It was on such minutiae that Liverpool's Champions League hopes hinged. BEN MACKRIELL, VP of Pro Products at Stats Perform, explains why it's shape and not formation that matters in football. Ian Graham has worked for Liverpool since July 2012 Written by Simon Austin — June 15, 2020 LIVERPOOL Director of Research Ian Graham says that although manager Jürgen Klopp “intuitively understands the numbers”, he does not have "day-to-day or week-to … We have detailed data on hundreds of thousands of players. “And then, ‘What was this team’s chance of scoring a goal after that action happened?’ And we call that ‘goal probability added,’ which is a really catchy name. 243. But while that represents their principal point of focus, his team also play a part in match analysis.

Prior to his arrival at Melwood, Graham earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Cambridge and built his own database that tracked the progress of more than 100,000 footballers from across the planet. He doesn’t work too much with it day-to-day or week-to-week, but that’s not a bad thing at all.”. “In Premier League football and European football in general, there’s a worldwide free market of football players. Ian Graham - Liverpool's hidden transfer guru working alongside Michael Edwards and Jurgen Klopp Throughout his career in management, Jurgen Klopp has always embraced forward-thinking ideas. Back in 2005, Opta existed and had been doing football stats for a while but the detailed data just still wasn’t there.”. He was a really strange case of a really attacking full-back playing in a really poor defensive team.”.

Liverpool FC is very lucky and blessed with vision to have hired Klopp.

A tremendously insightful article in the New York Times has identified one of the most important characters at the club at present: Ian Graham. The same technology that is used for missile-tracking, originally. Graham's exhaustive and extensive work has now been highlighted like never before, thanks to the New York Times, but he has been providing Klopp with the essential information since they first met in November 2015.

Ian Graham . One of Graham’s earliest responsibilities at Liverpool was to research Philippe Coutinho.

Aside from that he obviously just fits the whole club ethos and professionalism and inspires everyone at the club and supporters to such a degree that he's building a Juggernaut which seems destined for more success as long as the lads retain the attitude and application he requires, Data analyst Ian Graham tells about Liverpool hiring Klopp: 'He was always one of our dream hires as manager. 243. “In terms of our week-to-week relationship, I don’t have very much interaction with him, but that’s not a bad thing because he knows the analysis we do and how it feeds into the various reports and the weekly work that him and his team do. “But his last season at Dortmund was disastrous. Subscribe to LFCTV GO and get one month free T&CS apply. “They are responsible for the technology side of it - so maintaining the database for us, building our research website and so on.

They do all the tech stuff and that lets the four of us focus on the data science part of it.”, READ MORE: William Spearman - How Liverpool build pitch control models, READ MORE: Tim Waskett - The maths behind Liverpool's title charge, READ MORE: Ian Graham - The 'one currency' Liverpool use to judge players, For latest updates, follow us on Twitter at @ground_guru.

It’s much easier to track a person than a missile. “It was just luck really that she forwarded me that advert and I applied for it and got the job. “Pre-match, there’s a set of reports that James [French] and Greg [Mathieson] put together and then post-match there’s a similar thing that Harrison [Kingston] and Mark [Leyland] put together,” he describes. “Originally, I thought I would be a scientist,” Graham tells Liverpoolfc.com.

And if there is anything in particular that needs addressing, we’re there for the coaches. Ian Graham has worked for Liverpool since July 2012.

Which brings us neatly onto a little-known member of staff by the name of Ian Graham.

“So it was exciting to be going to work for Michael again and obviously the owners too, with the whole Moneyball story. Which was that they were still clearly the second-best team in Germany.

A big part of the club in the modern era is the continual search for benefits provided by analytics and data and there’s an argument for Liverpool being the most forward-thinking club in the Premier League in this regard. But data analysis showed Klopp's team were the second-best in the league and also second-unluckiest ones. “Pre-match, there’s a set of reports that James and Greg put together and then post-match there’s a similar thing that Harrison and Mark put together,” Graham explained.

Director of research Graham was relatively unknown until a piece from the New York Times earlier this week detailed how his work has aided Klopp across different facets of his management at Anfield.

Indeed, it’s not outlandish to suggest that the current back-to-back Champions League finalists would be in a very different state right now without the impact of some key individuals in this department. It was kind of like whatever they needed from us, they could ask and we’d try to apply our data analysis to it.”. There is no wonder Klopp impressed the Reds as he managed to win the title twice with the second-unluckiest team at the league.

info@trainingground.guru, About His journey here began when an exciting alternative to his scientific pursuits presented itself through a combination of chance and fortune. But that’s still 5,000 players, which is too big a set of players to scout everyone in depth and in detail.

u/Foundan123. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. FOOTBALL’S preoccupation with the ‘unicorn’ manager or head coach is a "flawed leadership concept" and needs to change, says Dave Reddin, the former Head of Team Strategy and Performance? He replaced Brendan Rogers at the wheel, instantly made everyone to simply fall in love with the new Liverpool manager, and we have the math to thank for that.

From the small-scale beginnings of Graham operating alone under Edwards’ supervision, Liverpool’s research department now consists of six full-time staff members. LIVERPOOL’S Director of Research, Ian Graham, has revealed that the club use a metric called ‘goal probability added’ to assess players. All rights reserved.