Latest news with #IanGraham
New York Times
24-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Football Architects: How the sport's data pioneers convinced the world to take notice
This is the fourth of a six-part series looking at figures who have played a pivotal role in a modern football success story. The first piece, on the rebuilding of Ajax, can be found here. Part two, on Belgium becoming No 1 in the FIFA Rankings is here. And part three, on the rise of Croatian football is here. Each article comes with a related podcast, which can be found here on The Athletic FC Tactics Podcast feed. 'All this data analysis in football is bulls**t, isn't it?' Ian Graham had been hired to assist Spurs' recruitment team, but his first meeting with Michael Edwards, his boss at Tottenham Hotspur, and future sporting director at Liverpool, was not going well. 'It was long and aggressive,' Graham explains. 'I called my boss (at Decision Technology — an analytics company) up after the meeting and said I thought Spurs are going to drop us, because they clearly think we're idiots. But he wanted to find out the answer. The way he asked them, I thought he was trying to make me look stupid, but he was honestly trying to gauge the quality of what we were doing.' Advertisement Working under Edwards and Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, Graham's work helped turn the club into Premier League and European champions, transforming the squad in the process. But his first experience was typical of many of the first data pioneers of English football. They have now, however, broken through — their work becoming mainstream across recruitment, training methodology, and even the sport's dialect. 'When I started, realistically the brief was: 'We've got lots of data, we think there's some value in it, can you find something?'' says Sam Green, a former data analyst at Opta who went on to work at Aston Villa. 'That was it. It wasn't like we wanted to change football.' 'You're seeing fans having online arguments about expected goals (xG) and player age,' adds Graham. 'But at least they're arguments about things that make sense — things that clubs actually worry about, rather than the old, 'Who's best in the dressing room?' stuff.' Generally, the birth of football's data revolution is dated back to the mid-2000s, although companies such as Opta and Prozone had been collecting data since the late 1990s. Back then, even if the ideas were sound, the battle its proponents faced was for people to believe in it. Part of the issue was the existing data's limitations. Baseball, the poster-child for the analytics movement, had a dataset going back decades — in contrast, when Graham began at Spurs, he had only two seasons to work with, with many foreign leagues completely inaccessible. While in baseball, statistics recording the outcome of every pitch told analysts what actually happened — high inside, low outside, where hit, how out — football's existing data did not necessarily do the same. What inherent value was there in knowing a player completed 19 passes? 'Football is one of the most complex sports to analyse, just because of the sheer number of people involved,' explains Green, one of the key players in the invention of xG. 'You need to worry about the dynamics of how those 22 players are interacting, and it just makes it much harder. After calculating the simple, event-based data, you don't hit a wall as such but it becomes more and more expensive, and the number of people with access just gets smaller and far less public.' Advertisement 'What is a pass, what is an aerial challenge, what is a clearance?' asks Sarah Rudd, one of the first full-time in-house data analysts at Arsenal. 'It's actually quite difficult. Was that player trying to cross or shoot? There's a lot of ambiguity around these things, so getting agreement across data collectors is tricky. And that creates this whole mess where we can't even really define a pass or a shot, and now are trying to build complex models on top of it.' Many analysts in the 2000s found themselves tarred by the reputation of Charles Reep — a visionary in many ways with his painstaking, handwritten analysis into play patterns in the 1950s — but who was ultimately widely criticised for his conclusions, preaching long ball football over all other styles. His ideas were later propagated by the likes of Charles Hughes in the 1980s, arguably setting back English football stylistically by decades. In his book, How to Win the Premier League, Graham describes former Liverpool head coach Brendan Rodgers raising this example. But by this point, however, Graham had a supporter in Edwards, who had begun to see the value in his work. 'Part of the reason that Michael was initially sceptical was that he started off as a Prozone analyst, where he was employed to produce statistical reports for the Portsmouth coaches,' Graham explains. 'But he knew Harry Redknapp and his assistants would have thrown him out the room, because the report was kind of useless — showing number of sprints and total distance. Michael was a youth player; he knew from his football intuition that it didn't tell you anything about the game. 'So part of his scepticism was because he had seen it done badly before. We had a very early version of expected threat (the chance of scoring based on the ball's current location) and he started tearing down all of the assumptions in it. 