Arne Slot gets on base

Liverpool make their big decision. How much does it matter?

Liverpool are not going to replace Jürgen Klopp.

The great managers don’t get replaced properly. There isn’t someone out there who can do exactly what he does. Even if Liverpool hired one of the vanishingly few managers as good or better than him – and none of them are available – they wouldn’t fit into Liverpool as an organisation like a glove, because the whole thing has been built for Klopp. Owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG) contorted their structure and vision to keep the German happy, and now he’s off. You can’t just put someone else in there and expect it to work. Ask David Moyes.

Fortunately, Liverpool aren’t trying to do that.

You’ve seen Moneyball, right? If not, you’ve at least seen the famous “recreate him in the aggregate” scene that I bring up all the time, correct?

”Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it, and we can’t do it. Now, what we might be able to do is recreate him. Recreate him in the aggregate.”

I have never watched a single baseball game in my entire life, but I have read Moneyball the book, so I know the gist. I think. Sorry if I get it all completely wrong. Jason Giambi was the Oakland A’s star player, but left for the New York Yankees, a much richer and more successful baseball team. Think Jack Grealish leaving Aston Villa for Manchester City. The book version explains what happens next in more detail, with that perfect Michael Lewis prose that gives me intense professional jealousy:

“The A’s front office realised right away, of course, that they couldn’t replace Jason Giambi with another first baseman just like him. There wasn’t another first baseman just like him and if they were they couldn’t have afforded im and in any case that’s not how they thought about the holes they had to fill. “The important thing is not to recreate the individual,” Billy Beane would later say. “The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.” He couldn’t and wouldn’t find another Jason Giambi; but he could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.”

The movie version of Moneyball ends, as in reality, with the Boston Red Sox’ new principal owner, John Henry, asking Billy Beane to move over to his team. Beane said no and that was the end of the film, even as the story continued in real life. Henry, in a characteristically blunt and calculated move, looked to hire some of the brains behind the ideas Beane put into practice. “I was just the vehicle”, Beane explained in Rory Smith’s book, Expected Goals. “If I have any genius at all, it is in my recruitment, in choosing smart people to surround myself with, and letting them do their work. I am just the sausage seller. They are the people who actually make the sausage”.

Bill James made the sausage. James didn’t make the film, but he’s all over Moneyball the book. Henry hired James as the Red Sox’ senior baseball operations adviser in 2002 and the rest is history. James’ quest to better understand baseball changed not just that sport, but analytics in all sports, and the way we use data in a million different fields. “Moneyball became a new shorthand for a way of doing things in every corner of American life”, Lewis explained on his podcast Against the Rules. “After you wrote Moneyball”, James told Lewis, “there was a Bill James of everything. There was somebody trying to apply my ways of thinking to every subject on earth”.

Henry was one of those somebodies. He made his money by trading soybean futures and like-minded ideas in Moneyball-style management of sports teams. “In every transaction you must attempt to lower your risk and increase your potential to succeed”, he said. “Every deal, every decision at this level has risk. You cannot shield yourself from risk. You cannot win with a long-term, conservative tone”. People perceive “analytics” as being about control and stability but, in just about every sport I know of, data-driven thinking tends to promote taking risks. It also means applying the same methods of thinking across an organisation, on and off the pitch.

When Henry and what is now called FSG bought Liverpool in 2010, he wanted to shake things up. He wanted to use data and embrace the same methods that won his team titles in Boston. He and FSG first turned to the man trying to aggressively position himself as football’s Beane, Damien Comolli. I don’t want to say Comolli is a snake oil salesman, but he demonstrably couldn’t interpret and contextualise the meaning of the data as well as promised. Anyone can run the numbers and tell you that Stewart Downing puts loads of crosses in while Andy Carroll gets on the end of them. The slightly harder part, at least with the data available in 2011, is working out that old-fashioned crosses to the big man are not a route to scoring lots of goals.

Comolli might not have been capable of bringing in a data revolution at Liverpool, but he brought with him people who would. He hired Michael Edwards, then at Tottenham, first as Head of Performance and Analysis. Comolli also wanted to buy Decision Technology, the analysis company advising Tottenham on recruitment, but the contract with Spurs made the deal too complicated. In a move Henry must have loved, Edwards suggested a solution: just hire Ian Graham, the person at Decision Technology who actually made the sausage. Edwards and Graham would significantly outlast Comolli, reshaping the way the club recruits players and makes decisions in line with FSG’s data-driven vision.

That changed to placate Klopp. He and Edwards clearly grew apart over time. Reports suggest they disagreed on some of the long-term contracts given out to older players, and that Edwards’ successor Julian Ward was not on the same page as Klopp for key signings. We don’t know exactly what happened, but it definitely felt like Klopp accrued more power over time. And he’s Klopp, so you have to give it to him. Whatever value he generated for the club was almost certainly greater than that which Edwards, Ward, Graham et al brought to the table.

Unless it wasn’t.

As soon as Klopp announced he was leaving, Liverpool decided to take the opposite bet. FSG knew that they wanted to return to a sporting director-led structure post-Klopp, and Edwards was at the top of a one-name shortlist for that position. He said no. The only thing to change Edwards’ mind was becoming FSG’s “CEO of Football”, encompassing complete control over sporting decisions at Liverpool and future clubs they seem interested in buying. He is the boss now. Henry took the risk on giving the keys to Klopp last time, and now, more than anyone else, he’s giving Edwards control.

Most decisions are pretty predictable. Edwards seems to be putting his friends in positions of power, most notably Richard Hughes as sporting director. I have to assume everyone he’s hiring right now sees football in a similar way to him. This is about building a structure that can weather changes and succeed in the long term. It’s about mitigating the risk of the manager failing, even if that will always be a risk. FSG are betting that shifting much of the risk onto Edwards is the wiser bet. But nonetheless, of Edwards’ decisions made since returning, the very likely appointment of Arne Slot is by far the most important.

Slot is clearly a good coach. His work with Feyenoord really has impressed, and he plays broadly the “right” kind of football, looking to dominate possession, press high, the usual stuff. The concern, that it exists, is that he can rely too much on getting the ball out wide and expecting his individual wingers to do brilliant things, rather than create chances in a more holistic way. That’s been highly successful in the Eredivisie, but the Premier League poses different tactical questions. I think he’ll need to show more ideas in the final third about how to break teams down if he’s to truly become a top coach.

As a person, he seems to impress everyone he meets. Klopp is obviously Mr. Charisma, and while Slot doesn’t quite have the same presence, people say he’s an excellent communicator. I’m not sure that Liverpool as an institution is quite ready for a manager who doesn’t have those skills. The players are used to working with a big personality and the fans are used to listening to such a figure. People are going to be looking around at Slot waiting to hear him speak on those terms, and I don’t know if he has that.

But ultimately, Slot is not going to be as important as Klopp. Decisions on when and how to move on from key players like Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk, and who to sign in their place, will matter more than whether Slot was a better choice than Rúben Amorim. Arsenal got the wrong man with Unai Emery and it didn’t matter that much because they corrected it after 18 months. Similarly, it would be bad if Slot didn’t work out, but I don’t think it will determine Liverpool’s trajectory for the next ten years.

No one is going to be as good as Klopp, and Liverpool know it. These decisions are about mitigating that risk rather than looking for the next messiah. It’s always a gamble, but FSG, Henry and Edwards are people I’d back to get it right more often than most. Liverpool just need to get enough in the aggregate from the whole organisation and we might have something here.