A “moneyball disciple” was hired by the sabermetrics-loving Boston Red Sox owners after they bought the prestigious, but essentially bankrupt, Liverpool soccer team in the English Premier League in 2010 to find players with undervalued but useful—and, most important, measurable—skills. Liverpool thought the moneyball approach would maximize performance while minimizing the financial investment, but the team wound up losing tens of millions of dollars in 2011 and finished in eighth place. Since then, Liverpool has generally underperformed both on and off the field.
Tottenham in the English Premier League has also tried a moneyball-like strategy. In 2013–14, Tottenham used the £91 million ($120 million) from Gareth Bale’s transfer to Real Madrid to acquire seven new players. A year later Liverpool used the £65 million ($99 million) from Luis Suárez’s transfer to Barcelona to sign eight players, and loaned one of them to another team. Despite acquiring these fifteen new players, all selected for specific attributes revealed through statistical analysis—attributes that each team believed would collectively compensate for the loss of the star player and lead their respective teams to success—the teams have generally disappointed on the field. The “good” but not “great” players never seemed to blend together, and many have now been sold off.
Whether the negative experiences of Tottenham and Liverpool occurred because the application of data analytics to soccer is fundamentally flawed or because it was implemented poorly by people who were not as good at translating statistical data into predictions of future performance as they thought they were, or because of subsequent mismanagement of the newcomers, the results provide a warning that more may be required than data analytics, especially in sports like soccer that require players to be interdependent.
What is clear is that whether a moneyball-like strategy is used or not, most professional European soccer teams lose money, and a lot of it. Costs were so out of control, with teams spending vast sums for talent, that in 2010 UEFA imposed financial fair play (FFP) provisions prohibiting teams from repeatedly spending more than the revenues they generate. In May 2015, ten teams (including Inter Milan, Roma, and Monaco) had to sign “settlement agreements” to work toward achieving breakeven for the 2018–19 season.
In 2014, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) were heavily sanctioned by UEFA for breaching FFP rules. Sheikh Mansour had bought Manchester City in 2008 for £210 million ($323 million) and has since accumulated annual losses of £535 million ($823 million), excluding approximately £200 million ($308 million) on facility upgrades, all of which was covered by its billionaire owner. Similarly, PSG was bought by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). In 2011–12, it spent massive sums for players. Although this spending at both clubs led to massive losses—especially excluding a related party sponsorship of up to €200 million ($264 million) a year by the Qatar Tourism Authority to PSG—it has led to success on the field: Manchester City has won two of the last three Premier League titles and PSG won consecutive French titles. Neither team, however, has reached the Champions League semifinals.
In 2015, UEFA found that Liverpool, despite losses of £49.8 million ($78 million) in 2012–13 and £41 million ($65 million) in 2011–12, did not breach FFP regulations, having signed a series of lucrative commercial deals over the previous eighteen months and being able to exclude some expenses.
What is little known is that only a handful of soccer teams, such as Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, and Bayern Munich, make money. As discussed, club members own Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich, and there is no billionaire to fund the losses. Public shareholders own Manchester United (it is traded on the NYSE) and probably expect profits.
Although there is a correlation of having the money to pay the best players to winning, it doesn’t guarantee success, especially in the Champions League. Manchester United, for example, won their first European title in 1968 but would not win that title again until 1999. And although Manchester United had the highest revenues in soccer from 1997 (when Deloitte started their soccer team revenues rankings) to 2004 (when Real Madrid took over the top spot), and has been consistently one of the top five teams in terms of revenues, the team only won one Champions League title in the 2000s, in 2008, even with one of the greatest managers in history, Sir Alex Ferguson.
In the same 2014 interview with Sean Ingle of The Guardian, Billy Beane said, “When I first came into baseball, people didn’t want to hear that a team was a business, but it is. And the better the business is run, the healthier the team on the field is going to be . . . If I’m buying stock in a [soccer] team . . . they’ve got revenues . . . they pay down their debt. And ultimately in today’s world that’s the best way for a long-term success.” Although he is referring to another soccer team, Real Madrid personifies what he is describing, which is essentially the link between on-field and off-field success.
I aim to demonstrate that there is much more to success on and off the field than data analytics and talent, and even money, and that those who do not include culture in building a winning organization are the real dinosaurs.
Interdependence (Ronaldo and Sixty Seconds)
Baseball is very different from basketball and soccer because baseball requires less team collaboration—for example, the too-much-talent effect (page 148) doesn’t negatively impact baseball teams. There are other differences and nuances that add context to any lessons learned from comparing a baseball team (or applying moneyball concepts) to not only a basketball or soccer team but also generally to organizations. Most organizations require interdependence among team members. The key takeaway: the complexity and interdependence of soccer and organizations, in contrast to baseball, puts more responsibility on the management team to create an environment or culture that is conducive to teamwork. The analysis demonstrates how strong the connection is in soccer between teamwork and scoring goals, more than basketball and much more than baseball. Combine that connection with the limited scoring opportunities in soccer, and it is self-evident that teamwork becomes vital to winning in soccer, similar to most businesses.
Baseball is a team sport that is really an accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike or hitting a home run is primarily an individual achievement. Each play has a start and endpoint, with a focus on a battle between pitcher and hitter. Although the events in baseball are more discrete, some interdependence still exists (e.g., the quality of the infield defense behind a groundball-oriented pitcher, player chemistry), which can have a big impact on a player’s statistics. There are nine players on the field on a baseball team. Regardless of what the other team does or a teammate does, each baseball player will come to the plate to bat around three to five times in a nine-inning game. A baseball team has at least twenty-seven different scoring opportunities. There are nine players, so each player has at least around 11 percent of the offensive opportunities to impact the game.
Contrast baseball with basketball. Basketball is a team-oriented sport requiring teammates to pass to each other and work together on the court. The five players on the court on a basketball team are interdependent and need to interact effectively under time pressure. A NBA game consists of four twelve-minute quarters, for a total of forty-eight minutes. In the NBA, there is a twenty-four-second shot clock. Instead baseball depends upon outs and innings, however long it takes.
Although interdependent, star players in the NBA can significantly impact a game. Stars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant each take, on average, 30 to 33 percent of their team’s shots. If one includes assists, each is responsible for 52 to 57 percent of his team’s shots. An NBA team, because of the shot clock, takes around 77 to 90 shots per game, so there are plenty of scoring opportunities. James and Bryant typically play 36 to 39 minutes (about 75 percent) of a 48-minute game. Each can be substituted for any reason as many times as he or the coach would like. They both touch the ball around 80 times and possess the ball for about 5 minutes per game, or around 10 percent of total