I told my heroes: These gentlemen don’t do it halfway. They go all in
The talks and meetings that spawned the new Fab Four and title glory
THE line to John W Henry was a little shaky to be delivering the once-in-a-lifetime sales pitch. Henry had the phone on speaker mode, distorting the sound, and he was watching Boston Red Sox at the Blue Jays in Toronto. The background din of a baseball contest made it hard for Joe Januszewski, sat in his front room in Boston and giving his three-month-old son his milk bottle, to focus on the job in hand.
An executive at the Red Sox, Januszewski was known as ‘soccer guy’ in the office, the eccentric football nut who would fly out over weekends just to watch his failing English club, Liverpool. That night he was home attending to paternal duties when he noticed a missed call from Larry Lucchino, the charismatic and demanding former president of the Red Sox.
‘When you see a missed call from the president, you call him right back,’ recalls Januszewski. ‘You could hear that he was at the ball park and he said: “Joe, I’ve got John W Henry and Tom Werner here. Tell us more about Liverpool.”
‘They had been speaking to a Blue Jays executive, who was more switched on to what was going on in the UK and Larry must have said: “Oh, we’ve got a guy in-house who’s a Liverpool fan and always talking about soccer.” I couldn’t hear John very well on the speaker phone but he said: “Joe, send me an email…” And Lucchino, a hard-nosed lawyer, said: “Make it brief!”’
The next day they had their brief email from Januszewski. The subject line was: ‘Save my club!’
‘That was August 9, 2010 and 60 days later, FSG (Fenway Sports Group) had purchased Liverpool,’ said Januszewski. ‘It was an unbelievable turn of events.’
On such whims, history turns. Liverpool were a laughing stock in ownership terms 10 years ago, effectively under the control of the investment bank RBS, such was the indebtedness of the owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. The club had to be wrenched from their control, the first significant victory of the FSG era taking place at the High Court in October 2010, with a judge dismissing the attempts of the owners to block the sale. Hicks was left railing at the British establishment, accusing them of an ‘epic swindle’, though his subsequent court actions were also summarily dismissed.
In the weeks that had followed the shaky
August phone call, Januszewski had been part of a working group looking at the proposition of buying Liverpool for FSG. He had played football as a youth and retained an interest in what was then a niche sport through university in Texas. His interest in Liverpool was piqued by his father’s love of The Beatles, then from seeing the passion for the club when backpacking in Asia and finally by being moved by the pathos of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Though this was strictly business, Januszewski was caught up in the sheer enormity of what was unfolding. ‘Without a doubt one of the highlights of my career was once FSG had secured the club and we went to speak to the club at Melwood. I was sitting off to the side and John and Tom looked at me and said: “Joe, the floor is yours.” ‘I’m a business person but I was standing in front of Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Fernando Torres. These were the guys I had watched on TV, in London, in Istanbul. I got up and told them: “I’ve gotta tell you that I’m a fan, I’ve supported you for 20 years, what I can tell you is that I’ve worked with these gentlemen for going on over a decade and when they do something, they don’t do it halfway. They’re all in”.’ Januszewski will be disappointed to hear that his excitement wasn’t reciprocated amongst his heroes. ‘I can’t say I thought there was going to be a huge difference initially,’ said Carragher. ‘I was convinced we need a Sheik to have any chance.’
As it turned out, Januszewski’s assessment wasn’t wrong. It may have taken a little longer than anticipated. But a chain of events had been started which would culminate in four men coming together to revive the club; Liverpool’s new fab four, if you like.
At Tottenham, a little-known academic with a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge University was watching events unfold with increasing interest. ‘When I heard the news that John Henry had bought Liverpool back I thought: “Liverpool is the place to be”,’ said Ian Graham in a club interview last week. This was the era of Moneyball.
Brad Pitt’s film, which told the story of how Billy Beane had used the explosion of data available to sports teams to revive the Oakland As would be released in 2011. It would feature John W Henry in the closing scenes, making Beane a $10million offer in a vain attempt to persuade him to work for the Red Sox.
Despite Beane’s rebuff, Henry and Werner had revived the Red Sox partly by getting ahead of the data curve and copying Beane’s method. They had also restored Fenway Park to a state-of-the-art stadium and they had ended the 86-year wait for a World Series. All of this boded well for an iconic team playing in a tired stadium.
Henry was a data evangelist and it was natural that the likes of Graham, who worked for Decision
Technology and was a consultant at Spurs, wanted to work for him. But Graham did have allies at Spurs, who believed in his work. Indeed, Damien Comolli had hired him. But as a pioneer in football data and an associate of Beane, Comolli became Henry’s first hire at Liverpool on Beane’s recommendation.
With Comolli gone at Spurs, Graham found a new soulmate there in Harry Redknapp’s video analyst, Michael Edwards. ‘I could tell that Michael had an interest and aptitude in data and data analysis and he became our main point of contact there,’ he recalled. ‘Part of Damien’s first attempt to build something at Liverpool was to get someone in who could do the football
interpretation and video side, but also understand the data side and make a judgment on whether the quality of the analysis is any good or not. He asked us if we knew anyone who could do this sort of job and we mentioned Michael’s name... and he took him to Liverpool in late 2010.
‘It was only after Damien left (Liverpool) that Michael and the owners decided that rather than trying to get Decision Technology to work for Liverpool, as they couldn’t make that happen, instead — as a second choice, if you like — they could ask me if I wanted to join Liverpool, which happened in April 2012.’