'Sometimes the backwards pass is the best option', he would say, which we had to admit we could not see in the data. Advertisement 'Luka Modric was the player we disagreed on most (when both were together at Spurs). We said he was an above-average player but not top 10 in the Premier League. Michael insisted he was by far the best player in our squad, and he was right, because his skills didn't come across very well in the event data.' It speaks to a near-universal experience faced by these early analysts. Despite being typecast as 'numbers people', at times, their most important skill was a social one — possessing the ability to communicate their work within a club in order to display its value. 'Social skills may be pushing it a little bit; we're all introverts — that's your standard personality type,' says Graham. 'But you have to communicate. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, is a great example. He works on complex stuff, quantum mechanics, but has this quote that if you can't explain your theory in five minutes to somebody serving you a beer at your local bar, you don't understand that theory. 'A lot of football club staff are not data experts — they shouldn't be data experts, they have too many other calls on their time and haven't had the luxury of spending three years on a maths degree. But they're usually intelligent people, enthusiastic, and it's your job as the data person to explain in clear football language how your model works.' Over at Arsenal, Rudd worked for an early analytics company named StatDNA, who were acquired by the Premier League club in 2012 to improve their player recruitment. She worked closely alongside the team's management, at first Arsene Wenger and his coaching staff, for 10 years. 'We always relied on video as a communication tool,' she explains. 'It's not to say that everything had to pass the eye-test, but if you're trying to claim something was a good action, and it didn't look like one, people are going to push back. So you need to be able to explain the knock-on effects, and present it in a way that everyone can feel comfortable with. 'One good example would be when we worked on what appeared to be a simple project for the Arsenal academy, where they wanted to measure switches of play. But as we sat down with the coaching staff — I think Steve Bould was there — he would say: 'Yes, it's a switch, but that's not quite right'. And it turned out that what they actually wanted was switching the ball and creating an overload. So we were seeing that the player executing the switch did the right thing, but the supporting player did not. So we changed our definition of success in the model, and it was good coaching feedback for them that their messaging needed to change.' Advertisement But sometimes, analysts still needed to know when to pick their battles. Statsbomb founder Ted Knutson worked at Brentford for several years, where his work was highly valued, but his experiences at other clubs sometimes left him reliant on demonstrative results. 'It was a lipstick-on-a-pig situation with some old-school directors of football,' he says. 'You can add the lipstick, but it's only going to make them angry if they're not open to this stuff. There was pushback for the first five years consistently — it still even happened last year with a coach. But, eventually, owners stopped allowing their football people to do this, because they saw that the best teams in the world were using this data — they knew they had to get on board.' Once they gained a foothold, data analysts increasingly became able to point to their track record as evidence for their worth. At Brentford, for example, data was a key part of the club's philosophy. Sitting in League One, lacking the resources to buy top players, they instead gradually exchanged their way up the leagues, generating returns and reinvesting, trading the proverbial red paperclip for a house. 'In my final years at Arsenal, there was a core football intelligence group that worked really well together,' says Rudd. 'The attitude would be focused around mitigating the risk of any signings between all these different information sources, whether they were data or more traditional scouting. If you look at Arsenal's transfer history during that time, from 2020 onwards, the ratio of hits to misses changed dramatically. 'For example, we did some work around really bespoke, subjective data collection around defending. That was a massive analytics black hole, and it still is for most clubs around the world. While event data usually collects tackles and duels, that's just players being aggressive, but the art of defending is around positioning and anticipating play — not interventions. But we designed a way to collect our own information around this gap. It was a program to basically evaluate when players are doing the right thing and the wrong thing, incredibly sophisticated and labour intensive. You could simplistically think about it in terms of penalising a winger for not tracking back, and allowing a threat to develop behind him, rather than punishing the full-back who is left one-on-one. It took five years to come into existence, and Arsenal's centre-back signings in recent years have a pretty good track record.' The data revolution was not a linear progression, or even limited to only a handful of pioneers. From the mid-2000s onwards, there were numerous development trains running concurrently — the betting research of Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham, owners of Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford respectively, in-house research teams at Arsenal and Liverpool, plus external consultants such as Opta and Statsbomb. Often, they worked in complete independence from each other. Advertisement 'Sometimes I'd go to meetings with the commercial guys who were selling our work,' says Green, then working at Opta. 