The inside story of how Liverpool bought a title-winning team

With Jürgen Klopp installed as manager, our evidence-based strategy for running a football club finally had a chance to succeed. In Germany, the culture of elite clubs was for managers to work collaboratively with a sporting director, a culture Jürgen was happy to continue at Liverpool.
Jürgen’s brand of “heavy metal football” and his charisma meant he was attractive to players, who were excited about the idea of playing for a Klopp team.
I was very surprised and very happy that some of Jürgen’s transfer priorities were also extremely highly rated in our statistical models. It was music to my ears that he highly regarded the Senegalese forward Sadio Mané.
In the summer of 2016 Jürgen was very keen on signing Mario Götze, who had been one of the stars of his Dortmund side in their Bundesliga title-winning seasons. Jürgen, like many managers, seemed to have an understandable penchant for players who had played for him previously. The difference in Jürgen’s case was that some of the best young players in Europe had played for him. But Götze decided he didn’t want to come.
Meanwhile, Mané had continued to play very well at Southampton and scored twice against us in March 2016 after Southampton had been 2–0 down at half-time. Mané’s introduction at half-time changed the game, and Southampton won 3–2.
Eddy [Michael Edwards, who was Liverpool sporting director] did some due diligence on Mané’s character. We were dismayed to find the opinion was negative. At Southampton he was apparently unprofessional, late for training, and a “difficult character”. Michael’s job is to weigh up these character references against the ability and fit of a player, and the finances of the transfer. He decided that the poor character reference was not important enough to stop the transfer and I’m very glad that he did. It was a lesson that canvassing opinion about a player can lead to very unreliable information. Completely contrary to the character references Eddy received, Sadio Mané was one of the most intelligent, decent, professional and hard-working players we ever signed.
He could have chosen to sign for Manchester United instead. Playing in the Champions League is a huge draw for any player, so it was imperative that we qualified, otherwise Manchester would be the more attractive destination. We had reached the final of the Europa League in 2015-16: if we won it we would qualify for the Champions League. We lost the final to Sevilla but, surprisingly, Mané still chose Liverpool over Manchester United. Years later, Eddy asked why Mané and his agent had made this decision. The reason was that they believed in Jürgen’s ability, in his enthusiasm for Mané, and they believed that something special was going to happen at Liverpool.
My delight was about to increase further. One week when Jürgen came in and started talking to Eddy and some of the scouts: “What about this Joël Matip? He’s available on a free transfer. Maybe we should think about it.” Matip had made very some high-profile mistakes and was caricatured by the phrase “mistake every game”. And now Jürgen was suggesting we might sign him! Eddy had also disliked Matip from some video analysis that had been done years before.
Jürgen’s interest gave us the impetus to look at Matip again. He had huge experience for his age, and our Possession Value model [analysing positive and negative contributions on the ball] insisted that since 2012 he’d been easily above the level of the average Premier League centre back. Eddy ordered the video work to be done on Matip and, on reviewing it, changed his mind.
At Melwood [training ground] one morning, Eddy bumped into Jürgen in the corridor and said: “Matip — I had a look, he’s good!” To which Jürgen replied: “Yes. I told you so.” Eddy’s response? “Great, let’s f***ing sign him then.” The second brick of the rebuild was in place. After agreeing to sign Matip, Eddy visited Germany to watch him play against Borussia Mönchengladbach. Matip slipped over on the halfway line, a mistake that led to an immediate Gladbach goal. Bayern Munich’s scouts were also watching the game and their reaction left Eddy in no doubt that they’d also placed Matip in the “mistake every game” category.
The third big signing of the summer was Georginio Wijnaldum. Jürgen and his coaches were huge fans of Wijnaldum and he had just been relegated with Newcastle United. Our data analysis indicated he was a very good player, but I was concerned about where he would fit in the team. His best position was attacking midfield, but we already had [Philippe] Coutinho and [Adam] Lallana to play in that role.
