Moneyball theory is outdated he says. Talent is over-rated and coaches are over-stated.

Few coaches and owners want to hear what he says, and even among the growing sports analytics community, he has his doubters. But Darwin's prepared to put his money where his mouth is.

Success in sport, and just about any form of human co-operation is about the interactions, the relationships, understandings and levels of trust. They are invisible to the eye but something which Darwin says he can quantify.

"People have it wrong about how teams work and how people work," Darwin tells AFR Weekend.

Teamwork index

The son of an archeologist and a financial planner, Darwin has spent three years building Gain Line Analytics, a sports analytics firm.

It has got many calls right – foretelling barnstorming rise of the Western Bulldogs, 500-1 outsiders at the start of the 2015 AFL season, and picking the Super Rugby finalists – the Lions and the Hurricanes.

The predictions are derived from their "teamwork index", or TWI, a measure which reflects and weights the "cohesion" of a set of players based on their shared experiences over various time periods.


It's based on three measures – long-term cohesion, which is the time team members have spent playing together more than two years ago; medium-term cohesion – which is the time spent within two years and finally the in-season cohesion, which has the highest weighting.

"We are measuring the understanding between people – and the inputs to that understanding," he says.

Gain Line has taken Darwin and TWI co-founder Simon Strachan around the world to meet and consult with some of the biggest names in sport.

It's led them to the conclusion that money buys skill, but not success, that talent flourishes best in familiar environments and that greatness is built carefully and methodically.

"Governance is the greatest driver of success, but boards get seduced by skill and what they see in other clubs," he says.

'They are all uncohesive'

Darwin's own journey from scrums to spreadsheets is itself unique.

The ACT Brumbies forward played 28 times for Australia, before a terrifying neck injury in the 2003 World Cup semi-final triumph over the All Blacks ended his career.


Relatedly or not, Australian rugby has been in gradual decline since about that time. "Commercial decisions have hurt the Wallabies," he says, pointing to the addition of more franchises to the Super Rugby competition.

As each expansion team was added, the Wallabies suffered as cohesion between players (the underlying idea of the Team Work Index) weakened. It was the code that suffered.

"It went from the Wallabies making money to the Super Rugby clubs making money to them all losing money – because they are all uncohesive," he says.

"They didn't understand it would destroy the commercial output of the Wallabies – who got worse by 2 per cent a year even though the coaches got better."

His comments come at a dark time for Australian rugby union as more youngsters are turning away from the game, and the authorities are considering a retreat – by shelving an expansion team.

If Darwin is right, the entire southern hemisphere trio of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa face a threat from the northern nations, which are reducing the number of club teams. He called Ireland's shock win over the All Blacks late last year on live TV.

Self-perpetuating spiral

The resurgence of Welsh rugby coincided with coach Graham Henry's push to reduce their domestic league to five teams.


"One of them went broke so it went to four, and then 'whack' – they won the Six Nations with the best defence in the last 10 years – picked virtually entirely out of the Ospreys team."

Darwin clearly doesn't think much about the state of Australian rugby union and its ability to generate the next generation of world beaters.

But he's far more scathing of English football, where Gain Line has done extensive analysis and projects.

"The day English football died was when they allowed foreign owners. They just care about winning. The owner has never done sport before, so he just buys the best talent and fills the team with foreigners."

The TWI scores for English football clubs has been been plunging as teams spend million of pounds to buy Europe's top talents – in an attempt to emulate the big spending teams like Chelsea and Manchester City.

"These clubs are under the mean in terms of teamwork but way over in terms of money. So people see this and realise in order to win you have to spend money [to win]."

That has created a self-perpetuating, and expensive spiral with adverse consequences.

National consequences


One is that young players that have been developed in the youth academies of the big teams never get a start and are left to fester.

Another consequence is that as the big money signings fail to deliver, because cohesion is fallen, the coach is sacked, and a replacement comes in who just spends on more new, outside, players.

In English football's second division, coaches last on average less than a season – 0.8 of a season to be precise. And half the teams are losing money.

In Germany, it's the opposite. Their teams are profitable, they are breeding young players and they're champions of the world. Germany beat England 1-0 this week with the winning goal scored by a player who flopped in the English leagues.

In fact, it's now been more than 50 years since England beat Germany to win their last football World Cup.