'And when I did, it was often quite cagey. You would get the impression that clubs were into it, but no one would show their cards as to whether you were ahead of them. I remember going to Chelsea and definitely knowing they were doing something, but having no clue whether it was valuable.' Knutson argues the history of football data could be loosely split into four waves: Early on, Green's brief at Opta, in terms of research and development, was broadly experimental. 'Obviously baseball was the precursor, so we knew there was something there,' he says. 'So it never felt futile; there were always people that were engaged. But there were some bits of work you did that went nowhere, and other bits that took off, and often they weren't what I would have valued. It is surprising what cuts through.' Green is one of the central figures behind the development of xG. While Rudd was concurrently developing a similar model at Arsenal in private, Green's initial blog post on the subject has morphed into a statistic well-known enough to be used on Match of the Day. 'It's like Newton and Leibniz independently describing calculus at the same time,' jokes Rudd. 'It's strange, because it didn't necessarily take off at the time, but subsequently has,' Green says. 'It's ultimately trying to describe the game — to codify what you think is actually happening. If you take a pot shot from 25 yards out, it's less likely to go in than a header from point-blank range. 'So it was a big building block for me. You had to get this in place to understand the value of generating different shots and scoring goals, because that's the aggregation that everyone is trying to do in football. But the mainstream success of xG is relatively surprising.' But surprise is a key emotion when it comes to data analysis — challenging prevailing bias is when the discipline is at its most powerful. For example, ultimately, Graham was one of the figures who convinced Liverpool to move for Andy Robertson — but at the same time, Green was interested in recommending the Hull City left-back for Aston Villa. Advertisement 'There's a quote from (baseball statistics savant) Bill James which outlines 90 per cent test,' says Green. 'If you build a metric, and 100 per cent is what you expect, you've not built anything of use. If only 50 per cent is what you expect, then your model is probably wrong. But if you expect 90 per cent, then the remaining data is really interesting. Often that's only one or two people. 'I remember Andy Robertson scoring really well in one, which surprised me, because of Hull City's relegation. Even though I should have been disassociating myself completely from his profile, it's still hard to be completely dispassionate about the situation and how it impacts the perception of a player.' This information sometimes gets back to players or coaches with vested interests. For example, when evaluating your club's own squad, a technical director might have his past signings criticised. A player who commissions data insights into their value might be upset when it suggests they are not worthy of that lucrative contract. TransferMarkt managing director Thomas Lintz tells a story about Cristiano Ronaldo blocking the website on Instagram after being displeased with his latest value update. 'People like being able to control their environment, and so there are times when you give coaches or agents information and they don't like what they hear,' says Knutson. 'I get it — you fight for whatever you can get. But we have to try and weigh it back to objectivity, and tell them to take it or leave it. There have been times when we've cut team deals loose because people wanted us to change our reports. It cost us money, but we felt that the alternative lacked integrity.' It is at these moments the overall structure becomes important. Graham is quick to point out his fortune at working at Liverpool under Klopp and Edwards, where clear processes were in place. 'The importance of being honest with the manager is underplayed in recruitment,' he explains. 'You have to tell them that though you think Player X might be the best player, they are not perfect, and so here are their weaknesses — are you comfortable with them? Advertisement 'That was a great thing about Jurgen — he was willing to accept weakness in return for strength. He said that if a player had some super strengths, he could cover up their deficiencies. As a recruitment department, we could give our honest opinion, and then it avoids the coach being upset when they turn out not to be able to do X, Y, or Z.' At Arsenal, the structure gradually improved. 'We were so early to the game that a lot of people still didn't really understand what we were doing or how best to use us,' explains Rudd. 