The Man Who Wasn't Listened To
Dr. Bill Gerrard pioneered soccer analytics in the 1990s and moved the game forward immeasurably. So why haven't you heard of him?
You likely haven’t heard of Bill Gerrard. There are a few different reasons for that. For one, he was far ahead of his time and few people grasped what he was doing at the time. For another, he was told that if he was going to have the kind of impact on the soccer business that he hoped to, he needed to lower his public profile. And finally, our society isn’t set up very well to deliver credit to the people that move their fields forward.
So anyway, Bill Gerrard, godfather of soccer analytics. An affable Scottish business school professor at the University of Leeds whose ideas were adopted by scores of others and then used to slowly remake the game. Gerrard is to soccer what Bill James is to baseball—the connection to Billy Beane included, but we’ll get to that.
Only nobody wrote a bestselling book, or multiple-Oscar-nominated movie, that detailed Gerrard’s vast contribution to the advancement of his sport.
Still, there is little arguing with the influence Gerrard has had in shaping of the modern game, even though quantifying the direct effect of his work is very nearly impossible. He was the ideas guy, a kind of inventor figure of soccer analytics. He thought of new ways of doing things, new ways of looking at problems. Sometimes they were adopted right away. Other times it took years for the seed he planted to take root. At least as often, he was ignored until his approach became industry standard anyway, decades later.
Mostly, Gerrard found himself frustrated by how hard it was for his ideas to take hold, how rare it was for a first team manager to even take a meeting with him. It’s what eventually drove him away from soccer and into rugby union, where he did analytical work for a dominant Saracens team, before Beane, of all people, brought him back to soccer.
Gerrard had been a soccer fan and player all his life —“I was one of those born with 99 percent enthusiasm; 1 percent skill.” But it hadn’t occurred to him to begin studying the sport as an academic pursuit until long after he’d gone to grad school at Cambridge University, given up a potentially lucrative career as an industrial economist at Unilever and turned to academia instead. By the time he had his epiphany, he had gotten his PhD in economics (writing his thesis on John Maynard Keynes, of course) and become a business professor at Leeds.
Two professor friends with whom he would go to watch games had published a couple of academic articles on attendance demand at soccer games in the early 1990s, garnering some attention. Gerrard was intrigued by this newly feasible option of doing research on sports. He was interested in the transfer market and the determination of prices and realized there was nothing to stop him from studying it.
“I wanted to question how any club could pay 15 million pounds for Alan Shearer,” Gerrard explains. In the summer of 1996, Newcastle United had obliterated the transfer world record to poach the Premier League’s most prolific striker from Blackburn Rovers. It was a transaction seen as the embodiment of the madness in the market for players as satellite TV flooded the game with new riches.
Gerrard compiled the data of every transfer between English clubs over three seasons in the mid-1990s—some 1,350 transfers in all—and created a model to assign players a market value.
The model was unsophisticated for a lack of meaningful statistics and information. “At that point there was virtually no data available on what players did on the pitch,” Gerrard says. “Basically, all we knew was who played, who scored and who was a bad boy. The only thing we had consistent data for was appearances, scoring and discipline.”
Nobody was even keeping assists yet, a deceptive statistic albeit an easy one to track. The internet was nascent. Soccer data companies like Opta and ProZone were in their infancy. Nobody had worked out how to measure the thousands of actions and reactions that took place on the field in every game. Lots of smart people thought quantifying a sport so fluid as soccer was impossible.
Still, Gerrard did his best with what he had. So his “Soccer Transfers” model took into account the size of the selling club (to provide context for past performance), the size of the buying club (to project future performance), the clubs’ overall results, the player’s age and fitness and what little statistics he possessed. Then he weighted them and attempted to predict where the player was in his career trajectory and, therefore, work out roughly what he was worth—relative to the number of years left on his contract, once the Bosman Ruling granted players their free agency in 1995.
Today, such a formula would be considered amateurish. But at the time, the notion that the whims of the market could be held up against something that had the loose shape of science was revolutionary.
Gerrard published three scholarly articles that gained traction. “The media took an interest,” Gerrard recalls. “And it typically was: ‘Crazy boffin tries to predict transfer values.’”
A boffin, should you require translation, is a British term for a nerd.
But in spite of being treated as a curiosity, people in useful positions took note. A stockbroker heard about Gerrard’s work and asked him to analyze the transfer dealings of Tottenham Hotspur manager Gerry Francis. Using his model, Gerrard wrote a report determining that Francis had lost 20 million pounds of shareholder value for the then-publicly-traded club. That brought yet more attention, work analyzing other clubs’ transfer dealings and a 15-minute segment about him on the BBC in 1997.
But Gerrard’s analysis of teams’ transfers and whether they were paying fair value found an unexpected audience. If the all-powerful club managers actually making those deals were reading his reports, Gerrard didn’t know about it. Rather, his readership appeared to consist of club financial directors who could use the aggregate value of their squads as an asset to secure financing against, or work out how much insurance they needed for injuries in their squad.
