The laptop guru who did a number on Brendan Rodgers
EACH morning, when Liverpool’s principal owner John W Henry and director Michael Gordon wake up in Boston, their inboxes ping with emails from the club’s head of technical performance.
Michael Edwards, who is based at Liverpool’s Melwood training ground, has become FSG’s go-to guy in England after aligning himself with the data-driven model of the group’s baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. This cosy relationship with FSG, dropping the owners emails throughout the day and increasing his power at the club, led to a strained relationship with former manager Brendan Rodgers, pictured.
Edwards encourages staff to use his nickname ‘Eddie’, giving a matey feel to the working environment. It is understood Rodgers has another name for him.
Edwards fell perfectly into place with FSG’s Moneyball strategy, the statistical model designed to extract maximum value in the transfer market. Clearly, with the club 10th in the league and paying up to three times the going rate for players, it needs refinement.
Despite a lack of playing experience at any relevant level, Edwards, who earns £300 000 (about R6-million) a year, has a big say on Liverpool’s notorious transfer committee.
He would arrive for meetings with Rodgers, managing director Ian Ayre, chief scout Barry Hunter and head of recruitment Dave Fallows armed with the latest data on potential targets.
The committee have yet to explain how they came up with the figure of £29-million to sign Brazilian forward Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim, who finished eighth in the Bundesliga last season.
Divock Origi, billed as “a world-class talent” by Rodgers when he was signed from Lille, could not even make the bench in the club’s last two games. There are countless other errors.
After each Liverpool game Edwards emails analysis and data to the club’s owners, detailing where the match was won and lost. It has made for grim reading this season but Edwards has used his relationship with FSG to strengthen his hand, becoming a trusted source of information to a group of people obsessed with statistical analysis.
There is a relationship with Bill James, the American stats guru who is employed by the Red Sox to provide Henry and Gordon with data for their baseball team.
Edwards can tap away at a laptop and within seconds tell you how many assists the 24-year-old Turkish left back Eren Albayrak has made for Caykur Rizespor this season (four).
Edwards and his team of analysts have invented a new language for football. Strikers are all about goal expectancy, chances created and the percentage of successful passes in the final third. Old-school managers just want to know if the boy can put the ball in the net. Defensive midfielders are judged on interceptions and the number of challenges won in the centre of the pitch.
The increasing influence of analysts has meant the end of the road for good football men such as Mel Johnson. He was the scout who recommended Liverpool sign talented young winger Jordon Ibe from Wycombe but was sacked, shamefully, in November 2014.
Former academy director Frank McParland has also left.
Instead a new breed sits in air-conditioned offices, cutting up videos from matches all over the world and burying their heads in the stats. Edwards, along with his vast team of analysts, constantly monitors the opposition, providing detail about playing positions, style, routines, set-pieces and other important matchday information.
They profile players based on their last 10-20 appearances, gathering information and helping Rodgers build a presentation for his players before matches that was usually a maximum of 10 pages on each team. It is a useful, but far from infallible, tool.
Edwards, who is in his late 30s, began his career as part of the video analysis team at Portsmouth before leaving to work with Harry Redknapp again when he became Tottenham manager.
There, Edwards struck up a relationship with Ian Graham at Decision Technology, a data firm collecting statistics on players from all over the world.
Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy paid Decision Technology a fortune each season for their services, trusting their analysis and using Edwards, in his newly created role as head of performance analysis, to make sense of it all.
Edwards was head-hunted by Damien Comolli when the Frenchman became director of football at Liverpool, turning down an increased salary of £250 000 a year at White Hart Lane to join the Anfield revolution. Levy was distraught. Since then Edwards, who has recruited Graham to his Anfield team, has emerged as a senior figure at Liverpool, empowered by FSG to make the call on big transfer targets. His relationship with Rodgers deteriorated shortly after the former Liverpool manager signed a contract worth £6m a year just a week after Liverpool finished within two points of claiming the Barclays Premier League title.
They clashed over transfer strategy, although Rodgers went on record to insist that he always had the final say over the recruitment of players earmarked for the first-team squad. In the end, Edwards had his number. – Daily Mail