Hueng Min-Son Was Almost a Liverpool Player?! Running the Game with Ian Graham

0:00It's Rog, here to sing my praise for a very special New Balance football boot, the 442. It's no-nonsense, workhorse midfielders and defenders, the ones who do the dirty work, but also ping a pass to perfection. It's a classic boot design with modern enhancements, with an ultra-lightweight sole, synthetic microfibre material, retains a soft premium in-hand feel, allowing for the lighter weight, the superior touch on the ball. Get a pair for yourself or the footballer in your family at newbalance.com slash soccer. You're listening to the Men in Blazers media network, Suboptimal Radio. In an alternative timeline, Son and Firmino would be Liverpool's front line.

0:42Our one and two choices were Firmino and Son. Son was cruelly sent to Spurs and we got Christian Benteke instead.

0:55Life truth, we all know the most important part of football is winning the transfer window. And my guest today knows how to win a transfer window. He's built a squad that can lift the Premier League title. He's a doctor of physics for real. That's not my hyperbole. And he led Liverpool's industry standard data analytics division from 2012 to 2023. Wrote a quite brilliant book about it that I know so many of you enjoyed. It's called How to Win the Premier League. Now his consultant group, Ludonautics, works with teams all over the planet. His first appearance on this network was honestly the stuff of instant classic.

1:34I'm thrilled to welcome back. It's Dr. Ian Graham. Hello, Rog. Instant classic, that's high praise. And your track suit's a bit of a classic as well. Nil sartis is the optimum. I love it. Nothing but the mediocre. And Everton's slogan's got to have the word nil in it, right? Fire your arm off for a nil-nil draw, Ian. And you're drinking your water out of a very humble brag champions winning glass, which I am countering with a complete and utter blank one. Still waiting. Still waiting. It's coming. But the transfer window, it's become an entity almost to itself. Bigger than football. I mean, Fabrizio Romano can kind of live on rumours all year, but appears to reverse hibernate and not sleep in the months when the transfer window is open.

2:17some fans prefer the buying and the selling more than the actual football you know as a former club executive how do you experience it are you just like in a basement in an undisclosed location just tracking every move with like photos old newspapers and string yeah the red string plays a very important part in transfer window planning yeah winning the transfer window much as i like transfer rumours and transfers to happen. The game is about winning football games rather than transfer windows. So when I was at Liverpool, I think we lost every single transfer window. But you know what? I didn't really mind.

2:56All of our underrated or where's the Coutinho money transfers, we didn't mind that we didn't win the transfer window. The players were good enough to win the actual game. Oh, don't take away winning the transfer window and parading Eberichi Eze around the Emirates to a standing ovation that was honestly soulful, ecstatic and bigger than the football. But I do want to relive some of the moves from the past couple of weeks, the stories, the noise, but do it in a way that goes deeper, almost under the tectonic plates of them all, not just to add to the rumour, there's enough of that. I brought you on so we can deepen our insight.

3:33A gent who's been, as I say, at the beating heart of a data analysis piece of strategy that's led to a winning club. Let's step away from the kind of hyperbolic wankery. No speculation. Just cold, hard numbers right here. The sort of benefit of data is it brings a lack of emotion. It has been sort of a criticism of data analysis. When it comes to transfers, a lack of emotions, they're the right thing to do. You know, you miss out on your first target. And then if your second target's just not good enough, having the cold, calculating decision-making to say, you know what, we won't get a player that won't work for us.

4:12We won't get panicked or get too emotionally involved in having to do something this summer. It's something not many clubs can do. God bless you. You're in the right place. Cold, hard, no emotions. As someone that died emotionally a long, long time ago, I'm so eager to dive in here. So let's start with your former club, Liverpool. You have created a reputation, a shrewd, studious, patient, as you've just said, disciplined. in the transfer market, willing to walk away if the option isn't available at the right place. But this summer, defending champions, though, the squad underwent an extreme makeover.

4:48So the tune right now, as we sit here, of over$400 million. They've broken their own transfer record, I think twice. And On The Slot came on our show 10 days ago. Was he going to point out that they've sold 250 million worth of players? Had a net game last summer from sales. If you average everything, it all evens out. How do you understand it? How do you process it? How should we process it, Ian? It might have been Ferguson who said, always build from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness. Sir Alex Ferguson, the legend. I think it's also important to look at a kind of longer term view.

