A Liverpool-supporting data analyst who used to work for Tottenham is busy plotting his former employer's downfall in the Champions League final.

Ian Graham, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Cambridge, heads Liverpool's little known and even less publicised data team.

But an in depth and enormously insightful New York Times magazine article by Bruce Schoenfeld has highlighted the work undertaken by a team which includes an astrophysicist, Tim Waskett, a former junior chess champion in Dafydd Steele and a Harvard high-energy physics genius in Will Stearman - work which included recommendations to sign Mo Salah, Philippe Coutinho and Naby Keita.

For four years, from 2008 to 2012, Graham advised Tottenham but his work was largely ignored.

Schoenfeld writes: "The club was run by a series of managers who had little interest in his suggestions, which would have been true of nearly all the soccer managers at that time.

"Then Fenway bought Liverpool and began implementing its culture. That included hiring Graham to build a version of its baseball team’s research department.

"The reaction, almost uniformly, was scorn. ‘Laptop guys,’ ‘Don’t know the game’ — you’d hear that until just a few months ago,' says Barry Hunter, who runs Liverpool’s scouting department. “The ‘Moneyball’ thing was thrown at us a lot.”

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But Graham's research helped pinpoint the kind of players Liverpool should be signing.

"Graham recommended that Liverpool acquire Mo Salah, who was thriving in Italy," added Schoenfeld.

"Graham’s data suggested that Salah would pair especially well with Roberto Firmino, another of Liverpool’s strikers, who creates more expected goals from his passes than nearly anyone else in his position.

Salah sleeps on the floor of the plane to Marbella

"That turned out to be the case. During the season that followed, 2017-18, Salah turned those expected goals into real ones 'There’s this idea that Salah failed at Chelsea,' Graham said. 'I respectfully disagree.'

"Based on Graham’s calculations, Salah’s productivity at Chelsea was similar to how he played before coming to England, and after he left. And those 500 minutes he played for Chelsea constituted a tiny fraction of his career. 'They may be slight evidence against his quality,' Graham said, 'but they are offset by 20 times the data from thousands and thousands of minutes.' In the conventional notion that playing in England is different, Graham saw an opportunity — an inefficiency in the system."

Graham refuses to watch video of players in his analyses. “I don’t like video,” he said. “It biases you.”

Another of his finds was Naby Keita.

"Born in the West African nation Guinea, he was playing for the Austrian club Red Bull five years ago when Graham noticed the data he was generating; it was unlike any he had seen.

"At the time, Keita was a defensive midfielder, positioned in front of Salzburg’s defenders. Occasionally, defensive midfielders will evolve into central midfielders, who play farther forward. Keita did. Rarely, if ever, will they emerge as attacking midfielders, whose role is largely offensive. Keita did that too.

In Pictures: Liverpool train in Marbella

"Graham spent months building a model that calculates the chance each team had of scoring a goal before any given action - a pass, a missed shot, a slide tackle - and then what chance it had immediately after that action.

"Using his model, he can quantify how much each player affected his team’s chance of winning during the game. Inevitably, some of the players who come out best in the familiar statistics end up at the top of Graham’s list. But others end up at the bottom.

"Keita’s pass completion rate tends to be lower than that of some other elite midfielders. Graham’s figures, however, showed that Keita often tried passes that, if completed, would get the ball to a teammate in a position where he had a better than average chance of scoring.

"What scouts saw when they watched Keita was a versatile midfielder. What Graham saw on his laptop was a phenomenon.

"Here was someone continually working to move the ball into more advantageous positions, something even an attentive spectator probably wouldn’t notice unless told to look for it. Beginning in 2016, Graham recommended that Liverpool try to get him. Keita arrived at Liverpool last summer."

Graham's team also works on information which can be passed onto players during matches.

"Before each game, he and the three analysts who work under him compile a packet of information.

"By the time Klopp decides which of their insights are worth passing along to the team, the equations are long gone; the players are only dimly aware that some of the suggestions are rooted in doctorate-level mathematics. 'We know someone has spent hours behind closed doors figuring it out,' says the midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. 'But the manager doesn’t hit us with statistics and analytics. He just tells us what to do.'

"But Graham’s analytics team can only nudge the team’s outcomes in a positive direction incrementally, one recommendation at a time.

"And because Klopp also gets advice from more conventional sources, the tactics he chooses end up being a mix of the data-driven and the intuitive."

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It's a mix which is proving remarkably effective.

The full New York Magazine article can be found here :