West Ham’s push for a first European final in 47 years is about to come up against Mr Moneyball himself.
AZ Alkmaar will face the Hammers in the first leg of their Europa Conference League semi-final on Thursday. And according to Billy Beane, the Dutch team is “one of the best untold stories in sport”.
Beane – the real-life inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character in the movie Moneyball – should know. He has an association with AZ that dates back nearly a decade.
He pioneered the use of statistical data to turn the tables on the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team, with his methods since being applied to other baseball and football teams.
In 2020 he bought a 5% stake in AZ, having acted as an advisor to them for the previous five years.
And earlier this year, he gave a fascinating insight into his methods and his thoughts on AZ Alkmaar in a speech to the European Club Association’s general meeting in Budapest.
“I am proud to be associated with them”
Beane’s connection to AZ is through Robert Eenhoorn, a Dutchman who played four seasons in Major League Baseball. The couple became friends through the baseball circuit and when Eenhoorn was named AZ’s general manager in 2014, he asked Beane to help.
“I’m proud to be associated with them,” Beane said.
“The process and consistency they had is one of the best untold stories in sport. I’m biased but it’s amazing. It’s not just a great football story, it’s a great business story .”
AZ is used to operating on a lower budget – and with a smaller infrastructure – than its rivals, both at home and in Europe.
Take the example of Thursday’s opponents. In the summer of 2021, West Ham’s total turnover was £192.1m, compared to AZ’s £19m (€21.08m). West Ham’s wage bill was £128.45m, compared to AZ’s £14.13m (€16.2m). The London Stadium has a capacity of 62,500 compared to AZ’s AFAS Stadium, which holds 19,500.
Domestically, eight Dutch clubs have more ground than AZ, who are dwarfed by Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord.
Still, with three games left in the domestic campaign, AZ are well placed to secure their fifth Eredivisie top-four finish in six seasons. They need four points to secure European football again.
For Beane, it shows that the data analysis methods he used in baseball were transferable to other sports – something proven when he answered Eenhoorn’s call.
“The first thing Robert did was stop losing money,” he said. “Unfortunately, the first year is painful because you sell your best players to compensate for bad decisions made by people who were there before you.
“What little money he had, he went out and bought two players from the second division who were completely data-driven. One was Vincent Janssen, the other was Alireza Jahanbakhsh.”
The pair were brought in for less than £1million. Janssen was then sold to Tottenham, Jahanbakhsh to Brighton, for a total of £33million.
“The role of scouts will be redefined”
Beane first practiced his Moneyball concept with the Oakland Athletics baseball team.
In football, expected goals have now become a common assessment of a team’s performance, in addition to passes completed in the final third and standard shots on and off target.
Still, Beane is clear that data isn’t everything. He rejects the idea that it will drive traditional scouting out of the game.
“If you think of a scout in any sport, you give him an impossible job,” he said.
“We’re going to redefine them. Decision-making in business is all driven by information. There’s information I can’t get from data. I can’t know what kind of teammate he is. I can’t find out if he stays out all night, what kind of parents he has, what kind of student he was.
“I want the scouts to give me information that I can’t get. You can build that into your model.”
Beane hopes for breakthroughs at Brighton and Brentford
Brighton and Brentford are two examples of Premier League clubs that have added a strong data element to their recruitment policy and are capitalizing on it with performances well above their perceived position in the game.
However, Beane thinks it will take one of these clubs to shake up the elite for a true understanding of what data analytics can deliver across the game.
“The challenge is not to get the data, but to run it,” he said.
“With the data, you might find a 5-foot-7 guy, who’s underrated because of his height. You can see he’s not 6-foot-4 and your eyes stop you no matter what. say the data.
“Brentford are not winning anything. But think about where they were and what they are up against. Usually people talk about clubs having a great youth programme. They don’t even have a youth programme.
“When one of these clubs starts pushing the top four, five, six, people are going to change very quickly.”