5:23So Jürgen, bless him, he knew he had to overhaul that squad and started that pretty well in 2023, overhauling the midfield. But then contracts ran down, the squad's getting older, and Trent leaves. The overhaul continues. It was an overhaul that was started and then nothing happened last summer for what reasons I'm not entirely sure. So yeah, it's a continuation of a process that everyone agreed was needed two years ago. I think as well as the ins, there's been a lot of outs. It's a lot of first team replacements. It's not just sort of stockpiling players. The players are bought to replace players who started 30 or 40 games last season.

6:04You're talking about contracts running down. It could be said that two of the biggest signatures that have signed for Liverpool over the past couple of months were already on the squad. New deals for club captain Virgil van Dijk, that colossus of vibes in Cologne, now 34. And the PFA player of the year, Mo Salah, 33 years old. 33, I think, is exactly the same number of abs that bloke's got too. Each signed two-year contract extensions. I mean, you have crunched numbers for Salah's last deal. These players are in the part of their careers when you would usually expect a dip. And Liverpool is always showing a remarkable ruthlessness in cutting ties as players age.

6:41You look at Sadio Mane, sold to Bayern Munich for$35 million two years ago. What does the data say about re-signing ageing players? How do you predict? Can you factor in and discover and cover any kind of potential drop-off ahead of time? Players like wine and there's wine ages. Some of them turn into fine wine. lots of wine turns into vinegar as it ages and so you're going to make sure you're taking the best vintage in general if we look at ageing curves how players deteriorate as they get older winger, Mo's position they're the quickest to drop off they rely a lot on their top speed, on their pace change of acceleration centre back, they're the kind of slowly maturing players so they kind of reach their peak a lot later and carry on a lot longer because they rely less on speed and more on strength.

7:31Now, Mo and Virgil aren't your normal players. When I looked at Mo's last contract extension, I looked at this idea of who are the similar players. We can't just look at any average winger and compare them to Mo. So I did this analysis similar to Nate Silver's Pekota, where you try and look for players who've had similar careers. And the thing with Mo was, if you just look at players playing in the big five leagues, number of minutes, he was in the top five for five seasons in a row because we went deep in Champions League. And then all the players that were closest to him in playing that huge number of minutes for five seasons as they go into their 30s, Lewandowski, Benzema, Ronaldo, Luis Suarez, Aguero.

8:17Because those players are older than Mo, you could sort of say, OK, Mo's a different person to those players, obviously. But there's some evidence to say if the players can keep producing those minutes into their 30s, then they can keep doing it for another season. Now, when you get into a 33-year-old season, the number of players that you compare into really goes down. I don't envy my old colleagues for having to make that decision on another two years or more. God bless. So ultimately, they've moved into a territory where there is almost no comparison, no parallel. Only like Tim Ream still playing football aged 87.

8:53Yeah, Tim Ream and Cristiano, they're the only two. By the way, in human history, this is the first ever show where the words Tim Ream and Cristiano have been mentioned in the same sentence. That is data. But we'll talk about the brand new attack. I'm actually going to speak to Mo this week. I'm really interested to get his take on this. Florian Vert in terms of the creativity, 145 million for the quite brilliant young schemer. But also joining in from the Bundesliga, the great human palindrome, Hugo Eketike, 110 million in for Meintracht Frankfurt. And back when you were at the club, you signed a then slightly under the radar forward from the Bundesliga named Roberto Firmino.

9:34Proceeded to dazzle almost as much as his beautiful teeth did in the Premier League. And part of the reason you pushed for his signing was because you saw how well he facilitates two goal scoring wide forwards in Mane and Salah with his selfless play. Eketike is a very different player, or has been. He's much more direct. There's nothing false about his nineness. He wants the ball. The runs he makes are to score, not to be a decoy. How does that difference change everything? The emphasis, the balance of the front three, the harmony, the focal point when you're doing an analysis and deciding how to bring players in.

10:10Eketike is certainly a number nine, and Liverpool have lost a number nine in Nunes. So he gives that option. I don't know if Slott prefers to play his 4-2-3-1 this season or if he sticks with 4-3-3. In that 4-2-3-1 that he used at Feyenoord, that does need a proper centre forward and that's what Eketiki is. But as well as looking at players' position, you've got to look at how they interpret that position as well. Firmino, when he was a number nine, he never really played like a number nine, he's more of a number ten. You've started to see some of that combination play from Eketiki. You know, Egetiki is much more of a traditional number nine than Firmino.

