The Liverpool Thread

A bit of a dream job. Studying analitycs myself right now and maybe in the future will try to see something up with local clubs but in doubt that there are any hope for something similar here. There are so many hidden pieces behind the scene that build up a club.
theathletic.com

Meet William Spearman, Liverpool’s secret weapon

He is the scientist who even the players know little about, but rival clubs refer to William Spearman as 'Liverpool’s secret weapon'
theathletic.com theathletic.com
Quietly, there is a new arms race in the Premier League and those trying to find their place in the rush acknowledge that it is being led by the champions.
Figures at other clubs have described William Spearman as “Liverpool’s secret weapon”, a researcher whose name appears whenever articles about the use of data are written — though he has never received the same level of focus as Michael Edwards, their sporting director, or Ian Graham, the chief data analyst.
His only public appearance was accidental.
When someone filmed Jurgen Klopp dancing at the club’s Christmas party in December 2018 after Manchester United had been beaten 3-1 at Anfield earlier that day, Spearman was in the background, performing some impressive moves of his own.
Spearman is a scientist. Colleagues at Melwood occasionally call him “the American boffin”, though the term is an affectionate one. Most of his focus is on recruitment and that means he is close to the scouts, with whom he shares an office. Beyond social conversation in the canteen over lunch, he rarely speaks to the players — who roughly know what he does but not always exactly.
Edwards and Klopp prefer it that way. Spearman’s findings can be complex. While Edwards’s background means he is comfortable looking at numbers across spreadsheets, Spearman’s information needs to be packaged in a way that inspires a clear mind for those who are less familiar with the analysis. That is where the analysis team come in, converting what he has discovered into videos which get presented at team meetings.
When Klopp speaks about the support at Liverpool “blowing my mind”, he is referring immediately to materials brought to him by Greg Mathieson and James French, who study opponents, as well as Harrison Kingston and Mark Leyland, the post-game analysers. They are active on a match day, watching what is happening live and via monitors. Their remit allows them to operate in dressing rooms.
Spearman is usually sat in the stands. He is right at the start of the production line, setting the programmes and tools that deliver the data from which conclusions are formed. As much as 60 per cent of his time is spent on long-term innovations, the sort of blueprints he’d want to publish on if he were working in an academic setting — as he once did at Harvard University.
After that, 30 per cent of his time is spent collaborating on short-term or bespoke projects with coaches and analysts. This could be a piece of focused work over a concentrated three-week period or a few days each week over a few months where the idea goes through a refining process. The remaining 10 per cent is recurrent work: post-match reporting, usually geared towards potential new signings.
When Spearman moved to England from Texas in 2017, he decided to rent a house a short distance from Melwood because he was unsure how hard it would be to get a UK driver’s licence. He reports to Graham, who lives and works from his home in Cheltenham, some 140 miles from Liverpool’s training ground. Though Graham travels up to Merseyside a couple of times a month, it is easy enough for the tech-savvy research team to maintain contact via the Slack messaging facility, which is relentlessly used throughout any working day and proved to be very helpful during the pandemic, especially as Spearman had returned to the US while Britain was in lockdown.
Graham’s Gloucestershire address isn’t far from that of Tim Waskett, another figure employed by Liverpool who keeps a low profile. An astrophysicist, he has been a software developer and statistical researcher since 2012 and during the week he and Graham work from each other’s houses.
There is a team of six researchers at the club. Waskett was Graham’s first hire and he was essentially brought in to implement the data models that Graham did not feel like implementing himself. While Graham is the ideas man, Waskett is a programmer. In his previous job with performance analysis firm Hudl, Spearman had to clear a lot of data and synchronise certain events into his models but at Liverpool, Waskett handles a lot of that.
Dafydd Steele, like Graham, was born in Wales and the former junior chess champion joined Liverpool in 2013 from energy company Petronas with the remit of looking for answers to very specific questions. Mark Howlett, the systems administrator, manages Liverpool’s database while Mark Stevenson is a software developer who focuses on front-end visualisation— preparing data findings for other departments. Aside from the data analysts and the scouts, the researchers also create tools for the club’s fitness and conditioning unit led by Andreas Kornmayer.
Spearman was hired because of his understanding of player tracking data, having created a statistical tool at Hudl which measured levels of control across a football pitch. Tracking data is where the ball and players are tracked, usually at a rate of once every 25th of a second, using in-ground cameras. This data complements the events recorded by the likes of Opta, which show every ball touch.
The tool was of interest for Liverpool especially because of its capacity to measure distances between player and ball and realistic expectations on the seizure of possession. The ability for a player to press, after all, is something Klopp values very highly.
Liverpool have since become one of the very few clubs to invest early in broadcast tracking data, which is a fairly recent innovation in the area of football analytics where positional data on the players and the ball are captured not using in-ground cameras but from broadcast footage of matches. Their partnership with SkillCorner means they have access to a machine that monitors the movement of every player.
In the meantime, Spearman has helped to develop a model that means Liverpool’s analysts are now able to estimate the probability of a goal being scored from anywhere on a pitch within the next 15 seconds. This tool is used to evaluate player performance after all Premier League matches, not just Liverpool’s.
“We can analyse a lot of players all around the world using the ball touch event data,” Waskett said when he spoke at a Royal Institute lecture in December 2019. “It gives us really good information on which players are doing well and who we might be able to sign in the future.”
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Will continue in next post, hit the text limit :D
 
