Liverpool receive FC Midtjylland in the UEFA Champions League this week in a match between two clubs much more than their respective UEFA 10th and 108th suggest.
Their similarities stem from their prestige in world football, the length of clubs, the profile of players and staff, or the point at which they play; however, in the way they run.
Both take an analytical approach, not only for their recruitment, but also on how their club works from the most sensible to the bottom. They have marginal gains in the education field, as well as in the moving market, and anywhere they can be located.
Midtjylland won its first Danish Super League in 2015, just 16 years after its formation. Last summer, Matthew Benham, who also owns Brentford of the English league, had the club’s majority shareholder.
They have won two more League titles, in 2018 and 2020, their presence in the Champions League this season.
They won the name of the 2019/20 season with a 14-point lead over 13-time FC Copenhagen champion and entered the Champions League in the qualifying round.
Midtjylland had to face Bulgarian champion Ludogorets Razgrad, Swiss champion Young Boys and Czech champion Slavia Prague to compete in the lucrative stages.
Although he played in the europa League organizational stages in 2015, completing moment in the organization before being dismissed by Manchester United in the 16th, this is his first appearance in the organizing stages of Europe’s first club competition.
His analytical vision played an important role in this progress. Benham, a professional player before fitting in to the owner of a football club, and this statistical technique to overcome occasions implemented in his clubs.
A fluid and variable game like football has many uncertainties, however, if you are able to excel in the things you can control, be thorough with your strategies, whether in recruitment and exploration, or on the education floor, and as many of those uncertainties as possible, then you can discover merit regardless of the prestige or history of a club.
There are parallels to baseball’s Moneyball technique, where teams, or first a team, the Oakland Athletics, have discovered new tactics to watch the game and have figured out what the vital stats were, rather than getting players based on an out. date instinct or stats previously rated.
But that evolving in a laboratory or the product of an elaborate detection system, the maximum strategies do not make an unusual sense.
“I don’t think a lot of what we do is sorcerer,” Midtjylland President Rasmus Ankersen told The Guardian. “But where we might still be ahead is that it comes from above. It is not two interns in the basement who paint with data. The trust formula comes from Matthew, from me and it leaks out.
This is not to say that there is not much complex research in the scenes, however, it is the aspect of common sense, which then leads to the acceptance and adoption of more complex analyses, which many clubs do not have.
This is especially the case for traditionally vital groups in the game that can no longer fail and are therefore less motivated or poorly structured to take advantage of all the benefits they can find and achieve marginal gains.
Large clubs are also harder to remodel. A team like Midtjylland, formed in 1999, can be launched from the most sensible to the lag more gently than a campus such as Barcelona, Manchester United or Juventus: 3 clubs that remain a success despite many bad decisions off the field and unrest with the club. Structure.
Imagine if one of the football establishments that are naturally due to its global fan base, and which have a wonderful story in the game, combine and adopt strategies similar to those used through MidtjyllandArray. .
Well, you don’t have to. Liverpool FC is that club.
Since its acquisition through Fenway Sports Group (FSG, then known as the New England Sports Ventures) in 2010, Liverpool has gone from being under-performance players who had never won the league championship in the Premier League era, to being one of the clubs in the world.
They won their sixth European Cup (Champions League) in 2019, as well as their first Club World Cup, after which they won a league championship in 2020, the first in 30 years.
The FSG themselves have a history of baseball analysis, having followed Moneyball to the Boston Red Sox after buying the franchise in 2002. In 2004, the team won its first World Series in 86 years.
In football, there are pitfalls in the top “big clubs” that save you such reform. This gives blank canvas clubs, or those with nothing to lose, a merit if they are fully engaged in research and knowledge (or even simply non-unusual sense).
Despite its size, track and reputation, Liverpool were at a low point in 2009 and 2010 due to the grueling and destructive property of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who were on the brink of management. If Moneyball could buy a big football club, he would buy Liverpool in 2010, and that’s exactly what FSG did.
In these clubs, as Ankersen alluded to, analysts and knowledge scientists are not sitting in the basement seeking to convince others of their theories as a sports edition of Mulder and Scully, they shape their clubs from the most sensible to the bottom, and in any other respect. corner and corner that you can locate that has not yet been explored.
While the media and the football scene in general are still catching up with the expected goals (xG), Liverpool are already going beyond that: their minds are focused on the day-to-day physical functioning of the club, employing knowledge and research to help each and every facet of this.
On the side of the game, they have the best head coach at Jurgen Klopp. German is a rare breed of coaches who has been at the forefront of a key tactical evolution in the game, while being a motivator and an ideal coach.
In fact, his taste for counterattack football would not work without the players and the entire staff, and the character required to paint at that point is one of the many things that looks at the recruitment aspect of the club when deciding who to sign. That even played a role in Klopp’s own appointment.
FC Midtjylland’s matches against Liverpool in this season’s Champions League Group D will face not only two opposing league champions, but also two similar mindsets.
It is a montage imaginable through the rigorous strategies employed by either party. It is simple that Liverpool himself only played in the Champions League once between January 2010 and the summer of 2017 and was removed from the organisation level in 2014.
The Ranking for the Champions League itself was once considered the target, but thanks to the exploitation of those marginal gains, it is now a no-brainer. This can also be a fact for Midtjylland, given its growing national superiority and the merit that its clever technique provides them over other groups at the time of the European leagues.
The odds may be against the Danish team at Anfield this week, however, they, more than any other world football team, are prepared to challenge them and at least look forward to the opportunity to do so.
From America to Africa, I make canopy all over the world for Forbes. My training day reports on the English Premier League teams, Liverpool, Everton and
From America to Africa, I do football all over the world for Forbes. My Match Day reports focus on the English Premier League teams, Liverpool, Everton and Manchester City, from the press gallery in the UK and Europe. World Football: From World Cups to the end of the Champions League, from youth football to foreign matches, I’ve written about all facets of the charming game for media like The Guardian, BBC and Goal. I’ve reported on matches in primary European football nations, adding the Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga, and I’ve also written a lot about football in North America and Africa. Some of my paintings come to in-depth tactical research and popularity reports, examining the playing styles of various head coaches, game numbers and their long-term stars. I am the founding editor of the Football Media Global Football Index, which produces articles, podcasts and reports from journalists, coaches, coaches and fans.