10:48But he can, it's not just shooting that he brings. He does bring a bit of interplay. So looking at, you know, the change in the team dynamics based on that change in role, that'll be something my old colleagues would have looked at, certainly. Liverpool have also revamped the back line, which makes me curious. We've grown leaps and bounds in quantifying just how good attackers are. But defenders, particularly to fans, remain very much a black box. I know teams have started to keep their own data, often proprietary data. Some are rumoured to be using positioning data, originally designed for missile systems, which shows you just how deep it is.

11:23Arsenal have built their own, and we've seen shrewd recruitment from them down the years to build one of the stingiest defences in the world. They're yet to concede a league goal, as we broadcast, after the incredible array of two games to judge it on. But they have conceded at least in the Premier League two years in a row. when data analysts sit down to decide is this defender any good how much should they be worth how do they make decisions can you give us a peek behind the data curtain centre-back's the hardest position Arsenal have done really well defensively doing an experiment of how many centre-backs they can get on the pitch at once it's going to make your defence look pretty good problem with defence is a lot of the most important stuff you do is off the ball even full-back you've got a mix of on the ball and off the ball stuff that you've got and so all the defensive stats are interventions in play so i i did a tackle or i conceded a penalty if my name is not a penalty or i leaned i leaned slightly towards the ball

12:29x not a penalty because i'm going to develop one but keep going and most of those not yeah you know not giving away penalty, but most of those active interceptions are I've won the ball, I've done something good. The crucial thing with defenders is what is done to them rather than what they do. So can we measure how many times that throw ball goes past me, how many times I let that cross happen, how many times I don't clear and a shot comes in from my area of the pitch. And that's where the positional data is crucial because without it, you're just guessing at where the players are if you can see where the players are on the pitch you've got an idea of which areas of the pitch they control which attackers they're responsible for and you can make a informed judgment about which defenders to blame so as a defender you're going to look stupid during the game i'm sorry that's part of being a defender the data analyst's job is working out who to blame for the team looking stupid the way you describe it i once interviewed an offensive lineman in the nfl and he said ultimately my name is called out two times during the game when the players are introduced at the beginning and only when I make a mistake and it feels very much like the way you're talking about it it's in that same lonely realm but when you say we can make an assessment how accurate do you feel like that data propelled assessment is it's where data starts to collide with tactics and you never really know if the coach has told them you have to mark the man that that was a bad idea from the coach or if the defender's lost position or lost his man.

14:05So there's always, I say judgment, really it's a judgment you make in writing your algorithm. But to give you an idea of what goes into that algorithm, we look at the space. So as a striker makes a run in behind, he kind of controls some of that space in behind the defensive line. You can kind of move each defender around or take them out of the pitch to say, which defender was it that stopped this striker being in space or which defender was it that allowed this striker to be in space. So you can kind of see the impact of each defender's position on how much he's allowing or how much he's preventing space behind for that striker to run into.

14:45The answer to that seven times out of ten is it was Michael Keane. I can't remember if I told you about this the first time we talked. The first time we ever looked at defenders with Spurs, Liam Ridgewell came out as the best defender in the Premier League because he's playing for Birmingham City. He made 10 goal line clearances, 10 tackles a game, 12 blocks and so on. But Birmingham City had conceded the largest number of goals. So it's kind of like, well, he's doing a lot of good stuff, but maybe he's partly responsible for some of the bad stuff that's happening. I think he had a late career renaissance in MLS.

15:22Liam Ridgewell via Portland Timbers. God bless Timber, Joey. But essentially you're saying the early analysis kind of just worked out which defender could, quote, get stuck in. Exactly, yeah, yeah. We've since learned the prevention is better than the cure. Ridgewell was great at the cure, not so good at the prevention. I'm listening to you. It reminds me of going to Aston Villa when they just got promoted and John Terry was an assistant coach running defensive drills. And the defensive drills kind of just consisted of him lining up the centre-backs and then having the ball just blasted in and around their genitalia while he screamed, We blocked the ball with our body!

16:04We blocked the ball with all parts of our body! It was the most English thing I had ever seen on a football training ground. I've made it till the day. Get stuck in Liam Ridgewell. But from the back, back to the front. And Arsenal finally did what every single newspaper editor in Britain has been screaming at them to do for years. Signed a proper number nine, Victor Jochores, from Sporting in Lisbon. Past two seasons, we all know the statistics, he's been bullying Portuguese all comers. I think 97 goals in 102 games, but we'd never seen the 27-year-old perform in a top five league in the world for a sustained period.

