at least do it correctly,” he said.

It has been almost a year since the 45-year-old informed Liverpool that his role there had come to “a natural end”. Working for the club he supported as a child was his “dream job”, but he felt he had achieved all he could. Graham knew that, at least in a professional environment, he wouldn’t be able to start over from scratch.

When news of his imminent departure spread, he quickly received a number of offers from other teams, all hoping he could do for them what he had done for Liverpool. Graham did not find the prospect attractive. The systems he had designed for Liverpool were now the club’s intellectual property; he didn’t want to build something for someone else. “I felt like I had already done it,” he said. “It would be crazy to work for just one club again.”

Instead, he focused his efforts on helping football as a whole become a little smarter.

Known unknowns

In recent months, Graham has met with a succession of football team owners and potential owners. They are — largely, though not exclusively — extremely wealthy Americans, often executives at private equity and venture capital firms, all of them eager to acquire for the clubs that have bought or hope to buy the services of Ludonautics, the company he founded. after leaving Liverpool.

The appeal is obvious. In a chronically time-starved sport, Ludonautics feels like a shortcut. Graham’s resume is compelling. So does Michael Edwards, the acclaimed publicity-averse sporting director who worked with him at Liverpool and who is now employed by the company as a “sports consultant”.

However, the proposal is not that they can repeat the success they had at Liverpool; is that they can expand it. Graham no longer needs to work within the constraints and demands of a team. He can instead use the full range of modern technology at his disposal to build something new, better, and power the sport’s next big leap.

Over time, this evolution could allow what he considers the “holy grail” of analysis: assessing a coach’s true importance. “This is very complicated,” he said. “It’s often confused with who has the best players, the best team. There are a lot of second-order effects. It’s very difficult to know exactly how good any coach is and what kind of impact they have on results.”

What has struck him most in his recent meetings is how much football still doesn’t know about itself. It’s not just that complex things — how much of a team’s performance can be attributed to luck, how much it is spending for each point gained — remain a mystery. The simplest building blocks are also unknown.

The most pressing thing is that, in many cases, teams do not know what should be considered success. Ludonautics has seen team sales prospectuses where roster values ​​are little more than rough estimates. This, Graham said, represents more than just a sales gimmick; has a tangible and harmful effect.

“In terms of performance, they often don’t have a systematic way of knowing who they are and where they are,” he said. “They don’t have a sense of the underlying strength of the team. Without that, how do you know where you’re supposed to be? How do you know if finishing fifth is good or bad? And how do you hold people accountable?”

To the extent he’s concerned, it’s in the interest of the sport as a whole: the more teams know about the simple things, as well as the complex ones, the better the sport becomes. “There’s a quote by John Keats about Isaac Newton using the prism to explain the colors of a rainbow,” Graham said. “But knowing why this happens doesn’t make a rainbow any less beautiful.”