In hindsight, it seems inevitable that Mané, Matip and Wijnaldum would become stars. But at the time, they were not stars. Each was perceived to be flawed in some way by the rest of the football world. This limited their attractiveness and meant we did not have to compete as hard as we might have to secure their services. Mané was (totally unfairly) seen as a bad character and had been rejected as a potential signing for Liverpool when Brendan [Rodgers] was manager. Matip was seen by the scouting world as an error-ridden liability. Wijnaldum had been tarred by the brush of relegation. Our Possession Value model suggested all three would significantly improve Liverpool’s performances and Jürgen thoroughly approved of all three, and had even suggested Matip and Wijnaldum.
Back in January 2014, in the middle of Liverpool’s first title challenge in five years, we attempted to sign a little-known winger from the Swiss team Basel. Just 21 years old, he’d produced some brilliant performances in the Europa League and Champions League. Statistically he looked excellent and Eddy thought he would become a superstar. But the proposed transfer fee kept on increasing. It looked like we’d have to break the Swiss transfer record by 50 per cent to secure the services of one Mohamed Salah. In the end my nervousness didn’t matter. Basel stopped taking our calls. Chelsea had been offered £40million by Manchester United for Juan Mata. With money to burn, they offered Basel £20million. Another failure to chalk up to experience.
In summer 2017, Liverpool again had the opportunity to sign Mo, this time from Roma. We had little competition from within the Premier League: he’d “failed” at Chelsea and our English rivals did not want to risk repeating Chelsea’s mistake. But we knew something that other clubs seemed to be ignorant of, despite abundant evidence: lots of transfers fail, for many different reasons.
At Chelsea, Mo competed for game time with Eden Hazard, who was then a global superstar. Mo wasn’t the only exceptional young talent to find minutes difficult to come by — Kevin De Bruyne played so little for Chelsea in 2013-14 that he was loaned to Wolfsburg just before Salah arrived.
We signed Mo for £37million in 2017. In the same summer Arsenal signed Alexandre Lacazette for £46.5million, Chelsea signed Alvaro Morata for £58million and Manchester United signed Romelu Lukaku — another Chelsea “failure” — for £75million plus £15million in add-ons.
It was incredible to me that there was so little competition from any other big Premier League club. When I asked Eddy if a Premier League rival might sign [Salah], he told me that they were certainly interested but he was sure none would put their reputation on the line, because of that so-called failure. Subjective opinion trumped hard data for most teams, and this intrinsic bias among our competitors gave us an edge that persists to this day.
Mo was not Jürgen’s first choice in 2017. He was a fan of Julian Brandt, a talented young German at Bayer Leverkusen. But among the many players we considered — Brandt included — Mo was an outlier. His ability to increase a team’s chance of scoring a goal, through shooting and through creating opportunities, was much greater than any player on our shortlist. Jürgen was convinced to sign Salah by my colleagues. He later said: “We were sure he [Salah] can help us. Michael Edwards, Dave Fallows [head of recruitment] and Barry [Hunter, chief scout], they were really in my ear and were on it: ‘Come on, come on. Mo Salah, he’s the solution!’”
We needed squad depth at left back. In summer 2017 we had a shortlist of five targets. Andy Robertson, the player we signed, was not top of the list. The standout left back that summer was Benjamin Mendy. He was top of my data-driven list but he wasn’t top of Eddy’s: he guessed, correctly, that Manchester City would try to sign Mendy, automatically putting him outside our financial range. He also attached significant weight to the bad character references he’d received about Mendy: this was a judgment call — the previous summer he had not attached very much weight to Mané’s poor references.
Our second choice was Roma’s Emerson Palmieri but Emerson tore his ACL on the last day of the season — we would have to look elsewhere. Andy Robertson was also 23. He had looked excellent over 1,500 minutes in Hull’s 2014-15 Premier League relegation season, then had been the standout young full back in the Championship in 2015-16 — we rated him as performing to an average Premier League standard and he started nearly every game as Hull were promoted. But in 2016-17 Hull conceded 80 goals in the Premier League, with Robertson starting the majority of games in defence, and were relegated again. Robertson’s defensive ratings suffered. It was difficult to analyse him: Hull had changed manager and tactical style upon promotion, and did so again halfway through the season.