16:44When you first started doing this work, Ian, you were kind of lucky if you could get two seasons of Premier League data. But by the time you left Liverpool, you had tracking data on 60 different leagues across the world. What I want to know is, how do you predict how performances translate from one league to another? You know, when you're slapping down$75 million for a new striker, how do you understand? How can you be sure? Can you be sure that the goals that he scored in Europe will make it away across the channel with him? Yes, lovely use of the word channel. I've not heard that word in a while.

17:19Delivering for you. How did that not catch on, by the way? Yeah, I mean, 1995, I think, was probably the last time I heard channel. Going across the channel while you're using a spork is probably like Pete's late 90s. about the sense of what the future but assume we'll all be travelling in channels as spokes Ian Yeah the channel translation for Jokeres so first of all it's always an extrapolation so I say like everyone wants Premier League experience and now I work with clubs around the world it doesn't matter how terrible their league is the player needs experience in this league he doesn't understand the passion of our league it's true for every league around the world So ideally, you want a player with experience in your league, but those players, guaranteed, are going to cost you a lot more than the same quality player from abroad.

18:13So we've put up with a bit of uncertainty because we can get as good a player for a lower price. And that uncertainty, yeah, the way we deal with it is UEFA, bless them. they allow teams from different countries to play each other. So we can see how well Portuguese teams do against Premier League teams. But also, you know, Premier League teams play French teams who play Portuguese teams. There's a big network of results that basically gives us an exchange rate. So as you're at the Bureau de Change at the Channel Station in St Pancras there, you can ask how many Portuguese Euros your Premier League pound buys you.

18:52and it's about a 35 % discount. So, you know, if you just look at raw goals numbers, we'd guess that Xochares goals per 90 minutes is going to decrease by about 35%. In reality, it's a bit more than that because Portugal's dominated by those three big teams and Xochares doesn't have to play against one of them because he was already at sporting. So the quality of opposition he played in Portugal was, you know, even worse than 35%. So if a striker scores 20 times in MLS, what's the goal conversion rate between MLS and the Premier League? How do you work that out? Off the top of my head, I think it's about 50%.

19:32So you're going to have to go a goal a game in the MLS to be a one in two Premier League striker. Like Suarez was a goal a game in Holland and he went down to 0.4 goals per game in his first season. He slowly increased that over the seasons at Liverpool. I like your answer a lot. I actually asked Mikel Arteta, I asked him what data point he'd used to be sure that Jocares could score in the Premier League as he had in Portugal. And he goes, what data point? I was like, yeah. He goes, looking in his eyes, seeing the hunger. That was the data point on a Zoom, which I also just love. You know, the eye to hunger ratio, it's a critical component in the algorithm as well.

20:14I'm not going to argue with Mikel. by the way God bless Mikel Arteta two games into the season two goals he was not wrong I love that the eye to hunger ratio that's another one when you work with Ludonautics future football club clients this is what you get that kind of instant creativity Chelsea Club World Cup champion team two new strikers Liam Delep and João Pedro well two new strikers so far each scored about the same rate as Nicolas Jackson last year, except Jackson did it well, underperforming his XG. Both Pedro and De Lapp overperformed theirs. We talk a lot about XG, mostly out of my mouth, completely wrongly.

20:56It's meant to be the probability of the expectation of scoring from the position the shot is in. Often players have hot streaks, cold streaks. They do seem to come back to the average. But there's some players, Ian. Lionel Messi always finishes above his XG. He's just a better finisher than your average finisher. when you're looking at this from a data perspective analysis how long do you wait for a guy like nico jackson or or a darwin nunez to revert to the mean and when do you just decide you know what this may be a below average finisher we have here yeah finishing's a noisy business if you want to make a good shot no matter where on the pitch it is you want to kick it hard and kick it away from the goalkeeper and on target as well but that stuff is you know it's host to a lot of things that aren't particularly repeatable maybe in this game you've got half a second less because the defender's half a step closer to you and even though we've got like defensive positions to give better estimates of xg now things like that or you know the balls come onto your foot a little bit quicker or it's bounced a little bit too high.

22:07There's a lot of, I call it that like noise is the statistical term, but it's stuff that's hard to measure and hard to repeat. So when you look at like number of shots that players get per 90 minutes, that repeats quite reliably season to season. XG repeats reliably season to season. So that's like a combination of number of shots and how good the position you're getting in for shots is. XG2 which is how well have you placed that shot that's less repeatable season to season because of all of those little factors that can affect it and then XG over performance I've just looked at Premier League strikers one season to the next 16 % correlation so it's more or less a dice roll whether you're hot one season and cold the next just to give a couple of examples Hoong Min Son, one of my favourite players.