'I think one thing we struggled with at the start was that in the era before sporting directors, you had one manager in charge of absolutely everything. So of course they wouldn't necessarily put a lot of thought into what the decision-making process should look like, which sometimes hindered us from being as impactful as we could. 'Some people think that the role of data in recruitment is just for generating lists or for filtering. I'm very much of the opinion that data and analytics has its own voice and should have an independent evaluation of players, separate from scouts, so that you have these diverse perspectives and you can kind of cover each other's blind spots.' Now, almost every Premier League club has a technical director or its equivalent, giving data its place within the club's management structure. Of course, there are still vast gaps between the leading clubs — generally considered as Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal — and those further down the table. But some new hires in wider footballing roles even possess an analytics background — Ben Knapper, Arsenal's former loans manager, and Norwich City's new sporting director, came through at StatsDNA alongside Rudd. It demonstrates the discipline's new-found reach. What is the next argument for them to win? One remaining frontier is whether they will begin to influence managers in game — suggesting substitutions or changes of system. Certain advancements in technology mean aspects of this are theoretically possible, even though the bar is so high to clear in practice. 'One of the reasons why it's so hard is that there are multiple ways to win — it's not like baseball where there's an ideal and finite way to move players around the bases,' explains Rudd. 'You can really optimise that in a way you can't mirror in football, because whatever strategy you come up with, somebody is going to counterbalance that. Plus, 45 minutes is not a lot of data to make decisions on.' Advertisement She laughs at the irony of a data analyst making her next point. 'To be honest, this is where the human brain just does a much better job at finding patterns. Pretty early on at Arsenal we got access to live tracking data, and the coaches wanted us to identify spaces we could exploit. But those spaces don't stay open for very long — so a human is just far better at saying: 'This person is positioned badly, or that player's reaction is a bit slow'. With current tools, you could probably build a slightly better model, but I think this is just where the human brain really excels.' Graham agrees. 'I don't think data has done much in terms of tactics yet, is the simple answer. You need a good tracking model to say something about tactics, and most teams don't have that — maybe just the big Premier League teams and a couple in Europe. It took us two years to build one at Liverpool and we had one of the best-resourced data science teams in football. 'But for most teams, if data is informing tactics it probably shouldn't be unless you're sure you have a very good model. You have to convince the coach to use it as well, and that's a very high bar.' Instead, some see the next frontier as taking place in training. Ninety per cent of Graham's role concerned recruitment and, though Rudd's focus on signings only comprised half her job, transfers were seen as the main priority. However, this means other areas possess low-hanging fruit. 'Training data and improving player skills is going to be a big thing going forward,' says Knutson. 'Using equipment like high-speed camera and LiDAR radar can help improve ball-striking — that could have a big impact because better ball-striking has a very large impact in scoring goals. But it also has an impact on things like, for example, your centre-back playing the ball out to the wings consistently — and we know that's a super valuable pass that not every centre-back can make.' Data analysts have had to fight to defend their role in football. Sometimes the numbers do not speak for themselves, but need somebody to speak up for them. For Graham, this is the only place where bias can be justified. 'The bias that is useful to have is contrarianism,' argues Graham. 'Football is too risk averse when it comes to anything. Back in the Spurs days, there wasn't much scouting of European players — there was a feeling that foreigners couldn't do it in the Premier League. That's mad to think of today. Advertisement 'And so being a contrarian is to say, whatever the bias is, that you're willing to go way too far in the other direction, and that will give you an edge. It's like the Matthew Benham quote of if you're 1-0 up and down to 10 men in the 90th minute, you've got to keep attacking. In some ways, it's a stupid thing to say, but everyone's so risk averse that they keep being wrong in the same direction. 'Find the biases, be biased in the other direction, and even if you're wrong, because everyone else is wrong in the other direction, that's going to be an advantage for you.' (Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Martin Rickett/PA Images; Peter Byrne/PA Wire via Getty Images)
New York Times
19-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Can Bryan Mbeumo be the ‘triple threat' that Manchester United's attack sorely needs?