For most of his career advising soccer clubs, those clubs kept Gerrard at arm’s length. He worked, in one way or another, with more than a dozen current or former Premier League clubs or takeover bids by potential new owners. He did so largely under confidentiality agreements, alas, cloaking both the identity of the clubs and the nature of much of Gerrard’s work—and, therefore, the true scale of his impact.
But no matter the exact work he was asked to do, he found that few of the clubs were prepared to actually do anything with the suggestions he made.
“It was a lot of frustration,” Gerrard says. “I wasn’t getting the interaction with the people I needed to develop my work. It was so political within clubs.”
He never could seem to get in front of the decision-makers, who could act on his insights. Instead, he would be presenting to video analysts or other informational intermediaries, who, Gerrard suspects, undermined him or dismissed his findings entirely since there was rarely any follow-up.
There were two notable exceptions.
The first was Bolton Wanderers, a clever, smallish club that made a remarkable two-decade ascent from the fourth tier to the European berths at the top end of the Premier League. The unlikely hero in this story is Sam Allardyce, Bolton’s then-manager who would go on to become most famous for saving troubled clubs from relegation with very rudimentary tactics and for drinking his white wine by the pint.
Big Sam, a hardnosed journeyman player who was well on his way to becoming a peripatetic manager, was all ears. “They were a very progressive club,” Gerrard says. “They were basically doing an Oakland [A’s] in the sense of being a small-budget club. But they were doing it with sports science rather than data analytics. They were buying Real Madrid quality on Bolton Wanderer wages by bringing in players at the back-end of their careers and looking after them physically and psychologically.”
It was a different kind of analytics, but Gerrard found an eager audience there.
The other club that publicly acknowledged his work was Leeds United, one of his boyhood loves but, by 2002, on the verge of collapse after its own stunning rise. As the club’s mismanagement put it on the brink of bankruptcy, Gerrard was asked to address a supporters’ group and explain why the club had been forced to sell star defender Jonathan Woodgate to Newcastle. The hundreds of angry fans in the room worried him. And right before he went before them, a club director handed him a letter from a lawyer threatening a lawsuit if Gerrard in any way suggested that Leeds might go bankrupt.
He did anyway. Because, of course, the club sold Woodgate to keep its head above water. There was no denying it. He never heard from the lawyer again.
By this point, soccer’s hardheadedness had alienated Gerrard to the point that he left the sport when the juggernaut Saracens rugby club pulled him into rugby union. The club asked him to analyze its team and opponents and he eventually became a kind of adjunct figure to the coaching staff.
“A lot of video analysts in soccer were antagonistic or wary of me,” Gerrard says. “They thought, ‘It’s all going to be data and we’re not going to have a job.’ Whereas Saracens realized, ‘Where do you get the data from? You’ve got to have the video.’” Saracens understood that those two things would work in conjunction, that more data analysts meant more video analysts as well. With Gerrard in the front office, Saracens dominated their league for several years.
Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who had leaned heavily on Bill James’s ideas to develop the baseball management philosophy that became known as Moneyball—a book Gerrard came to view as “a kind of bible”—reached him via email. So Gerrard went to see Beane in Oakland and, before long, he was an analyst for the San Jose Earthquakes, the Major League Soccer team that shared ownership with the A’s.
Beane gave Gerrard data on the soccer club and asked him to crunch the numbers to find useful correlations. Gerrard reported to Beane, who would give him problems to work on, and club owner John Fisher—who would later buy a share of Celtic, Gerrard’s other favored club. The team itself wasn’t that interested in his findings, never mind that it kept missing the playoffs.
Still, for 3 years, Gerrard wrote reports on every game the ‘Quakes played and occasionally audited the entire league to find success factors. He developed a value-for-money rating for MLS players, a handy tool in a league with a very low salary cap. His match-rating system judged every San Jose player against an opponent after every game, breaking performance into attacking, defensive and general play and, where applicable, striking and goalkeeping.
In the late aughts, virtually nobody else was doing this kind of work. It was all many years ahead of its time. And as such, nobody quite knew what to make of it. After three years, the Earthquakes decided that Gerrard was too expensive.
But when Beane got involved with Dutch soccer club AZ Alkmaar, he brought Gerrard along with him. This time around, like at Saracens, his opinions were valued by an AZ front office that was American-inflected—the club’s general director was Dutch former New York Yankees prospect Robert Eenhoorn, a friend of Beane’s, and its technical director was long-time U.S. national teamer Earnie Stewart. The club punched far above its weight.
This time, too, little of the credit found its way to Gerrard. Publicly anyway. This was largely intentional. One Premier League CEO had explained to him early on in his involvement with the soccer business that no manager would ever tolerate an analyst or advisor who publicly took credit for his share of the success. Gerrard had heeded the advice.
That’s why virtually nothing has been written about him. It’s why he has fewer than 500 followers on Twitter. And why his blog never attracted a bigger audience.
Because, unlike in baseball or basketball, the fight for acceptance of analytics in soccer isn’t yet won. “Football was much more skeptical of analytics,” Gerrard says. “It saw itself as a much more complex game than baseball or cricket. People were wary of what data analytics could do.”
And while those running the game came around, many fans and pundits remain skeptical of analytics.
Someday, that battle will be won. And maybe Bill Gerrard will get his due.