Concern scoured his vocal chords, but professional pride dictated his priorities. On Friday he took a brief break from preparing a profile of Paulo Gazzaniga, an imposing young Argentine goalkeeper who had ma-terialised at Gillingham, to take Jan, his partner, for lunch. Even during that respite, 17 messages stockpiled on his mobile phone. Callers were split into two distinct groups. The first, professional acquaintances, were seeking inside information on events at Anfield. They could be fobbed off with generalities. The second were friends from within the game, whose concerns were more personal. They ranged from managers, such as Jackett and Gary Waddock, to fellow scouts, like the venerable John Griffin, a man of huge knowledge and instinctive kindness, who was working in impoverished circumstances alongside Waddock at Wycombe Wanderers.
Saturday was surreal, a fusion of the past and an uncertain future. Johnson was in the car park at the Kassam Stadium, listening on the radio as Andy Carroll, a central character in Comolli’s downfall, scored the 87th minute headed goal which took Liverpool into the FA Cup final. He was accompanied by Dean Austin, whose professional duty, assessing Gazzaniga’s potential for Bolton, gave him the opportunity to offer moral support. When Johnson entered the press room, which doubled as a watering hole for the scouts, he was approached by a string of colleagues. Most offered sympathy as bait. At least one, Bob Shaw, seemed authentic in his compassion.
Shaw was a month from his 65th birthday, but looked 15 years younger. His shoulders were broad, and though his torso was encased in a leather bomber jacket, zipped to the chin, there was no sign of excess fat around his waist. His eyes were clear, and his silver hair was short and neat. His opinions, incisive and robust, reflected a schizophrenic working life. He had combined 34 years underground, as a coal miner, with spells as chief scout at Hull, Derby, Bolton and Sunderland, where he was a victim of a purge instigated by Roy Keane. He was compiling opposition reports for Plymouth Argyle, as a favour to Peter Reid.
‘I’m glad I didn’t need football to bring up my family,’ he told Johnson, as they sipped tea from polystyrene cups. ‘We’ve all taken the wrong jobs for the money, and we all know that if there are problems, people are managed out of football clubs. When I get this season out of the way I’ll take a long hard look at things. I’ll only take the job I want, for the right reasons.’
A contemplative mood settled on the conversation. Shaw recalled his father, who worked in the coalfields of the East Midlands from the age of 14 to merciful retirement, at 65. He contracted pneumoconiosis, a lung disease caused by breathing in dust from coal, graphite or man-made carbon over a sustained period. The legacy of his employment was a hacking cough and shortness of breath, caused by dust which had drastically reduced his lung capacity. The family fought for years to gain appropriate compensation; he died soon after the legal battle was won.
Oxford summoned memories of Johnson’s father, who worked for 25 years on the Morris production line in nearby Cowley. The scout scanned the city, shimmering in the spring sunshine beyond the opposite stand in the three-sided ground, and pointed out the factory. ‘This is my club, really,’ he said, in a tone which suggested he longed for lost innocence. ‘This isn’t a proper ground, like the Manor. I was brought up on Oxford United. Those were the days of Ron Atkinson and his brother Graham. They won us the Southern League in sixty-two. Happy days . . .’
He was roused from his reverie by the appearance of Gazzaniga, who had also attracted the attention of Jim Barron, from Everton, and Perry Suckling, goalkeeping coach at the Tottenham Academy. Tall, 6ft 5in, and athletic, he was from good goalkeeping stock. Born in Murphy, on the outskirts of Santa Fe, he moved to Spain at the age of 15 with his divorced father David, who held the appearance record for a goalkeeper at River Plate. His move to Gillingham, after his release by Valencia, was facilitated by Gary Penrice, Wigan’s European scout.
Johnson’s journey was worthwhile within minutes. Oxford’s Asa Hall was allowed to turn, on the edge of the six-yard box. His shot was instant, firm and destined for the bottom corner. Gazzaniga showed remarkable elasticity, throwing himself down, to his right, to make one of the best one-handed saves I have seen. Johnson made eye contact, and paused for dramatic effect. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was a truly great save. We’re on to something here.’ Meanwhile, below us, Gillingham captain Andy Frampton broke professional protocol and applauded the youngster with big hands and a big future.
