Football's Magic Money Tree

[Chester Perry]

Stadium sponsors are not that prevalent at the top of British game (where TV money is so abundant and fans demand traditional names be upheld) and usually only feature when a new ground has been built (it is a different story in the lower reaches of the EFL where the income is crucial and used to get around SCMP by ambitious owners). The biggest of clubs famously came out and said it would not do it even though it commercialises everything else. But what could it be worth to Premier League clubs.

https://sponsorship.sportbusiness.com/n ... ts-report/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

This graphic encapsulates everything that the European clubs fear about the Premier League and much that the top six would like to do to the 14

https://twitter.com/SBI_Barcelona/statu ... 0661779456" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

First raised the prospect of PSG's owners buying an English club in post #826 - if this comes to fruition the self styled biggest club in the world will be even more insufferable (if that is possible)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sport ... Leeds.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT - love this from Nick Harris @SportingIntel

Leeds have had their share of dodgy / corrupt / clueless / potless / reckless owners in the past 2 decades (current owner is none of those). Yet already seeing concerns among *some* fans not wanting Qatar takeover, presumably on ethics grounds. Interesting.

EDIT 2 - Simon Chadwick adds his informed two-penneth

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 4610036736" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In post #1068 Nick Harris (@SportingIntel) suggested that even though the Championship play-offs are billed as a £170m game, they are likely to be worth even more - today he provides an suitable example of his claim.

https://twitter.com/sportingintel/statu ... 9435219969" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

What I have not seen mentioned yet with this whole Qatar/Leeds thing is that QSI own Bien media while Andrea Radeizzani owns Elevensports - between them they own a lot of European football rights - this could be more of a diplomatic deal to keep prices down - achieving a similar effect to the peace breakout between Sky and BT

[Chester Perry]

Vysyble have made a blog post ahead of the release of their "We are so rich it's unbelievable" report (that title - for the unaware - is an ironic comment on the popular notion of wealth in football in comparison to their beliefs in the far from universally popular Economic Profit theory)

https://vysyble.com/blog" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here is the vysyble's view of the match up for tomorrow's Championship play-off final

https://twitter.com/vysyble/status/1131953991510839296" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Shaun Harvey says that EFL clubs would be lost without their owners - but seemingly doing little at the moment to put regulations in place - just a small whine about the financial discrepancy in the PL

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48412747" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Khaldoon Al-Mubarak the Manchester City chairman maintains the punchy stance they have taken of late when defending their actions against the charges against them - in the Telegraph and likely to fall behind a paywall so transcribed

Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak says criticism from La Liga chief over club's spending is 'hypocritical' - Sam Dean - 26 May 2019 • 10:00pm

Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, the Manchester City chairman, has launched a furious defence of the club’s spending and derided the head of Spain’s top tier for his criticism of their business model.

Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, said last week that City are damaging European football by driving up player prices with their “state-sponsored” cash reserves.

Tebas said that City, who he described along with Paris St-Germain as being run off “one off petrol-money, one off gas”, are inflating the market with their transfer spending.

But Al-Mubarak said it is “hypocritical” for the Spanish league to criticise the spending of English clubs and described it as a “clear attack” on the Premier League.

“He talks about how we distorted the market? There is a hypocrisy in this statement that is ironic,” Al-Mubarak told City TV in his end-of-season interview. “Number one, let’s look at the Spanish league, the time of breaking records on player acquisitions. I mean, who started that?

“Let’s go back to the world records, Figo, Zidane. These huge jumps in these transfers, where did they happen? You have to look back at the history of La Liga, a league dominated by two clubs, and Mr Tebas should look back at the history of that league and distortion that has happened throughout the ages.

“And then you look back at transfers. In the top 10 transfers of all time, Manchester City has not a single player in that, not a single one.”

City are facing the looming threat of a ban from the Champions League after an investigation into an alleged £60 million deception. Yves Leterme, the chairman of chief investigator of Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body, said earlier this year that City faced “the heaviest punishment” if the allegations against them were proven.

The body’s adjudicatory chamber is considering its sentence for the club, who have insisted they are confident any sanctions will be overturned.

Al-Mubarak said he believes “quite comfortably” that City will prevail, provided the process is “judged on facts”. He said: “Am I uncomfortable? No. I respect regulatory bodies doing their job and any regulatory process that asks questions. We have to professionally respond which is what we have done.

