Billy Beane, Tottenham Hotspur fanatic and the central character in Moneyball, the most compelling American sports book in a generation, has limited experience of life among the royalty of English football but he has learned enough already to genuflect at the appropriate moments. "There are some coaches who can change the atmosphere just by walking into the room," he said, kicking back behind the desk from where he runs the Oakland Athletics baseball team. "And he is one of those people."

The Athletics' general manager is talking about Sir Alex Ferguson, whom he met at a conference in London in December. But he could be talking about himself. Last summer, an ownership group of which Beane is a partner announced it had bought the San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer and immediately the atmosphere around the executive offices of MLS changed. "People sat up and took notice," said someone who knows the league better than most. "The attitude around the league was that if Beane is getting involved then we better know how he operates and what that will mean for the rest of us. You can take it from me a lot of the executives have been told to read Moneyball."

When those executives read the book - written by the business journalist Michael Lewis - they will have found a fascinating exposé of how Beane took the struggling Athletics, a small team with a limited budget, and transformed them into contenders in a league dominated by the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, a cash-rich pair whose spending habits are comparable with Roman Abramovich's.

Beane performed his minor miracle by throwing out the prevailing baseball wisdom that said instinct and experience were paramount when it came to identifying talent. Instead, he embraced a pseudo-science called Sabermetrics, in which every piece of action on the baseball field could be broken down and quantified and resulting numbers - not the eyes and ears of a wizened old baseball scout - were the ultimate judge of a player's abilities.

Other members of the baseball fraternity had long placed some weight on statistics but Beane also surmised they were looking at the wrong statistics. For instance, instead of accepting the tradition that said a hitter be judged by his batting average (the number of hits divided by the number of times he batted) Beane looked at his "on base percentage"; a statistic that took account of not just a batter's ability to hit the ball but also his ability to make the pitcher miss the strike zone four times, thereby allowing the batter to walk to first base - a much less eye-catching talent than hitting the ball but one which achieved exactly the same result.

It all sounds very complicated to those who know little of baseball but Beane, who clearly spends a lot of time reading business manuals and cites the investment guru Warren Buffet rather than Babe Ruth as his all-time hero, has honed a wallet-sized explanation. "The idea is that we were seeking undervalued assets in an inefficient market," he said. "What we tried to do was find value in areas where most people weren't necessarily applying the right values. And we did that cost-effectively."

This mantra of cost-effectiveness might not hold much appeal at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge but there is a huge swathe of the football world, from the MLS to the middle of the Premier League, who face the same economic realities as Beane faced at the Athletics and would gladly embrace his philosophy if it meant they could have a better team for the same, or smaller, outlay.

It is early days but Beane may soon be in a position to help them do exactly that. "I first got interested in English soccer when I visited London in 2003 and what struck me was the passion and the emotion that surrounded the game," he said. "And it sparked my interest from a business standpoint because where there is emotion in sport there is emotional decisions."

Over the past five years Beane has developed an emotional attachment of his own, to Spurs. He watches English football on cable TV whenever he can, is an avid listener of the Guardian's weekly football podcast and has also forged some close friendships with leading figures in the English game, including Spurs' chief executive, Damien Comolli. He has also started working with Professor Bill Gerrard from Leeds Business School with a view to developing a system for evaluating football players based on statistics gathered during games. "Big teams like Manchester United can get the best players because they have got the resources but most clubs can't do business the Manchester United way and expect to survive, never mind compete. The trick is to find a way to compete, using metrics [statistics] and finding areas that have been neglected," he said.

The main difficulty the pair have faced is that while a sport such as baseball can be easily broken down into individual events - a pitch, a hit, a catch - football is a much more fluid game, which makes it more difficult to isolate cause and effect. Nevertheless, Beane seems determined. "Say you have an approach to signing players and you get it right 30% of the time and then you can discover a different approach that allows you to do the right thing 35% of the time, you have then created a 5% arbitrage. I don't know if we can do that for soccer but I want to find out."

Beane is reluctant to go into specific detail about the work he is doing with Gerrard, understandably so because the marketplace for statistical analysis of professional football has become crowded in recent years with the likes of ProZone and Opta competing for vast sums.

However it is surely no coincidence that before the start of the latest MLS season executives from the San Jose Earthquakes, the team partly owned by Beane, spent the night before the league's annual draft holed up in the offices of an Oakland-based company called Match Analysis, which has developed a system of statistically analysing football matches and backing up their assessment of individual players with video evidence.

"You don't need statistics to spot the real great players or the really bad ones. The trick is to take the players between those two extremes and identify which are the best ones," said the Match Analysis company president, Mark Brunkhart, a fervent believer that the methods Beane popularised in baseball will soon be widespread in football. "If all you do is buy the players that everyone else wants to buy then you will end up paying top dollar. But if you take Beane's approach - to use a disciplined statistical process to influence the selection of players who will bring the most value - then you are giving yourself the best chance of success. Who would not want to do that?" Who indeed.

Applied to football . . .

Four areas where Sabermetrics scientifically identify the best footballers

1. Number of touches

A measurement of how often a player is involved on the ball

What it reveals Player's fitness level, the number of times he gets into a position to receive the ball and team-mates' willingness to pass to him

2. Shot creation

The number of times a player participates in a possession leading to a shot (both on target and off)

Reveals The attacking effectiveness of a player, especially attacking midfielders and forwards. Measures ability to balance ball retention with creating scoring chances

3. Ability to retain the ball

A measurement of the probability that the next player who touches the ball will be a member of your team

Reveals Contribution of players who are less directly involved in attack

4. Balls won per 90 minutes

Measures defensive effectiveness

Reveals Attacking players' willingness to defend; defenders' ability to tackle, intercept passes and position themselves well