I was always into real life auto biographies especially on people who made their money and everyone thought they were mad at the time until they were proved wrong. In sport this happens alot as well but there has to be an edge gained that nobody has seen. The English Premiership is now one of the biggest leagues in the world right now with billions being paid out to buy the best players so the top clubs need to be getting it right. Fast forward to new owners such as Brighton's Tony Bloom who made millions from the betting industry from football after inventing mathematical models that would predict a matches scores purely based on data and probability. Tony ended up paying 93 million for the club and one of his first port of calls was removing the traditional scout and installing data analysts. Brighton soon got promoted and got promoted again buying low and selling high and are now one of the top clubs in the League. The Americans started using mathematical models and data long before sports in England and you can watch the excellent film Moneyball with Brad Pitt managing an struggling team called Oakland Athletics who started using these data analysts in baseball to the shock of the traditionalists. The owner of the Boston Red Sox who also made his money through data analysts saw the job Billy Beane was doing and hired him and Boston then went on to some great success. This leads John to buy Liverpool Football Club and hire his own team of analysts and this is where we pick up the book "How to win the Premier League"
So John hires a couple of data guys and puts them in an old office in Liverpool's training ground called Melwood and they look about turning around Liverpool's misfortunes. Henry had them analysing everything , players , managers , opposition and he tasked them to come up with better models so that the data would provide them with more details. Ian goes into great detail in this book. Too much in fact as I struggled to get through it but I did find an awful lot of insight into how much detail these analysts actually look at.
One point in the book which surprised me was that the Liverpool manager who was there when Henry took over ownership was a manager called Brendan Rodgers. He did not really agree with the data model and he did not really buy into it. Rodgers was and still is considered a good manager and he nearly won the league with Liverpool only if his star player did not slip at the wrong moment but things went sour at Liverpool pretty fast after this near miss and I always wondered why. They offer an explanation in the book that Rodgers was set in his ways. They had a big number 9 up front called Andy Carroll and Rodgers did not fancy him, preferring another striker to come in instead. Now Andy Carroll had cost a fortune and Rodgers wanted a player called Cristian Benteke who would also cost a fortune. When the churned the numbers on the stats, Carroll came out with more positive data than Benteke. They were exactly the same player so to get rid of one and to be replaced by the exact replica did not make sense to the boffins. Rodgers did not really buy into them anyway. He threw the toys out of the pram and got Benteke only to be a disaster.
Another great little story was with a Brazilian player called Philipe Coutinho. Coutinho was a legend at Liverpool who could turn games with screamers from outside the box. Coutinho was abnormally good at scoring from outside the box but the data threw back that he was taking too many shots from outside the box. If he passed the ball more then Liverpool would have more success over the course of a season. Abnormal results do not last long and it would not be long before his shots would come back into the norm like other talented footballers. So when a bid for €140 million came in from Barcelona for the player , Liverpool absolutely bite their hand off. Liverpool invested in a keeper and centre half from the money and never looked back. Coutinho was a disaster at Barcelona and now plays in Brazil.
As I said earlier. The book was very hard to get through and I struggled reading the various models they set up and how they did it but I am glad I read it so I can see how detailed the stats were. I am looking forward to reading "Sanctioned " about Roman Abramovich and his selling of Chelsea and the new Dan Brown novel and this is holding me up. But I refuse to not finish any book so I must make sure I get to the end now.
A must read for @hivefpl fans . Can't give it full marks because of the toughness of the read. 7/10