Authors: Michael Calvin
‘The key thing to understand about analytics is we are talking about a model. It is not reality. It is a model of reality. Too many think models are the truth. You absolutely a hundred per cent still need the old school input from scouts, just not on its own. There is room for subjective judgement, as long as it is part of a bigger picture.
‘Everything we do is a mix of the subjective and objective. I might trade five games at once. The most I have done simultaneously was fifteen. I wouldn’t be watching the games in that situation. We have people who do that, watching and inputting the stats as we request. We have various formulae which work out targets. The screen beeps and goes red if a bet is there. It goes grey if the bet is far away. Then it goes yellow and through the shades to red.
‘We grade the quality of chances on ten different levels. Let’s suppose a player runs on to a through ball and is wrongly given offside. If that decision hadn’t been taken you’d have a man running straight in on the keeper. We can put that in as a really strong chance. Or maybe the decision was correct but marginal. We can still say that was less of a chance, but a chance nevertheless. All grading of chances is completely subjective but once we have the number and quality of chances for each side we can crunch it and put it into the models.’
It is a process of constant recalibration. Rule changes and refereeing standards are factored into the equation. Pythagorean Expectation, the mathematical theory originating from baseball, where it is used to estimate the number of wins, based on runs scored and conceded, is popular in the NFL and NBA, but cannot translate to football. Draws, regarded as a cultural aberration in North American sport, get in the way.
The boundaries between sport and academia are blurring. In February 2013, the NFL introduced a player assessment module designed by Harold Goldstein, professor of industrial and organisational psychology at the City University of New York. This test, applied on potential recruits from College football, measured learning styles, motivation, decision-making skills, ability to respond to pressure and core intellect.
Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a cognitive and mathematical psychologist, published a series of seminal articles on judgement and decision-making, cul-minating in the publication of their ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’. This paper suggested human beings are naturally risk-averse when making a decision which promises gain, but risk-seeking when making a decision which will lead to a certain loss. The eminent academics could have been speaking about Queens Park Rangers and their traumatic 2012–13 season.
It was a case study in short-termism, unexpected näivety and ruinous expedience. The underpinning five-year strategy was sound, the personnel were experienced, but there was a disastrous disconnect between basic philosophy and best practice. Mistakes multiplied and, when Mark Hughes was replaced by Harry Redknapp on 24 November 2012, they were repeated. Misjudgements of players’ character, and the perceived influence of agents who were paid £6,818,688 between 1 October 2011 and 30 September 2012, added to a toxic mix.
When the transfer window closed, on 31 January 2013, QPR had signed 29 players in 17 months under the ownership of Tony Fernandes. Redknapp was raging at ‘gang warfare’ being conducted by unnamed agents. Christopher Samba, a club record £12.5 million signing from Anzhi Makhachkala, was on a four-and-a-half-year contract worth £100,000 a week. Unsustainable gambles were being taken at a club with minimal match-day revenue, and an atmospheric but limited ground which held only 18,000. The club’s culture was in tatters.
QPR’s training ground, which lies under the flight path to Heathrow, has changed little in the 20 years or so since it was first rented by Chelsea. The offices, glorified portable buildings, are cramped. A small video room, with tiered seating, is one of the few concessions to modernity. But outside, there is a car showroom a petrol head would kill for. Bentley Continentals are parked haphazardly alongside Porsche Panameras with European plates. Customised Range Rovers flank a Ford Mustang. The place reeks of new money and Premier League pretensions.
This was where Mike Rigg had to develop and implement the strategy in conjunction with Hughes, in the summer of 2012. His credentials were impeccable. He had left Manchester City a month before they won the League title, after four years overseeing a recruitment programme which depended on a global network of 35 scouts. His inheritance from QPR’s previous regime, under Neil Warnock, was non-existent:
‘I walked through the door here and thought Oh my God. This is a Premier League club. What’s happened? How can a club be like this? We’d spent money on scouts, but didn’t even have a scouting department. There were zero, and I mean zero, scouting reports and targets. Who are we looking at? Who is our target? Right, we need a right back, what’s our list of the top five right backs? Where is it? Nothing. There wasn’t even a filing cabinet, and that in itself is a system which is thirty years out of date. At least in other clubs I have been at there was some record of where everybody had been.