“We are dealing with each of these entities as per the process, we have clear answers. I believe, quite comfortably, if the process is going to be judged on facts then unquestionably we will prevail. If it’s not about facts and it’s about other things, then it is a different conversation.”

On Tebas’ comments linking the wealth of City and PSG, Al-Mubarak added: “I think there’s something deeply wrong in bringing ethnicity into the conversation. This is just ugly. I think the way he is combining teams because of ethnicity. I find that very disturbing to be honest.”

The City chairman said there is a “certain level of jealousy” towards their success and insisted that attacks on the club should also be seen as attacks on the Premier League.

He added that those from other leagues are “bothered” by the dominance of English football in this season’s European competitions, with all four finalists in the Champions League and Europa League coming from England.

“Let’s not forget this is the best league in the world and if you look at this season, there is no better testament to this statement where the two European competitions, the Champions League and Europa League, the finals are being competed by English clubs.

“You have four Premier League teams in the two European finals and that’s a fact and that bothers a lot of people in many places. “We have the best league in the world, we have the most commercial league in the world, the most successful clubs in the world, economically, commercially in terms of global presence, and that is why this attack is not just on Manchester City, it is against this league. And I hope people start seeing that and start — I know people don’t want to defend Manchester City — but for God’s sake start defending this league.

“I will not accept for this club to be used as a diversionary tactic on poor investment decisions from other clubs. People make decisions, they’ve got to live by them. We’ve managed ourselves well and we will be judged by facts and facts alone.”

EDIT You can watch an Interview with him here (Warning 22mins long) - https://www.mancity.com/citytv/intervie ... w-part-one" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Claims that Newcastle have been sold to the man who failed to buy Liverpoo - Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed Al Nehayan, the cousin of Manchester City's mega-rich owner.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/f ... -16335734l" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... llion.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Following Steve Gibson's decision to litigate against Derby see post #1191 @ Kieron Maguire pokes at Boro's sorry financial record

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 8689982464" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

following post #1204 more on the financial implications of today's Championship play off final - this time from:

@SwissRamble

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 2424324096" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Daily Mail points out that a Villa win means former owner Randy Lerner gets some of his money back - £30m is a big hole to start a season with

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... sport.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

The Telegraph broke the story of Steve Gibson taking Derby to court see post #1191 and they have also given space to Mel Morris to respond - transcribed as likely to fall behind a paywall - this is likely to run for a while yet and deemingly in the public arena - Mel has got you there Steve

Mel Morris accuses Middlesbrough owner Steve Gibson of 'hypocrisy' - John Percy - 26 May 2019 • 10:00pm

Mel Morris has accused Middlesbrough owner Steve Gibson of “hypocrisy” after Derby’s Championship rivals announced their plans to sue them over alleged financial breaches.

As revealed by The Daily Telegraph on Saturday, Gibson has vowed to take legal action against Derby as he claims they have broken the Football League’s profitability and sustainability rules.

Gibson has been at war with Derby for months and is furious that Morris was allowed to secure a £14.6m profit in the club’s accounts after selling the Pride Park stadium and then leasing it back. He believes Morris has bypassed the rules by unfair means.

Derby were notified on Friday that Boro plan to sue them, days before their Championship play-off final against Aston Villa.

But Morris has hit back and insisted Derby are fully compliant, branding Gibson’s accusations as “bitching”.

Speaking for the first time in detail, Morris said: “I consider the timing of their action to be cynical, an open attempt to try and steal our focus ahead of a crucial game. Fortunately, we are motivated by such actions. I’ll call it out there because I think it needs calling out.

“The sale of fixed assets is allowed in the rules. In 2016 a club [Boro] got promoted who chose to sell the tax loss from the football club to the parent company, because that then makes it revenue which is a positive towards profit, to help remain within Financial Fair Play.

“When I raised that at a meeting in March, the representative from the club said it was allowed in the rules at that time. So is this! What is different? You set the mould and we copied your lead, now you’re bitching. He [Gibson] had the hypocrisy to do that.

“Even his own fans called it out on their forums and said ‘how dare we do this with our own history’. We discussed this issue again in April and there wasn’t a single vote against, including from their own club! They didn’t even vote for their own motion. It is absolutely hypocritical. I didn’t write the rules.

“They had the gall to say to us this is not right. Absolutely unbelievable. Those things to me are just insane."