When Sir Jim Ratcliffe gave a series of interviews from INEOS' headquarters in Knightsbridge a few months ago, one name came up more often than you might expect: Ian Graham. You probably know Graham as Liverpool's former director of research, who, alongside Michael Edwards, championed data science behind the scenes from a pokey box room at Melwood and ultimately played a key part in putting another of English football's behemothic clubs back on their perch. Graham left Liverpool in 2023 and, last year, published his book 'How to Win the Premier League'. Has Ratcliffe read it? Some of those close to the petrochemicals billionaire were not sure when asked by The Athletic, but said they would not be surprised. If Project 150 is to be completed, it should probably find its way to his bedside table sometime before 2028. Advertisement If he has read it, or when he does, Ratcliffe will learn that one of the key elements of Liverpool's data-influenced approach was Graham's 'possession value' model, which calculated if a player's every action in possession contributed to his team's chances of scoring or conceding a goal. Graham's model was partly inspired by Dean Oliver's concept of 'usage' in his book 'Basketball on Paper', which can also be broadly applied to its fellow 'invasion' sport: football. Put simply, this is the idea that a player can only score a goal if they shoot. But shooting often ends a spell of possession, and a team can only score if they have the ball. Sometimes it is more advantageous to play an extra pass or beat an opponent with a dribble. Ideally, your best attacking players should be capable of doing all three of those things, and should know when one or the other will improve their team's chances of scoring. They should be, what Graham calls, a 'triple threat'. 'These players are difficult to defend against,' he writes. 'They can choose to pass or dribble instead of shoot. And they use up fewer possessions than players whose only skill is shooting.' Liverpool's research department believed they had three 'triple threats' in Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino. But they also considered each to have particular strengths which complemented the others. Firmino's ability to link play and find the right pass made the most of Salah's expert finishing, for example. For all the complex metrics and machine learning, here was an example of the simple, intuitive logic at the heart of Liverpool's title-winning data science. The best frontlines are balanced frontlines, where the players have complementary strengths and no clear weaknesses. So, how much attention was Ratcliffe paying by page 152, if indeed he has read that far? Advertisement The targeting, pursuit and long-awaited agreement to sign Bryan Mbeumo suggests at least some, because you would be hard-pressed to find another Premier League player who added more value to his team's attacks than the Brentford winger. Outside of Anfield, at least. According to StatsBomb's On-Ball Value (OBV) metric — a possession-value model of the type that was a cornerstone of Graham's work — only Salah added more value to his team's attacks last season than United's new £65million ($87.2m) signing. Those figures are total values rather than per 90 minutes, meaning players such as Salah and Mbeumo benefit somewhat from having consistently played a lot of football last season. Yet these metrics record both positive and negative contributions, punishing errors and mistakes harshly. Players with a lot of minutes have more opportunities to be both rewarded but also to be penalised. Still, Mbeumo ranked highly among his peers. Clearly, United will be hoping for a repeat of his 20 league goals — the fourth-most of any player last season and a career best for Mbeumo — although five came by dint of being Brentford's penalty-taker, a responsibility he is unlikely to assume from Bruno Fernandes. As has been well documented, Mbeumo overperformed his 12.3 expected goals (xG) significantly last term. That will almost certainly not be repeatable season after season at Old Trafford. Yet, last season was actually a down year on the underlying metrics for the 25-year-old, with his 2.08 shots and 0.20 non-penalty xG per 90 minutes being his lowest totals since becoming a Premier League player. Data by StatsBomb; vs Premier League attacking midfielders/wingers Mbeumo made up for that by ranking far better among his peers on value-added metrics, where his execution of shots helped turn low-quality chances into goals, ranking among the 89th percentile of attacking midfielders and wingers in the Premier League. A repeat in United's colours could, in some ways, mitigate fellow new signing Matheus Cunha's tendency to shoot from range, which led to some spectacular goals from Wolverhampton Wanderers last season but, according to Shot OBV, was often detrimental to his team's chances of scoring. Data by StatsBomb; vs Premier League attacking midfielders/wingers Yet both players are more than just goalscorers anyway, and were arguably most influential as providers last term. Both ranked highly among players in their position for Pass OBV, with only three players adding more value to attacks than Mbeumo: Fernandes, Salah and his