‘Everything we’ve done this summer has been catching up. We’ve had thousands of names thrown at us. “Go and get this kid from Belgium, Portugal, this lad from France.” I said to Mark, “We are doing this and we have no idea. We have done no due diligence. We have no idea who they are.” I guarantee you now the day I walk out of here the next person in will be able to click on a button and source information from all around the world. That’s exactly what I left at City. It’s an industry that’s like no other, and I know what it is like. When I do go it will be “thanks, Mike”. A week later it’ll be “who’s Mike?”’
There was a terrible foresight in his words. It would be easy to use hindsight to score points, and denigrate certain individuals. That is football’s way, because it helps to dissipate the blame. No one sets out to fail, and events offer a perfect opportunity to reverse engineer the Rangers project. A lot of what Rigg said was uncomfortably close to the truth:
‘The problem with the football business is if it lurches from crisis to crisis, and you have no fundamental principle or philosophy, every time there is a change at the top of the organisation, the whole organisation changes. On my first day, I went to see Caroline our PA, and asked how long she had been here. In her fifteen years at the club she’s worked with thirty-three managers. I guarantee you that every time a new manager comes in there’s change.
‘They try to implement new methods and systems, but within two, three or six months people are saying “we have got to get him out”. Frenzy is generated. Everyone in football wants it and wants it now. No one is prepared to wait for anything, any more. If the club decides to make changes, there’s not an awful lot you can do about that, but surely there should be a consistent set of principles to work on.
‘At City it was like living in the most luxurious palatial mansion. From the outside everyone sees this wonderful building, but you open up the doors and inside are the most dysfunctional family you’ll ever come across. When I came here it was like someone said to me, “there’s a field, and a caravan for you to live in. For the next couple of years there’s going to be a bit of mud and shit and holes and dirt, but you can actually build something.” This, for me, is not just going through the motions of the job. It’s a passion, it’s my life, it’s what I spend seven days a week thinking about and doing.’
He pushed his laptop across the desk, at an angle, and scrolled through a 56-page dossier he had compiled on Alexis Sanchez, when City considered signing him from Udinese. It was ultimately futile, because Barcelona did the deal, but it represented the sort of template he wanted to implement at QPR. Recruitment was a haphazard process, because football is a haphazard business. The intelligence operation he had carried out, in conjunction with Barry Hunter, who had subsequently moved to Liverpool, was revealingly indiscriminate:
‘Barry was my Italian scout. We went out and spent four or five days, on the back of two years’ worth of work, watching Alexis. We saw Udinese train, looked at his house, met family and friends. We went into town at one point, sat down and had a coffee, and we actually followed him walking around with a mate of his. We weren’t trying to be private investigators but it’s only a small place. We were noticing who he was with, what he was doing. At one point we went into a hotel and pretended to be fans. We asked for an autograph to see what the reaction was like.
‘We should be doing psychometric testing with people to find out what makes these players tick. But the rules state you’ve got to go and spend fifty million on someone on whom you are not allowed to do any due diligence, unless you get permission from his club. And if the club want to sell him, because there are problems, they are going to prevent you from doing that.’
Rigg led me across to a whiteboard, on which players were split into first team and development groups. Their names were on magnetic strips. Those who were surplus to requirements and out on loan, like Joey Barton, were turned over to face the wall. The names of those who had left the club that week, like striker Tommy Smith, were removed and thrown in the bin. Rigg then drew an organisational flowchart, in which his function was linked to that of Hughes and Fernandes.
