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Billy Beane is an innovator, a revolutionary. And he could be on board in Liverpool soon.
Best known for his ‘Moneyball’ approach to recruiting players while he was general manager of the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team, Beane could look to buy a minority stake in Anfield for his new company ‘RedBall Acquisition Corp’.
If it does, Liverpool will find it has another canny operator behind the scenes. Beane is friends with the FSG because of his ties to baseball, and his philosophy is not much different from the way the club has approached things in the transfer market in recent years.
Anyone who has seen Moneyball, the Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt as Beane, will be familiar with the story. The Oakland Athletics used sabermetry to star out-of-date and relatively unknown players and won 20 consecutive games in 2002 as a direct result.
Beane was at the heart of that transformation, proving so influential that Liverpool owner John W Henry tried to persuade him to join the Boston Red Sox in 2002 with an offer of $ 12.5 million.
There is history there, then, and obvious parallels between Beane’s previous job and what Liverpool are doing now.
The Premier League champions have been similarly analytical in their approach to recruiting, and sports director Michael Edwards used data to identify the likes of Virgil van Dijk, Naby Keita and Mo Salah.
That has played a big role in the Reds’ rise from relative obscurity to the top of the European game under Jurgen Klopp. Beane is undoubtedly a fan of everything that is happening at Anfield.
He has also experienced it all in sport. Beane, fresh out of high school, played baseball for the New York Mets, a promising teenager who seemed to have a long career at the top of the game that stretched out ahead of him.
But at the age of 27 his career had stalled. He was in the Oakland Athletics (the Athletics, as they are known in the US) and decided to become a scout. After eight years in that position, he was promoted to general manager. It was 1998 and baseball was about to change.
In 2003, ‘Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game’ was published, showing how Beane succeeded through the use of innovative statistical analysis, and the book became a best-seller.
Then came the movie, which only contributed to Beane’s fame. He was revered, singled out as the man who had transformed not only a struggling team on his own, but an entire sport.
Now 58, Beane’s time as general manager of the Athletics lasted 18 years, ending in 2016 when he became executive vice president of baseball operations.
That has clearly freed Beane for other potential ventures, one of which could be investing in Liverpool. He has an interest in football and is believed to be working on a system to objectively analyze players. He was also hired by AZ Alkmaar in 2015 as a consultant.
“Ultimately, we are trying to find undervalued assets and we expect player value to continue to rise. The challenge in Oakland is that there were a lot of good decisions that cost a lot of money that we weren’t allowed to make, ”Beane said in a recent interview with the echo.
“In Liverpool, a great example is Salah. They spent around £ 40 million on it from Italy, which is a lot of money. At the time, people thought it was too much, but it turned out it was worth a lot more than what they paid for it.
“For me, that’s a great example of how to take advantage of data – spend a lot of money, but get a lot more value than people expect.”
Liverpool probably don’t need much help with that, but having someone with Beane’s experience at the club can only be beneficial.
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