Brentford team-mate Mikkel Damsgaard. Advertisement For all that Mbeumo overperformed in terms of his goalscoring, the quality of the chances that he created for teammates suggests that he was unfortunate not to have racked up a couple more assists. As we can see from the map below, he was excellent at moving the ball into the box from his wide role, frequently finding players inside the six-yard box from corners, perhaps a product of Brentford's meticulous approach to set pieces. Crucially for United, both players stood out among the rest of the league as front-footed and progressive, whether that was passing or dribbling. It is something that Ruben Amorim's side sorely lacked, with often only Fernandes' playmaking driving the team up the pitch. Again, Mbeumo ranked highly for adding value to Brentford's attacks through his dribbling last season, with Cunha not far behind for Wolves. One player to outperform both was Amad, who may now see more minutes at wing-back this season as a result of United's spending targeting the two No 10 spots. Mbeumo could be more effective when dribbling, though, and more threatening on goal too. As well as he ranks on possession-value metrics, his raw volume in terms of shots, progressive carries and take-ons was below the Premier League average last season. Mbeumo often lingered on the edge of attacking moves and held the width at Brentford — though he could be decisive when he picked up the ball and looked to drive inside. It is not just penalties he could lose, either. A steady diet of set-piece duties has helped lift those eye-catching chance-creation numbers. Cunha held many of the same responsibilities at Molineux, too. But both are well-rounded attacking players who can shift the emphasis of an attack in various ways with the ball at their feet. The type that last season's often staid, predictable United attack badly needed. And particularly in the case of Mbeumo. Whether Ratcliffe has read Graham's book or not, there is a hint of its lessons in the identity of the biggest signing he has sanctioned at Old Trafford to date. United must hope they have found their own 'triple threat'. Additional reporting: Thom Harris (Lee Parker – CameraSport via Getty Images)
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Why Liverpool signed Darwin Nunez over Alexander Isak 'as Reds plot huge new bid for Newcastle star'
Amid transfer speculation linking Liverpool with Alexander Isak, the reason behind the Reds' decision to sign Darwin Nunez over the Newcastle star in 2022 has been revealed. Jurgen Klopp's side were linked with both men that summer but eventually opted for Nunez, signing the striker from Benfica for a then-club record fee, leaving Newcastle free to break their own transfer record by bringing Isak from Real Sociedad to St James' Park for a similar price. But while Nunez's progress has stalled somewhat in the seasons since then, leading to repeated rumours of a cut-price move away from Anfield this summer, Isak has grown into one of the Premier League's best strikers. Isak is now thought to be on Liverpool's summer wish list as Arne Slot looks to make a new world-class centre forward the latest addition to his Premier League-winning squad. Given the two strikers' contrasting fortunes, particularly last season when Isak's league goals tally of 23 was more than quadruple that of Nunez, Liverpool's detractors may view the decision to sign the streaky Uruguayan over his Swedish counterpart as a mistake. In an interview with the Financial Times, former Liverpool director of research Ian Graham has suggested it was then-Reds manager Klopp who made the call to pursue Nunez over Isak thanks to the German manager gaining increasing power over transfer decisions. 'Jurgen created a lot of success for the club, so it's understandable why it moved in that direction,' Graham said. 'In 2022, he signed Darwin Nunez instead of Alexander Isak. 'Both players, if you look at top young centre-forwards in Europe, they would be number one and two (at the time), or two and three but [Erling] Haaland was going to [Manchester] City and out of our price range. Jurgen preferred Nunez.' The ex-Liverpool staffer, who between 2012 and 2023 worked to implement data analysis into the club's transfer policy, continued: 'It would be very churlish of me to say, 'It's terrible that Jurgen had his choice', when in the past Jurgen had been persuaded by me and my colleagues of a different choice. And it was still the case that we signed good players - in Nunez's case, one of the best young strikers in Europe.' Graham, now chief executive of sports advisory firm Ludonautics, also claimed that Klopp was persuaded by his recruitment team to sign Mohamed Salah from Roma instead of Borussia Dortmund's Julian Brandt in the summer of 2017. 'I'm happy to talk about my colleagues persuading Jurgen [in 2017] that Mo Salah was the player to buy instead of Julian Brandt,' he added. That momentous move to acquire Salah's services would, of course, shape much of Liverpool's success in the years that followed. Discussing the influence of managers in club transfers, Graham said he believes the role of 'coach as dictator' is specific to England and is also 'something that is dying off'.