England sunk to a new low last year when they got beaten in the European championships by minnows Iceland.

With a population of 332,529 people, an internet meme on the underdog triumph deduced that once women, the elderly, workers and even the fans in the stadium were accounted for, there were only 23 males of football playing age in the whole of Iceland.

But this is precisely why Iceland beat England – their juniors were mixing from an early age building their levels of cooperation and understanding.


England's football starlets meanwhile were stratified by the system.

"The only way they would play together was if they were part of the same system. England has got 98 professional clubs. Half the players are foreign so there is no opportunity to build cohesion through success."

England the "least cohesive team in international football," Darwin says and he made few friends when he told the heads of the English teams and the Football Association that they should "burn down" the mega St George training facility.

'That was our advantage'

Darwin credits his own path to international rugby on the limited pool of talent, first at the ACT Brumbies and then for Australia – "the last dog at the bowl so to speak".

"People think that greatness is predestined. And what I have experienced is it's not. There was a fundamental effort that was required on my behalf but the system I was part of was the driver of whether I had success or not," he says.

"When I first came into the Wallabies I could not get comfortable with the way Michael Foley was scrummaging and I was getting absolutely smashed – at that point the Wallabies could have dropped me.

"The reason that I played further for Australia is there was no one else around. That was our advantage – a lack of people and a lack of facilities."


Darwin took up coaching following his career ending injury with mixed success. Then he started crunching numbers around player performance and history

One day about three years ago as he built a database of players' previous clubs and their current contract status, he noticed something unusual.

"As I looked at the data I saw all the Crusaders come from the same high school. And we looked at the Highlanders, which imported seven All Blacks in 2013, and they came third last."

"Those [Highlanders] guys won a World Cup. Ma'a Nonu is an extraordinary player… with Conrad Smith - without him, not so much."

"Everyone is bagging Nonu and he goes to Japan, and he's terrible' and then he goes to Auckland and 'he's terrible' and then goes back to Wellington and he was performing again."

"And the whole time he is playing for the All Blacks and he continues to perform beautifully. So what is happening here?"

It was these mysteries that Darwin sought to solve.

'An immediate and lasting decline'


He got in contact with Harvard PhD student Pat Fergusson – who told him about a book called Chasing Stars. It studied the performance of Wall Street's star analysts as they made big-money moves between the banks.

Author Boris Groysberg's striking conclusion: "Star analysts who change firms suffer an immediate and lasting decline in performance."

At that point Darwin admits his obsessive personality took control, and the data skills he learnt as a coach led him to build a series formulas.

The non-sport underpinnings of his analysis convinced him the insights could apply beyond sport and he began looking at companies and boards of listed companies.

He briefly thought about using his technique to pick stocks, pointing out that Warren Buffett's approach is "he doesn't touch companies when he buys them".

"Whenever I talk about applying this to stocks, people get really condescending. They say – corporations are really more complex than sport," he says.

"I totally understand the ramifications are more complex but if you make everything else equal this will be the deciding factor. The other factors can come into play but they affect everyone. Trust is trust."

There are two particular examples that Darwin cites as irrefutable proof of his theory of cohesion.


One is Manchester United's famous Class of 92 – a group of unremarkable pimply teenagers that included David Beckham. As kids they got thumped by Leeds United in the FA Youth Cup.

"They were just a normal bunch of kids with great attitudes –that became was the most dominant side in the history of the English Premier League"

And Celtic's Lions of Lisbon – a team in which 14 out of the team of 15 were born within 10 miles of its home ground in Glasgow but became European football champions in 1967.

Darwin challenges anyone in the field of sports data to explain how a band of locals could beat a continent.

"Was there are some form of amazing footballer going around Glasgow rooting women in the 1940s?"

Darwin is also dismissive of a cottage industry of management gurus and leadership consultants that sell their services to sports teams to business organisation.

"There are people making money off this and its bullshit," he says.

His gripe is that the 'team-building' techniques they pedal, identify rather than create unity, and if they're used in an uncohesive team they do more harm than good.


"If people are together long enough they will build a collective outcome. Criminal organisations – the Mafia – they figure out what to do. They didn't invite teambuilders into their organisation to help them become more cohesive."