‘My role is to balance the football and the business. I need to pay attention to the here and now, but formalise the future. Succession planning should never stop. We have a four-tier system, in terms of recruitment. Number one is a top Premier League player, who can come and fit straight in. Number two is a senior squad player, who may be coming towards the end of his career. There’s minimal resale value but determinable risk. Number three is a development player aged between seventeen and twenty-one. Number four is a schoolboy. We have a global target list for each tier.
‘What you don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don’t want to throw good people away, with good knowledge, but the whole concept of scouting has changed. Absolutely everybody is a scout. It’s not so much what you see, but how that information is communicated. If there’s a player out there, and he is seen by a parent, or the man on the street, it’s on Facebook and Twitter. The information is with an agent. It’s on the internet, on video, on DVD, on YouTube.
‘It’s on people’s phones; someone stands on the side of the pitch and sends a text to someone, which is shared. Technology means communication is no longer reliant on a scout on the touchline. That’s come about because a lot of people realise that there are vast sums of money to be made from players who have talent. That may be a Mum or Dad who sees their son as being the next Ryan Giggs, or it could be an agent who wants to snap up a player at the age of thirteen or fourteen because they want him for life.
‘It’s not hard to come by who the best players are. I could literally pick up the phone now, and say to someone, “do me a favour. Just email me a list by one o’clock this afternoon of the best twelve-year-olds in and around London.” You can get that information very quickly, because there are so many people out there. Yes, you do need people who have good eyes, but you’ve got a new culture of people coming into the game.
‘They are hard working, enthusiastic. They are graduates, sports scientists. They are intelligent, articulate. There is also a new breed of professional footballer, who doesn’t have to think about what he is doing next because he is so well off, financially. He doesn’t have to stay in the game. That leaves the boys in the flat caps.’
All are dependent on the men in the boardroom who are prepared to fund flights of fancy, but begin to panic when others lay the blame at their door. Hughes was sacked because QPR bought rashly, placed undue faith in experience, and failed to recognise the character flaws of players like Stéphane M’bia, Jose Boswinga and Esteban Granero. Injuries to such senior pros as Bobby Zamora, one of the few footballers with the honesty to admit he dislikes football, were disruptive.
An embedded recruitment programme would have picked up the danger signs of indolence, complacency and culture shock. Rigg made the fatal mistake of believing ‘this group should be brilliant for us for one or two years’ and left Loftus Road just before Christmas 2012. Redknapp spoke archly of QPR’s owners having ‘their pants pulled down’, but proceeded to staple their underwear to their ankles by sanctioning another round of recruitment. Change meant a new batch of casualties.
Stuart Webber, lured from Liverpool in August, quickly jumped ship, to become head of recruitment at Wolves. Hans Gillhaus, another senior figure appointed by Rigg, was sacked. Paul Dyer, who had watched Jack Butland at Southend with Mel Johnson and myself, was another victim of the dismantling of a scouting system that had only just been ratified. Redknapp’s long-time chief scout Ian Broomfield, gave Dyer the bad news that he was out, and asked how long he had been in the game.
‘Forty-five years.’
FRIENDS AND FAMILY,
football men and little boys, gathered at the Royal British Legion in the West London suburb of Parsons Green to commemorate the Golden Wedding of John and Gloria Griffin. It was a celebration of a life shared and of a flame which flickered and refused to die. The years melted away into a mist of remembrance, a reaffirmation of faith and fidelity.
Parallel worlds collided gently. Football had obsessed John Griffin, Wycombe Wanderers’ chief scout, since he was a boy in post-war London, when he turned left out of the council estate on the fringes of the Fulham Road, and headed to Craven Cottage. Had he turned right, and taken an equidistant walk towards Stamford Bridge, he would have matched his twelve grandchildren, and supported Chelsea. The prospect amused and appalled him.
‘My whole family warned Gloria about me,’ he said, his face illuminated by soft, ruminative laughter. ‘She didn’t listen, thankfully. I know I am stupid about football, but there is nothing more important than family. I see the kids in their Chelsea kits and I shudder, because I was brought up to dislike that club, but I love each and every one of them to bits. They remind us of what is important, don’t they?’