Austin was making notes on his BlackBerry, which would be transferred on to his online database. He still yearned to coach or manage, and there was a rigour to his analysis with which many of the part-time scouts around him could not compete. His portrayals of players could be cutting, but they were concise and unerringly accurate. One glance at Gillingham’s corpulent striker Danny Kedwell prompted him to type the dismissive words ‘will always be non-league’. It also led to the creation of the sort of nickname which tends to stick.
‘They got him from AFC Wimbledon, didn’t they?’ asked Johnson, with mock innocence. ‘KFC Wimbledon, more like.’ Austin, attuned to the caustic humour of the dressing room, beamed. He, too, recognised the potential enshrined in The Save, but noticed room for improvement. ‘You can see he’s a kid who has not played many games,’ he confided. ‘Look how he is trying to drill his goal kicks into the wind, on to KFC’s head. This is a strange ground, because of the open end, and he’s trying to be too precise. That’s why he’s kicking them out of the park. There’s an awful lot there to work with though. He’ll soon be able to do the lot.’
The game deteriorated rapidly into a dour goalless draw, which benefited neither team, whose hopes of a place in the League Two play-offs were receding. It also invited more acidic comment. Liam Davis, a rangy centre half, saved Oxford with two last-ditch interceptions. Austin was unequivocal: ‘He’s got everything you need to be a top player except the one thing you cannot be without – a heart.’ He was especially irked by the response of Gavin Tomlin to his early substitution. ‘Doesn’t look like he’s got an attitude, does it?’ he remarked, as the Gillingham striker trudged off with the sullenness of an adolescent making the walk of shame out of the pub after being refused a pint following the presenting of a fake ID.
Rather than joining Austin in an early exit, Johnson waited for the traffic to clear. He was in reflective vein, and dwelled on the frustration radiated by the younger man: ‘Deano would make an exceptional scout, because of his tactical and technical appreciation of the game, but he wants to coach. I really feel for him. He gets upset when he sees people without his talent and drive getting jobs, while he is on the outside, looking in. I can understand that, because he is a fantastic judge of a player.’
Footballers know their own kind. Immediately after he had showered, Frampton sat in the away dressing room and sent a text to a friend. It read: ‘Paulo’s just put another nought on his fee.’ The defender, a model professional with managerial potential, explained: ‘Word moves fast at our level. He knows the interest he’s generating. He shares a car with Danny Kedwell. He doesn’t know much English, but today, driving in to catch the bus, he just said “Sunderland?” Yup, we told him, that’s a big club.
‘I know I’ll get stick but I just had to applaud him for that save. That shot was right in the bottom corner, and he swooped down with such a strong hand. His kicking was a problem today, but that is usually a strong point. As centre backs, we split and pull off to give him an angle if he needs it. But he drives the ball, about two metres off the ground, with fantastic accuracy and power. He’s getting better at communicating, and is learning all the time. Obviously, the higher he goes, the better the tuition he will receive. He’s a lovely lad but he’s not going to be with us for long.’
In football, it is every man for himself.
9
Moneyball, RIP
DAMIEN COMOLLI LANDED in Nice just before Mel Johnson joined the queue to leave the Kassam Stadium, which had shrunk sufficiently to require only a 200-yard crawl from Frankie and Benny’s
, purveyors of overcooked pasta to time-poor football scouts. It was a humbling retreat for the Frenchman, who considered himself Général de brigade in the Sabermetric Revolution, which was spreading from baseball with increasing speed. He took to exile with Napoleonic restlessness, and vowed to return.
In truth, he was not widely mourned. Johnson valued his faith and friendship, but Comolli was a classic victim of the conservatism of English football. The prevailing view of many within the game was crystallised by the frigid lucidity of Tom Werner, Liverpool’s chairman: ‘We have a strategy we need implemented and we felt Damien was probably not the right person to implement that strategy.’ The wider implications were summarised by a two-word tweet, posted by Henry Winter, the Daily Telegraph’s football correspondent: ‘Moneyball, RIP.’