23:02In an alternative timeline, Son and Firmino would be Liverpool's front line. Telling me a story, Son Hoong Min was almost a Liverpool player. You know, the old transfer, much maligned transfer committee, our one and two choices were Firmino and Son for our two strikers, but Son was cruelly sent to Spurs and we got Christian Benteke instead. yeah and you were just like son hung men son hung men son hung men and they're like yeah christian benteke he's a unit different uh different style of player which is fine you know the manager wanted that style of player at the time but you know son is uh along with messi one of the best finishers and it took us two years to increase his shot placement skill by 10 percent and then we took another two years to increase it by another like 20 percent so like the best finisher, because it's such a noisy process and so few players can consistently do it, it took us a long time to upgrade him and even being the best in the world, he's kind of like 20-30 % better at replacing those shots and similar with Darwin he kind of just hovered around average for a while, he was hot in the season before Liverpool signed him and he was cold afterwards but that happens to lots of players, he's been cold for long enough that we have started to downgrade his finishing ability now.

24:26That's genuinely amazing. Benteke to Liverpool is what you get when you do the eye to hunger data point in the Zoom. Is that what you're telling me? Aye. Aye. His character. His character.

24:42Talking about strikers, I love that you're saying finishing is a noisy business. That is my big takeaway from this show. I mean, Manchester United went out and acquired a whole new attacking battery Mbumo, Cunha, Young-Sheshko. But at the back, and this is a Manchester problem in general right now, and this may change for both clubs before the end of the transfer window, but in goal right now for United, it's either Bayern there or Andreanana. It's kind of like death by flappery or death by erratic decision-making. What was your philosophy on goalkeeping? Is it a bit like good pitching that it's impossible to win a title unless you have a globally elite goalkeeper?

25:18Yeah, finishing is a noisy business, to just repeat myself there. So when teams win the title, their goals is greater than their expected goals conceded, and on the attacking side as well. Your goalkeeper has probably won the goal in gloves or got close to it. With goalkeepers, it takes us a long time to update our opinion of their quality. That being said, you need a really good shot stopper. that gives you a much better chance of having that super defensive season. So, like, I think Alisson's worst seasons have been slightly above average and his best seasons have been among the best in the world.

25:56I couldn't really think of a time recently when a team has won the title with an average or a below average goalkeeper. And even if my long-term view of the goalkeeper wasn't great, in the title-winning season, they had a great G-XG season, like strikers can have those seasons. So how do clubs put themselves in this position where they obsess, they obsess, they assess? It's a bit like baseball teams chasing the home run hitter and then leaving themselves completely vulnerable defensively. How at this stage in football's evolution are clubs leaving themselves without a defined number one that fits the playing style that the team need and crave?

26:38So much research across sports has said attack and defence, they're about equally important. Like attacks, much easier to measure than defense, especially in football, whether, you know, goals was the only thing you could measure for a long time. Defense is more of a team game as well. So, you know, working out the sort of world-class centre-back is hard because if the unit's not working properly, they can look really stupid, as Ridgewell did at Birmingham. Whereas if the attacks not working properly, you can still prosper as an attacker. Now, goalkeeper is an individual position, I think like with the goalkeeper as the 11th outfield player, like too much emphasis is put on that playing out from the back.

27:21I got a great friend of mine, used to be a goalkeeping coach, he's now sort of goalkeeper analyst. He said, you know these gloves, these special equipment goalkeepers wear, that tells you something. The number one job is to keep the ball out of the net. it's like Alisson's great with his feet but you know he's world class at keeping the ball out of the net that's the number one thing so give me someone who can stop shots I say compromise on the ball play and stuff because there are so few who are world class at both things like with Alisson Liverpool were really lucky but if you want to compromise on one I just try to say like coach it's more important to keep the ball out of our net than to play you know ticky-tacker in our own penalty area.

28:06It's funny how great attacking players, or the ones that play for Everton anyway, wear tiny, tiny chimpanzees. I can imagine an evolution of the goalkeeper position wearing about three generations. They'll take the field with tiny, tiny goalkeeper gloves. They'll always be annoyed that they have to wear them. That's where the game will be gone. But talking about the world's greatest Everton Football Club, I did a live show with the great St. David Moyes this summer, one of the most joyous nights of my life. But on stage, he'd look me in the eyes and he said, Everton need to sign nine or ten new players.