An unlikely shot

That brings us to the Moneyball movement that gave the data-nerds the power in lockerrooms around the world.

Michael Lewis' book (and subsequent film) on how the Oakland A's coach Billy Beane turned sporting convention on its head by using statistics to recruit talent, inspired sweeping changes across all sporting codes, including Australia.

It's a tale of the power of numbers, but also of a man who met enormous resistance by the sporting establishment.

"I don't want this to be an story about Moneyball being wrong. It was right for its time and its environment – baseball."

The Team Work Index is different, he argues: "If analytics, and GPS tracking and all that [deliver] a 1 per cent differential, we are saying 'cohesion' is 40 per cent."

Darwin refers to teams that have tried and failed to use the Moneyball approach – including a top-flight English football side.


"They almost went down to the third Division because their churn was enormous. That's the English Premier League at the moment – Churn!"

It was that churn that paved the way for the most unlikely of sporting triumphs. With the English football's cohesion in disarray because of the spending habits of the big clubs, Darwin said no EPL team had a TWI of above 40 per cent heading into the 2015-16 season.

And that gave 5000-1 outsiders Leicester City an unlikely shot at the title.

Strong consistency

In dissecting Leicester's title surge, we get some sense as to how Gain Line's closely guarded algorithms work.

Leicester made no changes to their defence from the eighth round when Arsenal beat them 5-2. By the end of the season, the defence had clicked and could not be breached.

"Teams figured out how they attacked and could defend against them, but they couldn't crack their defence. So the goal differential grew, even though their attack got worse," Darwin says.

"Their skill output wasn't good but the more they stayed together the more this accelerated. They just out-accelerated everyone in the competition."


That Leicester's team was left unchanged was particularly unusual in that coach Claudio Ranieri was nicknamed "Tinkerman" for constantly changing the line-up.

In a remarkable post-script Ranieri got the sack this season after a poor run.

And Darwin says it may indeed have been the senior players, not Ranieri or his team-building pizza nights, that influenced team selection. In his absence Leicester are winning again.

Gain Line has performed analysis going back to the 1960s and often takes into account decisions going back 30 years.

Long-term success

This, Darwin says, is because success on the field in 2017 can be a consequence of paths chosen decades earlier.

"We see that in [AFL team] Richmond – one decision in 1982 is still hurting them today."

That decision was the sacking of coach Tony Jewell after an injury-hit squad narrowly missed out on the finals, which led to a series of missteps; Darwin believes these have set the team back to this day.


There is no quick path to building the foundations of long-term success.

"You can't duplicate cohesion – it takes too long – it can only go up 5 per cent a year."

But the effort is worth it. The pay-offs run into perpetuity. Fans, brands and sustainable success will follow. The high-cohesion clubs are "those that people love with a passion".

"Brand engagement is really about peoples relationship with the players and the managers and the longer they are there the more you have those relationships.

"That is why the cohesive clubs are profitable, sustainable. The short term thinking clubs are unprofitable, unsustainable and unsuccessful."

He says he's not fan of any team, just an admirer of organisations. Among them are the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors basketball teams, and the New England Patriots football team.

Hawthorn, Geelong and the Swans in the AFL are high-cohesion units but he says St Kilda and Melbourne are improving and North Melbourne could spring a surprise.

In English football, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur are slowly on the march.


The fervour of fandom is not to be underestimated, especially in Melbourne where Darwin lives.

Darwin copped abuse he said for daring to suggest on a radio show that AFL side Collingwood were in for a long struggle.

"The problem with Collingwood is the coach is under enormous pressure to be successful."

"Collingwood is a philosophy and their philosophy is 'we buy the best'. That is how Richmond used to think about themselves – and that's not good particularly in a competition where there is parity."

Collingwood's intensely loyal following, much like Richmond's was built on the pride of past achievements.

It's analogous to the great English football club Liverpool, which dominated the game in the 70s and 80s gathering fans that are devoted to the club to this day.

The team has failed to win a league title since the early 90s yet on its visit to Australia in 2013, 100,000 filled the Melbourne Cricket Ground in an emotional friendly game.

"Part of it is they were a loyal club and loyal to their people and their fans."

"Loyalty in sport has not gone, it's just been misunderstood. In the good organisations, loyalty exists and in the great organisations, it is the foundation."