John Henry emails Liverpool team still talking about transfer offers reminder for Richard Hughes

It’s been more than a decade since an email arrived in the inbox of John W Henry, an Ivy League economist, with a subject line that piqued the curiosity of Liverpool’s principal owner.

“How much is Luis Suarez worth to Liverpool?” it read, immediately inviting further assessment from a seemingly perplexed Henry. It was July 2013 and the Reds were embroiled in yet another saga involving their talismanic yet controversial No.7. Suarez had bitten Branislav Ivanovic just a few weeks earlier and had served just 40 per cent of a 10-match ban for sinking his teeth into the Chelsea player’s shoulder at Anfield.

Arsenal, aware of the apparent existence of a £40m release clause in the Liverpool striker’s terms, offered just £1 more than that figure, in an incendiary move that prompted Henry to make what remains the most memorable tweet by a Premier League club owner.

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“What do you think they’re smoking over there at the Emirates?” he replied, a clear message that Liverpool saw Arsenal’s offer as an insult. So much so, in fact, that the only response he deserved was ridicule in the most public and volatile of forums. The looting, inevitably, ensued.

The contents of the email to Reds owner Henry went into detail about how Liverpool should consider getting rid of their most influential player and top scorer because the team’s goal difference was apparently better when he was unavailable. A handful of analytical data was also provided to back up the bold and frankly contrary claim.

Twelve months later, however, having refused to heed the advice in the email, Liverpool were able to sign Suarez after 31 Premier League goals and one of the finest individual performances of any season at Anfield. The Reds’ 24-year wait for a league title might have been over had the irrepressible Uruguayan not missed six games early on due to his suspension, in fact.

It was an unwelcome sale, but his exit to Barcelona was sealed for a fee of between £65m and £75m, depending on the reports, meaning Liverpool made a profit margin of somewhere between £25-35m to keep Suarez for another year. Perhaps more importantly, it denied a rival the chance to capture the club’s best player from under their noses. That would have been unforgivable to many and was a lesson to those who believe that dice are always king.

“If Liverpool had listened to those analyses it would have been a massive negative,” former research director Ian Graham said at the 2021 StatsBomb conference. “A world-class season, (Suarez) was basically irreplaceable.”

That story is still told by those within the inner sanctum of AXA Training Centre. While the club has become known as one of the most innovative when it comes to the rise of data analytics in football over the past decade, there is also a need for this side of football to dovetail with more traditional methods, particularly when it comes to recruitment. Data models, while important, are not infallible, but every resource available is maximised to limit the danger of a misstep in the transfer market.

“Contrary to popular belief, we don’t sign players on ‘stats’, but the information provided by their research plays a crucial role in our decision-making,” former sporting director Michael Edwards wrote in his open letter on the club’s official website in 2021. “Whether it’s video, written reports, data, background checks or good old-fashioned viewing from the stands, it all goes into the big decision-making cauldron. And when you make a decision, all that information allows you to do is mitigate the risk you’re taking.”

With Edwards back at Fenway with a wider remit as FSG’s ‘CEO of Football’, Liverpool are being widely tipped to implement the same recruitment model that has allowed them to build a squad that has been the envy of world football under Jurgen Klopp in recent years.

That’s why it will be fascinating to see how Liverpool navigate the current transfer window with a new-look department in place. With Richard Hughes on board as the club’s new sporting director, the Scot is now working closely with head of recruitment Dave Fallows and chief scout Barry Hunter, the long-serving duo whose fingerprints are all over some of the best business of the last decade at Anfield.

Hughes, who arrived from Bournemouth at the start of last month, has also brought in Mark Burchill from the south coast, who was the Cherries’ chief scout, while David Woodfine returns to the club as assistant sporting director and Julian Ward and Pedro Marques are installed as FSG’s technical director and director of football development respectively. It means the club are able to tap into a wealth of knowledge, experience and contacts that did not exist just a few weeks ago.

Hughes arrives with deep knowledge of the Spanish and Italian markets, while Ward and Marques have extensive contacts in Portuguese football. Edwards’ Filofax reads like a who’s who of the European game, which includes many who have worked in the Red Bull stable in recent years. Arne Slot’s own experience in the Eredivisie means the Reds have a huge well of information at their fingertips across virtually all of Europe’s strongest leagues.

“They were instrumental in building a world-class scouting department,” Edwards said of Fallows and Hunter. “For those who don’t know Barry – and there can’t be many – he was a high-impact Northern Irish centre-back who has a contact book that reads like a who’s who of football. Dave is simply Google, I’ve never met anyone with a memory like his or an ability to think outside the box when innovative solutions are needed.”

Hunter and Fallows were in attendance on Friday as the club welcomed back some first-team players for the start of pre-season training, while Hughes was placed alongside Slot to symbolise what is a real change of direction at the club after almost a decade under Klopp.

While Slot talked about thin margins and small gains at his Friday press conference, the research department is more interested in making big strides. Incremental improvements are not enough, and marginal progress is not seen as real progress in that area of ​​the organization.

While the data models are applied to virtually every facet of the football club, from academy stats to fitness records, it is in recruitment that the research team really seems to shine. “It’s the only place where the action is in terms of money,” Graham revealed at the Stamford Bridge conference. “Recruitment is the only place where the action is in terms of performance. Analysts who don’t work in recruitment are literally wasting their time.”

While the cost of a player is often an ingredient that whets the appetite of football fans in general, those with an analytical eye argue that transfer fees are a poor indicator of a new signing’s potential success and there are countless variables that can hamper a player’s performance, from his personal life to injury concerns, tactical adjustments and more.

It’s not an exact science, which is why Liverpool have become so highly praised for their recruitment work in recent years, particularly when Edwards and Klopp were coming into their own. Under those two, the Reds went from top-four hopefuls to having a team that, at one point in 2020, were champions of England, Europe and the world.

The exhaustive, data-driven approach will continue with Will Spearman at the helm, having succeeded Graham last summer, and he and his department will look to provide invaluable insights alongside experienced bosses from Hunter, Fallows and now Hughes, who brings with him his own people and fresh ideas.

At Bournemouth, for example, Hughes divided the entire English professional pyramid between a scouting team of around half a dozen, meaning there was accountability if a player who was expected to be a transfer target slipped through.

There were 91 teams in total and as a result each scout was forced to know up to 15 clubs and their youth academies in great detail. It was a huge demand, but it’s a workload that could be reduced if a similar technique was used with a larger scouting team at Liverpool.

“How you recruit a player will clearly vary from club to club and everyone will have their own policy,” argues Hughes. “But I think the key to a successful signing is that the manager is an essential part of that recruitment process, that’s what we’ve always had, but it’s also true that that manager can’t be in multiple places at once.”

Liverpool’s new regime is still in its early days and while there is still plenty of work to be done to restructure the squad and secure longer contracts for key players, with Edwards on board and Hughes recruited by someone he calls “the best British sporting director to date”, the models that have served the club so well in recent years are likely to be given a shake-up in the months and years ahead.