Ian Graham doesn’t really seem like a revolutionary. He has all the academic qualities: friendly, quick-witted, very casually dressed. He’s not a very good salesman. He doesn’t like giving interviews. Every 10 minutes or so he lets out an offbeat joke that’s beyond his control. So he finds it risky to be interviewed by electronic media.
Yet his revolutionary ideas were resoundingly successful. Twenty years ago, he pioneered the idea that football could benefit from analyzing the mountains of data produced by every player during every match. He is one of those who invented data analysis applied to soccer.
During a decade at Liverpool, he proved the value of his approach. Starting from scratch, he created a data service that became one of the most sophisticated in sports. His systems, methods and ideas transformed a club that had long been a giant adrift into a beacon of innovation.
There are two ways to measure its influence. The simplest ? The victories. During his tenure at Liverpool, the club were crowned champions of England – for the first time in 30 years –, Europe and the world (at the Club World Cup). He reached the Champions League final, soccer’s most important match, three times in five seasons.
But his influence on soccer as a whole also speaks volumes. When he was hired by Liverpool in 2012, the idea that an elite team could employ a scientist was considered far-fetched or absurd (Graham has a PhD in polymer physics, but he jokes about it when asked speaks).
Football has long been resistant to anyone who has not proven themselves as a player or coach. Soccer perceived itself as too dynamic, too fluid, too poetic to be reduced to the banality of numbers. The idea of a data analysis service was novel in itself.
Yet by the time Ian Graham left Liverpool in the spring, this practice had become the norm: any club playing in the continent’s big leagues must analyze data to recruit new players and evaluate their performance.
Almost every big team in Europe has a data department, staffed by people with a scientific background. We could therefore think that the scientific revolution in soccer is done. But for Graham, it’s just getting started.
He founded a company, Ludonautics, and now offers his services to all teams interested in data analysis. For its customers, the attraction is obvious. In a sport where time is always short, Ludonautics seems like a shortcut and Graham has a convincing track record.
For him, it is not a question of repeating the success experienced at Liverpool, but of pushing his discipline further. Graham is no longer obliged to work according to the rules and constraints of a team. It can use the full range of modern technologies to innovate, do better and bring about a great leap forward for soccer.
One day, he aspires to what he describes as the “Holy Grail” of analytics: measuring the coach’s real impact. “It’s very complicated,” he said. It gets mixed up with who has the best players, the best team. There are a lot of side effects. It is very difficult to determine the exact value of a coach and his impact on results. »
For Graham, soccer is more complex than theoretical physics for two reasons. First, the exact sciences have the advantage of being bound by immutable rules. The laws of physics are non-negotiable. Particles behave in predictable ways. This is not the case with soccer.
Next, elite sport does not offer the luxury of controlled experimentation. European soccer does not evolve in a sterile laboratory where a hypothesis can be formulated, tested and modified. “Everything about it is very emotional, very reactive,” Mr. Graham emphasizes. Supporters and leaders demand quick results.
Now, in Liverpool, he had time. Which largely explains its success, he says. This is the key factor that allowed the club to develop its methods. “The first thing I told the owners was: Don’t expect to hear from me for six months. This is the time it took to build the system we needed. Whenever there was something more urgent, we could hire someone else to do it. »
Few teams – if any – have this privilege. This is what limits soccer’s ability to make the most of recent advances in data analytics. Even Brighton and Brentford, two English clubs who emulated Liverpool and rose to the Premier League thanks to data, must keep pace in a field that is evolving at breakneck speed.
“Look at what people are doing outside of sport, those who have the time to try things, it’s often much more advanced,” says Graham.
“The tools, the technology, the data, all of that has gotten a lot better. If you were to build a system today, you would start at a much higher level. However, in a club, we cannot push development very high. There is so much work every day that there is no time for research. »
For two months, Graham has been meeting soccer team owners and people who want to buy one. Most – not all – are extremely wealthy Americans, often heads of venture capital firms. They all request the services of Ludonautics and Graham.
What struck him most during these meetings was that soccer remains very poorly understood, quantitatively, by those who work there. How much luck plays into a team’s performance? How much should she invest for each ranking point? All this remains a mystery. But even some simple things are, too, says Graham.
In many cases, teams don’t know what to consider success. Ludonautics has seen team sales flyers in which the value of players was barely a guesstimate. This has a tangible and detrimental effect, Graham says.
When it comes to performance, some teams have “no systematic way of knowing who they are and where they stand. They have no idea of the underlying strength of the team,” he says. “If we don’t know that, how do we know what rank we should finish the season at? How do you know if finishing fifth is satisfying or not? And how can we demand accountability at the end of the season? »
According to him, it is in the interest of soccer as a whole: if more teams master both simple and complex things, soccer will be better off. To explain the need to quantify this sport, Graham evokes a quote from the English poet John Keats, who criticized the physicist Isaac Newton for having destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.
“Knowing how it’s produced doesn’t make the rainbow any less beautiful,” Graham argues.