That succinct appraisal of an ill-starred initiative, which involved 26 separate transfer deals and the ul-timate belittlement of a legend, Kenny Dalglish, resonated with those who resented the achingly fashionable application of science. The original intention of Moneyball, in essence the strategic use of statistical analysis to identify undervalued players, was in danger of being lost in the fog of a 60-year war between arithmetical scrutiny and gut instinct. The ghost of Wing Commander Charles Reep, hailed as ‘the first professional performance analyst of football’ by the Journal of Sports Sciences after his death aged 98 in 2002, stalked the ruins of the Anfield project.
Reep pared football to its essentials. He used rudimentary statistics, together with the tactical philosophies of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal from the 1930s, to develop a quasi-academic theory supporting the use of ‘direct passing’, or Hoofball, to give it a 21st-century twist. His passion gave him plausibility; Stan Cullis, the pre-eminent manager of the era, was convinced by Reep’s achievement as an ‘advisor’, in helping Brentford avoid relegation in the spring of 1952.
They collaborated in the aftermath of Hungary’s devastating victory over England at Wembley the following year, devising a pattern of play that purported to blend the artistry of the Magic Magyars with the artisan, ‘wholly English’ principles espoused by Reep. Wolves, under Cullis, won the League three times in the 1950s and, as Reep’s portfolio expanded to analysis of 2,500 games including a number of World Cup finals, his influence extended.
He was a regular contributor to academic journals, recounting his partnership with Cullis in a tome entitled Are We Getting Too Clever? His theories were implanted at the highest level of the game, through the Football Association’s arch-fundamentalist Charles Hughes and emerging managers such as Graham Taylor. The former England manager took issue with simplistic suggestions that his philosophy was flawed, but his trademark lament – ‘can we not knock it?’ – was an unwitting echo of another of Reep’s agonised treatises, This Pattern-Weaving Talk Is All Bunk!
Football, like any major undertaking in sport or in life, cannot be dictated by absolutes. The Nowhere Men were an increasingly endangered species, but no one had found the magic bullet, the ultimate statistic which proved, beyond doubt, a player’s worth from a spreadsheet rather than a stream of consciousness, scrawled on the back of an envelope by a scout who felt football in his bones. That wasn’t going to stop their detractors trying, however.
Bill James, the founding father of Moneyball, regarded the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which drew 2200 delegates to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, as ‘the culmination of my life’s work’. His baseball theories, honed during night shifts as a security guard at a pork and beans cannery, and enshrined in Hollywood mythology by the film featuring Brad Pitt, had spawned an industry. The convention featured only one research paper and a single break-out session on football, but technical scouts from Premier League clubs were eager to learn at the feet of the master.
James, an august figure with a bushy beard, was evidently at home in a world in which earnest young men in pinstriped Oxford shirts and chinos spoke of ‘franchise value’ and ‘the metrics of physicality, strength and flexibility’. Apart from one pertinent intervention in the major set-piece debate – ‘Usually the public desperately wants you to do one thing, at a time when the coaching staff wants you to do something entirely different’ – James allowed others to speak for him.
Scott Boras, who controls 175 Major Leaguers as baseball’s so-called ‘super agent’, exuded the astuteness, detachment and candour of his trade. He mocked perceptions of the analytic movement as the province of ‘geeks, nerds, and cheerleaders from Harvard’ and envisaged a future in which the financial and intellectual rewards of professional sport would attract the best and brightest, regardless of their affinity with athletic endeavour:
‘Everyone is looking for an edge. Internal metrics are already being kept as state secrets. There’s a trend for hiring NASA engineers to write programs. Where can we progress from there? We should be training psychologists to understand the game and the players, because we know talent can be a state of mind. How can players be so hot and cold? How can they be so sound for ten days, and lost for five?’