The Sun
30-06-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Liverpool's former scouting director reveals Jurgen Klopp's huge Alexander Isak mistake that could cost reds £100MILLION
JURGEN KLOPP made a mistake on Alexander Isak which could cost Liverpool £100MILLION. The Newcastle striker is one of the most in-demand stars of this summer's transfer window. 4 4 4 Isak, 25, is wanted by the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool after firing the Magpies back into the Champions League. Newcastle want to keep hold of the prolific Swede and want him to sign a new deal. Any deal that would lure him away from St James' Park is likely to cost more than £150m. Liverpool could have signed Isak back in 2022 from Real Sociedad for just £63m but decided to pursue a move for Darwin Nunez instead. The Uruguayan cost the Reds a then-club record £85million from Benfica while Isak joined Newcastle. Liverpool's former data expert Ian Graham has revealed how Klopp opted for Nunez over the cheaper Isak deal. He told the Financial Time s: "Jurgen created a lot of success for the club, so it's understandable why it moved in that direction (from data-driven decisions to managerial preference). "I'm happy to talk about my colleagues persuading Jurgen (in 2017) that Mohamed Salah was the player to buy instead of Julian Brandt. JOIN SUN VEGAS: GET £50 BONUS "In 2022, he signed Darwin Nunez (for £64m plus add-ons) instead of Alexander Isak. "Both players, if you look at top young centre-forwards in Europe, they would be number one and two — or two and three but (Erling) Haaland was going to (Manchester) City and out of our price range. Viktor Gyokeres to Liverpool LATEST as Reds sweat on Alexander Isak | Transfers Exposed "Jurgen preferred Nunez. It would be very churlish of me to say, 'It's terrible that Jurgen had his choice', when in the past Jurgen had been persuaded by me and my colleagues of a different choice. "And it was still the case that we signed good players — in Nunez's case, one of the best young strikers in Europe." Nunez is expected to leave Anfield this summer but the club will hope to sell him for £60m, according to DiMarzio. But the interested party Napoli are keen to drive his price down in order to push a deal through.
Daily Mail
30-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Revealed: Why Liverpool signed Darwin Nunez over Alexander Isak - as £85million flop nears Anfield exit
Liverpool 's former director of research has revealed why the club decided to push ahead with the signing of Darwin Nunez back in 2022 over Alexander Isak. Nunez joined the Reds in a then club record move from Benfica, splashing out an initial £64m on him, with add-ons rising to a potential £85m. The same summer saw Newcastle break their own transfer record, spending £63m to bring Isak from Real Sociedad. The forwards have had contrasting fortunes in the Premier League with Isak going from strength to strength, while Nunez appears likely to leave this summer. Nunez has scored 40 goals in 143 matches for Liverpool, with the Uruguayan's tally including 25 goals in 95 Premier League games. Despite injury problems having led to Isak playing less matches for Newcastle at 109, Isak has struck 62 times for the Magpies, including 54 goals in 86 Premier League games. Speaking to the Financial Times, Liverpool's former director of research Ian Graham has suggested Jurgen Klopp's growing power over transfer activity at the club was key to the Reds choosing to move for Nunez over Isak. Graham worked at the club between 2012 and 2023 to help use data analysis to aid their transfer policy, and now serves as chief executive of Ludonautics, a sports advisory firm. He explained how Klopp had previously been persuaded by the recruitment team to sign Mo Salah over Julian Brandt in 2017, a decision which proved a masterstroke. Following success in the Premier League and Champions League, the balance of power had altered with Klopp apparently pushing for the signing of Nunez in 2022. 'Jurgen created a lot of success for the club, so it's understandable why it moved in that direction,' Graham said. 'In 2022, he signed Darwin Nunez instead of Alexander Isak. Both players, if you look at top young centre-forwards in Europe, they would be number one and two — or two and three but [Erling] Haaland was going to [Manchester] City and out of our price range. 'Jurgen preferred Nunez. It would be very churlish of me to say, 'It's terrible that Jurgen had his choice', when in the past Jürgen had been persuaded by me and my colleagues of a different choice. 'And it was still the case that we signed good players — in Nunez's case, one of the best young strikers in Europe.' Graham added that he believes manager's having the ultimate say in deciding transfers is both specific to England and is starting to die off, with more faith being placed in recruitment teams over decisions. Klopp had been vocal in his support of Nunez during his time at the club, stepped down as Liverpool boss in the summer of 2024. Nunez racked up 47 appearances last season under Klopp's successor Arne Slot, but started just eight Premier League matches and scored seven times in all competitions. The forward has reportedly been the subject of interest from Napoli, Atletico Madrid, and Saudi Arabian side Al-Hilal this summer, but Napoli are currently viewed as the frontrunners to sign him on a potential cut-price deal. Mail Sport understands Liverpool want to sign a striker this summer if they can afford one. Isak would be the dream target but he is likely to command an even bigger fee than the club's outlay on playmaker Florian Wirtz, an initial £100m rising to £116m with add-ons.