College Station is a US college town built originally on the back of the earliest Texan railroads, located somewhere in the middle of a triangle created by the big cities of Dallas, Houston and Austin. Education is the primary source of employment there and in the most recent census was responsible for more than 16,000 jobs.
Mark Spearman studied at Texas A&M (Agricultural & Mechanical) University, graduating in 1986 with a PhD in industrial engineering. Nearly two decades later, he returned to the campus as a department head carrying more experience in academia, having initially worked as an associate professor at Northwestern University near Chicago, before securing a more permanent role at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
He would realise after less than a year, however, that he did not enjoy the politics that came with university leadership and returned to consultancy work with his own company, Factory Physics — a name taken from one of his earlier textbooks published while at Northwestern.
Spearman’s wife, Blair, was a biologist. Maybe it should be no surprise that at least one of their three children emerged as scientifically minded. Jacob was born first and Rebekah last, though she preferred the classics and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Chicago, where she also works as an instructor.
William Spearman was born in Chicago but moved to College Station when he was six because of his father Mark’s work. In 2005, he enrolled at the University of Dallas, where he studied science, specialising in physics. Following a year-long scholarship in Geneva, he returned to the US and, at Harvard, completed a PhD in high-energy particle physics where his thesis measured the mass and width of the energy field Higgs boson. Though some reports have made a lot of his role in such a far-reaching investigation, The Athletic understands he was one of as many as 5,000 researchers working on the project.
Like his father, Spearman stepped away from academia and into industry, in 2015 joining Hudl, a performance analysis tool manufacturer used by lots of American sports teams. Though Spearman watched American football, he was not a sportsman himself and his competitive interests at college in Dallas extended only as far as the frisbee club.
He became interested in what the rest of the world calls “football” at Hudl because of the flowing nature of the game and the complexity of the data created. Though analytics had long since established itself in decision-making processes in baseball, Spearman felt it was easier to crunch numbers in America’s most popular pastime because of the fixed number of hitting outcomes: first base, second base, third base, home run or out.
This, he thought, made modelling very simple. While American football was somewhere in between, basketball was the closest to football in terms of analytics but remained much more straightforward to assess because there are so many point opportunities since on a court that would fit in a football pitch’s penalty area a team was always within one pass of scoring.
There was the threat of the counter-attack in football, but the pitch was much bigger than a basketball court and the probability of a long pass leading directly to a goal was much lower. He could see that in football there was an increased number of phases in play and, as in ice hockey, outcomes were naturally influenced by the use of space.
Crucially, five years ago, he could see that data was still in its infancy in football. Not every club had embraced its use. In his mind, so much about the game remained unexplained. Even though he was one of the thousands of students working on the Higgs boson at Harvard, the experience gave him a taste for the cutting edge in a field that had not been explored before. Analysing something only a small number of people across the world were studying excited him. Others might have had access to the same data but he liked to think he looked at it differently.
Inside his first year at Hudl, he had designed the control model that alerted Liverpool.
When it was made public in 2016, Graham and Steele wanted to meet him and after that, the trio kept in touch, mainly via email, until the following year, when Graham asked Spearman whether he’d be interested in joining a club.
Though he had established a home in College Station where he was able to work for Hudl remotely and the lifestyle change in Britain daunted him, he could not resist the temptation to try something he considered groundbreaking.
Researchers at football clubs tend not to advertise their work, because it might alert a rival to a new development.
This explains why there are challenges detailing exactly which club is leading.
Spearman is the sort of person who finds innovation addictive. Certainly, Liverpool cannot afford to rest on their laurels and make the sort of mistakes other clubs make. Liverpool’s owners are rich but do not have the wealth of Manchester City or Chelsea’s owners. So they have to be smarter and better in other ways.
Chelsea, supposedly, are building a promising analytics team. City, meanwhile, recently made three new hires and are working more closely with scientists at the University of Manchester. Elsewhere in the Premier League, Spearman apparently respects the work of Mladen Sormaz, his contemporary at Leicester City, as well as Sarah Rudd at Arsenal, who transferred over from StatDNA when the club acquired the start-up seven years ago.
Rudd and Barcelona’s Javier Fernandez are considered the leading researchers in football, though respected figures inside the game think Spearman is actually ahead of them at the moment because he is being listened to more both at ownership and management levels.
When Spearman joined the club three years ago, one of his biggest fears was that he wouldn’t be taken seriously, or that it would take years before there was any sort of buy-in from significant figures. His friends at other clubs have struggled to regain credibility after presenting seemingly half-baked ideas but he’s never felt that way at Liverpool because he has always been clear that his first version of any potential tool might sound far-fetched. There have been lots of instances where Spearman’s models have said something about a player that hasn’t correlated with the opinions of a scout.
Those who have worked with him say they have only had encouraging conversations. As much as the scouts learn from him, he learns more about the realities of football from them.
As one source told The Athletic, “Liverpool are ahead because they’ve got the balance right between the football people and the programmers.”
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Will leave something good also here. Brilliant watch.
 