Rocco Baldelli represented the other source of fresh talent, refugees from the locker room. A former Major League outfielder, forced to retire at the age of 29 by a mysterious metabolic disorder, he was kept on by the Tampa Bay Rays to work in scouting and player development. ‘I don’t want to use the word secrecy, but there is a time-sensitive nature to the stuff we do,’ he explained. ‘We are only limited by our ideas. We sit around for hours, looking for unique ways to look at the game. The information is there, and more is coming. The cycle of trying to define value never ends.’
Jeff Luhnow, general manager of the Houston Astros, highlighted the moral ambiguities football would face, as it spread its net, ever wider, in search of raw material. ‘Baseball is now buying in the Dominican Republic and Latin America,’ he said. ‘We are spending millions of dollars on fifteen-year-old kids. That brings with it a whole range of issues. We’re dealing with false ages, coaches operating as agents, and problems with performance-enhancing drugs.’
Mark Shapiro, president of the Cleveland Indians, advised his audience: ‘You are going to be second guessed, no matter what. There is a swirl of emotions around decision-making in recruitment. You can’t explain decisions for multiple reasons, and you get more free advice than you can cope with. These are not the jobs where you want short-term approval ratings. The full valuation of a recruitment decision can take four or five years to emerge. Only then can you factor in the human element, and determine whether you are wrong, or right. Players are not assets, they are human beings.
‘When we first started out, in 1992, technology was an Excel spreadsheet. We worked with stat books on our laps. Now there are so many technological elements involved. But we still apply language, honed over fifty years of watching the game. No machine is ever going to spill out the answer for which we are all searching. There is still an art to it.’
The human element struck a chord with Scott McLachlan, who, as Chelsea’s head of international scouts, was a pioneer of performance profiling in football. He oversaw the collation of intelligence, such as transfer tendencies. He was responsible for database design and management of recruitment statistics, such as player migration trends. Like Everton’s James Smith, he was a graduate of South Bank University, where he earned a Masters degree in sports coaching science. Unlike Smith, he reported to Technical Director Michael Emenalo, rather than the first team manager.
Each club has its own culture; Chelsea’s was intensely political, and driven by the autocratic certainties of owner Roman Abramovich. McLachlan drew strength from the diversity of the clubs for which he had worked. Mentored by Roger Smith at Wimbledon, he spent three years in a youth development role at Northampton before working under Sir Clive Woodward at Southampton. He specialised in technical scouting at Fulham, where he flourished under chief scout Barry Simmonds and chief executive Alistair Mackintosh:
‘The Fulham CEO could see the future, before the whole Moneyball thing became a
parody of itself. He believed we could combine analysis and metrics with scouting. It was frustrating, because in football getting something new across is like uphill skiing. I am going to four or five matches a week, because I don’t want to lose touch with the essence of the game, but at Chelsea my role has changed. It is more managerial. I have about twenty scouts working to me. It is my job to educate them scientifically, to tailor their observation and analysis to data presentation. I’ve got to stop them using silly clichés, like the boy does this and that, and get them to focus on trends and averages.
‘What is crazy is that, to pick a moment in time, two hundred and sixty-nine million was spent in the transfer window in January 2011. How much of that was down to quantitative analysis of the facts? How much objectivity was used in the signing decision? How much involved real scrutiny of the data? If you are going to make a capital investment of fifty million in one player, how are you going to discover what you are getting for your money?
‘Let’s make a comparison: say I need to buy an office printer. I know I need to buy one that will produce fifty thousand colour copies each year, for an average of five years. I can research the purchase and monitor the risk. In football that doesn’t apply. That’s why we at Chelsea are looking at how we measure and quantify talent. That’s why we are seeking links with performance scientists from all over the world.
‘In football we make big decisions on peer group testimonials. We try and interpret their potential without really knowing them. Who is our player? Does he play for the money, his family, or the glory? What is his mindset? Even the army has a twelve-week training period, during which they can weed people out. We don’t find out about our people until the money is down. That’s an issue when you’ve paid millions for someone you don’t really know. You need to try to protect yourself.’
The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters Page 13