Mohamed Salah: When Liverpool nearly missed out on forward, and how ‘Moneyball’ strategy revitalised club

Graham was a consultant at Tottenham from 2007-2012 but “they never really had the ambition to make more” of data whereas he said “Liverpool were the first team to have an in-house analytics department”.

He was at Liverpool from 2012 to 2023 and was a key part of the ‘Moneyball’ strategy – the statistical method Major League ­Baseball side Oakland Athletics used in the 1990s to recruit players – that Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG) adopted at the club.

“Moneyball is really the concept of, ‘can we get more value for money out of our squad? Can we get more performance per pound spent? Because, if we can, that means we can compete with clubs with a higher budget than us’,” said Graham.

“We started off with about seven or eight different leagues, by the time I left we were probably taking data from about 60 different leagues so that we really understood what players could do on the pitch.”

Graham worked under former Liverpool sporting director Michael Edwards, who left the club in 2022 before returning as FSG’s chief executive of football in 2024.

The pair were part of a transfer committee who, along with Liverpool’s manager, would “come to a consensus decision on the best players to sign”.

Liverpool had appointed Klopp as manager in October 2015 and his willingness to engage in the use of data in recruitment was in contrast to his predecessor Brendan Rodgers.

“Previously, we had robust debates with Brendan about which players to sign and the two differences were our ideas about which players would improve Liverpool were very different to Brendan’s ideas,” said Graham.

“Brendan, understandably, put a big premium on Premier League experience whereas we felt those players were quite often overvalued by the market and players from other markets, like Mo Salah and Roberto Firmino, were undervalued.”

Graham explained that Rodgers “came in with a preconception that the player he wanted to sign was the only solution for that position” and that “it was very difficult to persuade him otherwise”.

In Klopp, Graham said they had found the “missing piece” and, in some cases, “a manager who seemed to see what the data saw”.

He added: “He [Jurgen] is very happy to thank us for our suggestions to have stopped some of the less sensible signings, which at the time caused big arguments but, in retrospect, he could see this was a good process for signing players.”