How a data ‘nerd' helped Liverpool to win the league

There are ways of introducing yourself to Jurgen Klopp.

- RICHARD JOLLY

Running through the defeats that took his Borussia Dortmund team to the foot of the Bundesliga, 18 months after they had been Champions League finalists, may seem among the more unorthodox. For Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former director of research, there was method to the apparent madness.

“I was nervous,” he said. “My guess was his personality was just for the cameras, for the media, but it is really not. He just doesn’t have a filter, so how he would speak to you is exactly the same as how he would speak to me or some guy on the streets he had met. He is very enthusiastic and emotionally engaged.” So Graham discovered, as he delved into the seemingly dry topic of the expected goals of various shots in matches of Klopp’s awful autumn of 2014.

“I think the first was against Mainz. His response was, ‘We fucking destroyed them in the game, did you see it?’ He clearly had the image of the chance they missed,” Graham recalled. “I could not believe it. ‘They score this goal eight times out of 10!’ Yeah, that’s exactly what expected goals says. The second game was, ‘Oh, fuck, we were so unlucky in that game, I cannot believe it.’”

And if it creates an image of an animated Klopp in a Melwood office, still as annoyed by losses a year later, it helped forge an understanding. “That was a really nice way in,” Graham said.

“It was a way for me to say, ‘Hey, Jurgen, we think you’re great and when [German newspaper] Bild was saying you were rubbish, we still thought you were great – you were just unlucky.’” Graham’s numbers showed that, even in a year when Dortmund finished seventh, they were still the second-best team in Germany.