The year after Holland reached the 2010 World Cup final, Dutch daily broadsheet NRC ran a satirical column called Tiki-Taka, featuring snatches of conversation between two of England’s leading soccer writers: David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange, the seminal book on Dutch soccer, and Simon Kuper, author of Soccernomics. Winner had recently seen Moneyball. “I love the idea that Billy Beane applied the principles of the Enlightenment – scepticism, free-thinking, intelligence – to sport,” said Winner. “Let’s get Billy in as Ajax’s technical director. He’ll put Dutch football straight back in the avant garde!”

Someone was listening to Winner, but it wasn’t Ajax. Last week, AZ Alkmaar confirmed that Beane would work in an official advisory capacity to the club, while retaining his position as general manager of the Oakland A’s.

In many ways, it’s a perfect fit. AZ are traditional overperformers in the Dutch top-flight. They won the league in 2009 when the coach was current Manchester United boss, Louis van Gaal. One of the ways AZ gained an advantage over rivals was their use of data analysis: Van Gaal is a firm believer in statistics, while hardly anyone else in Holland is (it’s why no-one has ever asked him properly about the subject). The lack of Dutch interest in Moneyball, the book or the film, sums that up: the increasing role of data in football may be the first tactical revolution that the Dutch, usually early-adopters, have missed.

“There is no real evidence that Dutch clubs are using analysis of on-pitch data to improve performance,” says Simon Gleave, head of analysis at Holland-based analytics company Infostrada Sports. “The Eredivisie is not awash with great innovation in this area. It is new and there’s an opportunity to get an edge.”

Beane is a self-confessed soccer nut who regularly gets up at 5am to watch Arsenal. He is a regular dinner companion of Liverpool owner John W Henry and has spent time with some of the best thinkers in football: Sir Alex Ferguson once drove from Manchester to London to meet him while he has talked about data and football for hours in the company of Arsene Wenger.

One of the things that has interested Beane in the past is why Holland, a tiny country of approximately 17 million people (a smaller population than four US states) is able to produce such a wealth of talented soccer players. It has reached the semi-finals of the last two World Cups, despite a tiny resource pool. It’s another reason why starting at AZ makes sense.

There will also be less attention on Beane than if he worked at a Premier League club, where performance analysts are par for the course (reigning champion Manchester City has over 10 of them). Unlike in England, Beane won’t have every potential mistake sneered at by a sceptical media.

“Billy has been crazy about soccer for a while, and this is a good compromise to dip his foot in the water,” says Kuper who, since writing Soccernomics, described as the soccer version of Moneyball, has got to know Beane. “I wouldn’t be amazed if he ends up working in football full-time one day.”

Kuper also understands the football analytics world, as he set up the Soccernomics consultancy after the success of the book (declaration of interest: I also work for Soccernomics). “Billy knows that he doesn’t know everything, and that he’s at the start of the process,” Kuper adds. “But he has the intelligence to give smaller clubs an edge, and help top clubs do things better as well.”

The obvious quick win for Beane would be to help AZ in dead-ball situations, such as corners or free-kicks. This is where soccer looks most like a baseball game, and the conversion rate from such opportunities is very low. Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, has not scored from his last 54 free-kicks. It is a long-held Soccernomics theory that direct free-kicks should often be passed to a team-mate, given that a wall of opponents provides a cluster of players that can quickly be bypassed.

There are other areas where Beane’s experience in baseball can make a difference: tracking, and improving, the decision-making ability of athletes is already used in US sports and is in its infancy in soccer. The number of high-intensity sprints in a game has increased by 41% in the last 10 years, and as the game gets faster, players need to make more decisions at speed. That needs training.

Soccer is an insular sport, and the idea that an outsider, even a successful one, can come in and improve results is often met with suspicion. Beane, however, thinks that an outsider can sometimes be the answer. His long-time right-hand man Farhan Zaidi, a Berkeley-educated economist, was never into baseball, but was last year appointed general manager of the LA Dodgers. “Farhan has no experience-bias when he comes to my office, so he is able to question the obvious,” Beane told The Guardian in an interview last year. “A guy like myself, who has been in the game his entire life, may not be able to spot when the emperor is not wearing any clothes.”

In soccer, the clearest example of this happened at English club Southampton in 2005, when Sir Clive Woodward, a World Cup-winning coach with England’s rugby union team – and data-obsessed – was appointed technical director. It was a tense season, mainly because there was little buy-in from the head coach Harry Redknapp, who (to put it kindly) is more intuitive. After Southampton lost one game 3-2 to Luton Town, Redknapp turned to rookie performance analyst Simon Wilson and said: “I’ll tell you what, next week, why don’t we get your computer to play against their computer and see who wins?” (These days, Wilson is manager of strategic performance at Manchester City and Redknapp is not working.)

That will not happen at AZ, where executive director Robert Eenhorn, a former New York Yankee, was behind Beane’s appointment. The club is collaborative, and the head coach does not wield too much power, unlike at English clubs (especially Arsenal).

“Billy knows there’s a big difference between how things work in baseball and how it might work in soccer,” Kuper concludes. “He is sophisticated and knows he won’t have the answers straightaway. But it will be fascinating to see what he does come up with.”