Trouble was, whereas Henry and Werner had secured the World Series for the Red Sox within three years, football was proving resistant to the magic of Moneyball.
It did bring them Luis Suarez for £23m in January 2011, who would almost take them to a league title in 2014. But it also brought them Andy Carroll for £36m in the same window. The following summer’s intake was similar: Jordan Henderson came for £16.2m; but also Stewart Downing for £20.52m. And Henderson was not an early success and was almost sold when Brendan Rodgers arrived in 2012. And with Kenny Dalglish back as coach from 2011 until May 2012, after FSG had ended incumbent Roy Hodgson’s reign, Liverpool’s brave new world looked rather like the same old same old. The ‘wild west’, as Henry described it, of European football transfers, moneymen and agents was making a mockery of Moneyball.
The fact that Liverpool last week topped the Premier League table of spending on agents last season, paying more than £30m, indicates that their current recruitment is about more than raw data.
‘I think if they were honest the owners would say that they’ve been on a journey,’ says Jay McKenna of the Spirit of Shankly fans’ group.
‘Given their background and experience they probably thought they knew best. What we’ve seen with Carroll and Downing probably showed them that it’s not that straightforward.’
‘We all got a fast and deep education on football,’ said Januszewski, who left Liverpool in 2011. Comolli was sacked in April 2012, with Graham arriving, joining his old colleague Edwards. Two of the four men who have transformed Liverpool were now in place; a third would soon emerge.
Around that time, Mike Gordon was making his way into the higher echelons of FSG ownership. Gordon, a hedge fund manager, had been introduced to Henry and Werner in 2001. He was initially a junior partner, owning just two per cent of FSG. By 2012, he was a 12 per cent stakeholder and started to pay more attention to Liverpool. By 2015, he was president of FSG, and in daily contact with Liverpool executives. ‘I think he had a soccer passion that predated this acquisition,’ said Januszewski.
Insiders say he has been transformative to the club, delegating the right people on the ground to do their job, most notably Edwards, who became sporting director in 2016.
But it is the recruitment of the fourth man, Jurgen Klopp, that would prove the final piece in the jigsaw. Klopp would meet with Gordon, Henry and Werner in New York in October 2014. Gordon needed to convince himself that Klopp was not all toothy grin and cod charisma. Graham had already crunched data that convinced the team that Klopp’s awful final season at Dortmund could be ignored.
‘He was always one of our dream hires,’ Graham told Freakanomics radio. ‘But his last season was disastrous... and the German media said Klopp had lost it. Our analysis showed something quite different: that they were still the second-best team in Germany but the performance did not match results. I analysed 10 seasons of Bundesliga performances and Dortmund were the second unluckiest team in that 10 years.’
Those first impressions counted. Gordon quickly became convinced that Klopp could be chief executive of any FTSE 100 company. ‘It wasn’t about: “Boy this guy is really charming, he is going to do wonderfully at press conferences and as a representative of the club”,’ said Gordon in Raphael Honigstein’s
Bring the Noise. ‘Very quickly what came across was his breadth of talent: not just the personal side, but the level of intelligence, the kind of analytical thinking, the logic, clarity and honesty and his ability to communicate, even though English is not his first language.’
Carragher agrees that Klopp is the best communicator at the club since Bill Shankly. ‘He always seems to come out with the right words. I don’t know if I believe him, when he says that he doesn’t prepare, as even in the pandemic, he always said the right words, not only for Liverpool fans but for football. That is his special quality, to say the right thing and to bring people with him and make people believe in him. He is very funny, but on the flipside, when something serious happen it feels like he is the go-to manager for the league almost, nails what needs to be said and how people are feeling.’
Gordon, fond of an aphorism, was quickly telling people that Klopp was not the best person for the job: he was the perfect person for the job. ‘My concern was the act you see on cameras was just that: an act,’ adds Graham. ‘It really isn’t.’
Yet even since that appointment, there have been missteps. And not just lost finals, but also by the ownership. In February 2016, the club announced ticket-price increases from £59 to £77 and a £1,000 season ticket. Over 10,000 fans walked out of the next home game with 10 minutes left, chanting: ‘You greedy bastards! Enough is enough!’ The club reversed the price increases a few days later. As with the attempt to furlough staff in April, the Spirit of Shankly group were pivotal.
‘It did feel like it was a defining point,’ says McKenna. ‘We did it and we’ve seen price freezes, away supporters caps, a head of supporter liaison appointed and I feel that’s benefited the club.’
Ten years on from that auspicious phone call and speaking from Texas this week, Januszewski is able to reflect on a job well done by his former colleagues. ‘Save my club’ was the tagline on the email to John Henry but really I felt that way,’ he said. ‘And clearly I would say they’ve been successful. It’s certainly a lot more fun now than battling for a Europa League spot. Part of having the vision is being able to understand that maybe that it will have a longer run out. You have to be it in the long haul. I don’t recall John, Tom or Mike ever saying: “You have to do this in x number of years.” I think they were going in learning with a great appreciation of what they had and the history of it. “Let’s listen, let’s learn.”
‘And they didn’t just throw hundreds of millions at everybody and hope they could bludgeon their opponents into submission with talent. They have not done that. Did it take longer? Perhaps.
‘They stayed the course. Was 10 years a little longer than expected? Perhaps. But in the scope of a football club which is 128 years old, that’s not bad!’
Klopp was not the best person for the job, he was the perfect person
It’s a lot more fun now than battling for a Europa League place