Scottish football can learn from the coach who could buy a win

BRAD Pitt’s part in the latest sports movie to hit our screens will resonate with coaches and beleaguered chairmen everywhere. In one scene, he is having breakfast with his young daughter when she turns to him and says across the kitchen table: “Daddy, do you think you’ll lose your job?” After he has given her his best where-did-you-get-that-idea look, she adds sheepishly: “I go on the internet sometimes.”

In Moneyball, the UK release of which was last night, Pitt plays Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, whose best players have left to join wealthier rivals. Without the resources to acquire high-profile replacements, the main protagonist is persuaded to adopt an innovative new strategy shaped by statistics. Bull Durham it ain’t.

The drama lies in Beane’s determination to keep faith in his system, not only when it is subject to ridicule, but when it is slow to achieve results. Based on a true story, as told by Michael Lewis in his best-selling book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, there are shades of The Social Network about the way it follows the unlikely development of a technological idea into a popular phenomenon.

As readers of the book will know, Moneyball is a reference to decisions, based on empirical evidence, that identify value-for-money in players overlooked by other, more emotional coaches. The strategy has its roots in the work of Bill James, a baseball statistician who eschewed the game’s age-old measurements in favour of new ones that were a better indicator of an individual’s ability. Or, as Peter Brand, the economics graduate to whom Beane turns in a shady car-park scene, puts it: “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins.”

The approach became known as Sabermetrics, a reference to the Society for American Baseball Research, of which James was a prominent member. One of his, and Beane’s, most celebrated ideas was to use “on-base percentage” rather than “batting average” as a guide to ability. A batter who makes frequent contact with the ball does not necessarily secure his team more runs than one who earns a “walk” to first base by teasing the pitcher into four deliveries that miss the strike zone.

It flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom. In the film, Brand feeds his extensive data into a computer, crunches the numbers and turns from his monitor to show Beane a list of names that takes no account of reputation. “Here are 25 players who have been overlooked by every other team for one reason or another,” he says. “Like an island of misfit toys. In here is a championship team, one that we can afford.”

All of which disgusts the club’s traditionalists, including the old-school scouts whose opinions have been devalued, and the grizzled team manager, Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. “You don’t put a team together with a computer, Billy,” warns one colleague.

But Billy does, and despite a sticky start, stands by the plan, together with Brand, whom he has appointed as his assistant. Slowly but surely, it pays off, most visibly in the form of 20 consecutive wins, an American League record. The point is dramatically proven.

In the real world, Beane made a big impact on baseball. The Boston Red Sox adopted his methods on their way to a pair of World Series wins and just about every Major League club now employs a full-time sabermetrician.

But the question is whether other sports should follow his example, especially at a time when the economic climate is forcing clubs all over the world to seek better value for money.

Beane has admitted that it is “hard not to be romantic about baseball”, the national pastime, but he proved that it was worth the effort, as it might be in Scottish football, which also tends to overestimate the importance of tradition.

Bill Gerrard, a professor of Sport Management and Finance at Leeds University Business School, says that the principles advocated by Beane, with whom he has collaborated in the United States, would be ideal for Scotland’s impoverished clubs. “Because I’m a Scot, I instantly side with the underdog.

“I’ve always been interested in what I call ‘David strategies’. How can people with fewer resources be successful against people with more? The story of Scottish history is about taking on bigger neighbours and occasionally winning. And any time we’ve done it, it’s because we have outfought and outthought them. It’s because we have done it differently. And that’s the story of Moneyball.”

According to Gerrard, the statistics by which we seem to be overwhelmed in football – thanks largely to Opta and Pro Zone – are not as helpful as they should be. He believes in a different kind of performance analysis, one that interprets data in the context of a team’s particular needs. If their instructions are to close down opponents, a tackle that more vulgar statisticians would record as a failure may turn out to be one that forces a significant error.

Beane, in fact, is a fan of football, especially the European variety. He is an Anglophile, who talks lovingly of the King’s Road, black-cab journeys and The Clash. When Damien Comolli read Moneyball, he made it his business to contact Beane, with whom he became close friends. The director of football at Liverpool, now owned by Fenway Sports Group – also owners of the Boston Red Sox – has used the baseball experience to shape his transfer policy, providing manager Kenny Dalglish with a list of options based on rigorous statistical profiles. Sabermetrics even has an equivalent term in football. Soccernomics is the name of a book written by football journalist Simon Kuper and economics professor Stefan Szymanski, whose analytical study of the business produced a number of ‘rules’ that ought to be heeded in pursuit of value for money.

New managers, who tend to waste the transfer kitty, should not be indulged. Strikers, who are overpriced, should be reared rather than bought.

Comolli, though, is an exception in a sport not known for its willingness to embrace new ideas. Gerrard did a presentation on the subject at a conference in Manchester on Wednesday, but was frustrated to find that, while professional football clubs were well enough represented, they were less enthusiastic than their counterparts from other disciplines.

“Mark Wotte, the Scottish Football Association’s new performance director, was on the guest list, but did not attend. “The football people were very polite, but the ones who really wanted to talk to me were the rugby people.”

Perhaps they are persuaded by his work with Saracens. Gerrard doesn’t just gather statistics for the English champions, he measures key performance indicators, relevant to the team’s strategy. On the Sunday after every match, he provides the coaches with data in the form of spreadsheets, which allow them to address weaknesses in training.

Maybe rugby, more disjointed than football, lends itself to statistics. Andy Flower, the England cricket coach, is also an avowed fan of the process, enlisting the help of a mathematician to achieve his aims.

Whether the same approach is right for football remains to be seen, but in these challenging financial times, its coaches and club owners could do worse than visit the local cinema.