Again, Jürgen proved critical. When warned of our uncertainty about Robertson’s defending, he replied that he didn’t care if he could defend or not; he needed his left back to attack. He could solve any defensive problems by giving Robertson more cover. I was impressed by Jürgen’s practical approach. Rather than demanding the perfect player, he was willing to find creative solutions to maximise each player’s strengths and minimise their weaknesses. He often talked of his preference for players with one or two “extreme characteristics” — game changers. If and when those game changers had weaknesses, he was willing to use other players to compensate for them. This philosophy was exactly in line with my beliefs about squad building.
Robertson was an excellent value signing — Emerson and Mendy’s transfer fees and wages were much, much higher. But if it wasn’t for Manchester City’s pursuit of Mendy and Emerson’s injury, Robertson may never have ended up at Liverpool. For there to be three excellent young left backs available was unusual, and in retrospect we ended up with by far the best one.
In January 2018, it was finally agreed that Barcelona would sign Philippe Coutinho by paying Liverpool a fee of £105million up front, plus £37million in easily achievable bonuses. The old adage says you should always sell when someone offers you more than something is worth, and Coutinho’s contract was simply not worth £142million.
In summer 2017 we had been annoying Southampton in much the same way that Barcelona were annoying us. We wanted to sign their central defender Virgil Van Dijk. He was the best young defender in Europe, and somehow he wasn’t already playing for a European giant. Van Dijk looked brilliant in our analysis, but you didn’t need fancy analysis to see that: his brilliance was obvious to everyone.
Unfortunately, we’d signed Mané, Lallana, [Rickie] Lambert, [Dejan] Lovren and Nathaniel Clyne from Southampton in the past few seasons. To say our approach for Van Dijk was unwelcome is an understatement.
After Coutinho’s departure, we had money to spend and could finally pay the price that Southampton felt compensated for the loss of Van Dijk — a then world-record for a centre back of £70million plus £4million in add-ons. We had lost one of the best attacking midfielders in the world but had gained the best young centre back and — as with Mané and Salah — Jürgen, Scouting and Data Analysis were unanimous that Van Dijk was the best option for Liverpool. As a bonus we still had plenty of money left over.
Summer 2018. Funded by the Coutinho money, we signed Alisson Becker from Roma for a world-record fee for a goalkeeper, until Chelsea smashed the record a few weeks later. Alisson is one of the few players that Eddy watched live before signing. He decided to do that because he freely admits he is no expert on goalkeepers. Data analysis showed that Alisson and Jan Oblak at Atlético Madrid were the best goalkeepers in Europe. Jürgen wanted a goalkeeper used to playing with his feet and that made Alisson the preferred choice.
Fabinho also joined from Monaco. A defensive midfielder who could also play as right back, he had been weirdly overlooked by the European giants in 2017 when they had raided Monaco’s title-winning team. Fabinho had played for three seasons as a right back for Monaco before moving to central midfield, and had been a Liverpool target before. In 2016 Jürgen was keen to upgrade our options at right back so we analysed every promising young right back in Europe. After training one day, Jürgen walked into Eddy’s office and told him: “We don’t need a young right back any more. Trent Alexander-Arnold looks fantastic!”
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The players who contributed most to our title win were nearly all recent arrivals. The 2018 signings Van Dijk, Alisson, Fabinho and Naby Keita made 38, 29, 22 and 9 starts, with Van Dijk playing every minute. The 2017 signings Robertson, Salah and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain made 35, 33 and 17 starts. The 2016 arrivals Wijnaldum, Mané and Matip started 35, 31 and 8 times. And the 2015 signings Roberto Firmino, Joe Gomez, James Milner and Divock Origi made 34, 22, 9 and 7 starts.
The team was unrecognisable from the one that was ridiculed in our disastrous 2014-15 season. Since then, nearly every new signing had met with the approval of our data analysis, of Eddy’s new scouting process, and of the manager. We’d finally demonstrated that our approach to squad building worked, and we’d achieved it with a net transfer spend much lower than most of our big six rivals.
‘How to Win the Premier League’ by Ian Graham is published by Century, Penguin Random House, £22 from August 15