@Bujakaa92 , a fascinating read and watch ta.

I thoroughly enjoyed that even not being mathematically inclined. I struggle at times understanding the concepts of the algorithms with the data models. Even when they're explained as simply as they are in the above video. But then I am not blessed with a super brain like the ex-NASA scientists and top University professors et al that make up L'pool's industry-leading analytical and sports science departments haha.

I touched on this the other day when talking about Jürgen and his humble appreciation that he doesn't know more than the experts in their respective fields and willingness to take on board any and all ideas, however new and innovative, to give him that extra edge over our opponents that make all the difference at the very highest level.

N0 stone unturned in the pursuit of excellence.

It's a whole new football World with maths and science now as important a factor as anything.

LONG may LFC remain at the forefront of it.
 
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@sistoney67
Jurgen Klopp to @5liveSport on @lfc lack of transfer activity: "We live in a world with a lot of uncertainty. For some clubs how uncertain the future is seems to be less important – owned by countries and oligarchs, that is the truth. We are a different kind of club."
 
Neil Jones
@neiljonesgoal
·
Sep 10, 2020
Ben Woodburn is set to join Eredivisie side Sparta Rotterdam on a season-long loan from #LFC
 
What is up with the ugly kits this season? Inter, us and now Liverpool. Atleast, for us and Pool, it's the third kit, probably rarely used.

Mind you, chessboard still looks better than Zebra, which looks better than Inter's psychedelic stuff.
 
Meh. I don't so much mind that compared to the horrific away strip. At least that ones wearable.

Not that the competition is any great shakes. (And don't get me started on the home with the back-to-front colour containing ******* blue! And the totally unneeded side-stripes that just makes it look cheap.).

Bottom line is it will all add to the £100 million or so a season from the Nike deal which will be even more invaluable in these COVID uncertain times.

Even if we do look a state playing in them. Mad thing is, most of the extensive Nike casual/ training wear et al is really nice. Just the kits are *****.
 
Ahahahahahahahaha. Is it possible to love that man any more?

That's absolutely brilliant! I shall now watch ta mate.

Soz abar us if this fella' isn't your manager.
 
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