[Claretmatt4]

Really interesting stuff Chester keep it coming!

[Chester Perry]

Following his interview with @TariqPanja in the New York Times (see post #1135 - thanks again edlass) Aleksander Ceferin has now been speaking to Der Spiegel

https://www.spiegel.de/international/eu ... ml#ref=rss" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Simon Chadwick comments on the role of face in the Middle East and links that to the Khaldoon Al-Murbarak interview see post #1208 but is it more of a comment on the Newcastle sale (post #1209)

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 6999258113" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I find it fascinating that what we used to call good manners and form (etiquette) and consequently (and to me sadly) rejected is very similar to that still in play across a vast swathe of the globe

[Chester Perry]

In post #1183 I pointed out the difference in TV revenues between the PL and the Scottish game - Here @ Kieran Maguire looks at the overall financial performance of the SPL -

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 1950974976" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The Scots hate it when SPL clubs are compared to EFL League one clubs but half of those teams are on top end League one revenues - Even Rangers are a bottom half Championship budget

[Chester Perry]

The potential buyers of Newcastle has confirmed they are in talks

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48420387" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT - more detail from Offthepitch.com

Newcastle takeover ‘terms agreed’ and due diligence completed - 27 May 2019 6:20 PM - Martin Hardy

Sheikh Khaled has already completed due diligence in Newcastle - a sign of the level of seriousness.
The Bin Zayed Group surprised Newcastle by releasing a statement on late afternoon on Monday.
Caution from club insiders after Staveley and Kenyon failures to buy out Mike Ashley.

The potential sale of Newcastle United to Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan moved a step closer today when his group issued a statement that the terms of the deal had been agreed.

The Bin Zayed Group, looking to complete a stunning, £350 million takeover of the Premier League side and end Mike Ashley’s 12 years in charge at St James’ Park, said they were bidding to ‘complete the transaction at the earliest opportunity.

There is still caution, however, within St James’ Park, although the club has officially admitted talks have begun for Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the cousin of Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour, to take control.

Recent high profile approaches to buy Newcastle from the Sports Direct owner Ashley, first by Amanda Staveley and then the former Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon, failed to materialise amidst much acrimony.

Due diligence finshed
Offthepitch.com can reveal due diligence has been completed by the Bin Zayed Group, a further sign of the level of seriousness of the latest attempted takeover.

Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan failed in an attempt to take control at Liverpool last season and those inside Newcastle insist there is still work to be done before any takeover is completed. It will also have to be agreed by Ashley, who bought the club for £133 million from the Hall and Shepherd families in 2007.

Those close to Ashley insist he will want guarantees that any new owners can move the club forward.

Statement from potential buyer
The Bin Zayed Group surprised Newcastle by releasing their statement on late afternoon on Monday.

It read: “In response to numerous reports in the world media this morning, we would like to comment as follows. We can confirm the representatives of his Highness Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan are in discussions with Mike Ashley and his team about the proposed acquisition of Newcastle United Football Club.

"We view it as an honour to have the opportunity to build on the strong support, history and tradition of the club. We have agreed terms and are working hard to complete the transaction at the earliest opportunity. Best Regards, Midhat Kidwai, Group Managing Director, Bin Zayed Group.”

Surprised Rafa Benitez
News of the potential takeover broke late on Sunday evening. The Newcastle manager Rafa Benitez, whose contract ends on June 30, was said to be surprised by the developments.

He has been locked in protracted talks about a possible contract extension and that too has still to reach a conclusion. He will ask for clarification from the club’s managing director, Lee Charnley.

Ashley’s reign has been a controversial one. He stated that he had to clear around £80 million of debt (£50 million of which was a mortgage repayment on the development of St James’ Park) following his surprise acquisition of the club in 2007.

He was initially popular and stood with supporters at away games. The relationship turned sour when he clashed with the then manager Kevin Keegan and lost a constructive dismissal brought against him and the club by Keegan. There was a hiring and then not rehiring of Alan Shearer and a controversial decision to attempt to rename St James’ Park.

[Chester Perry]

found this which is quite topical - on 2 fronts - Newcastle and football club valuation - from November 2017

https://vysyble.com/blog-25-november-2017" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

as usual I will add that vysyble's methods and approach is far from universally accepted

[Chester Perry]

The New Yorker has a peak into Football Leaks - This is a serious magazine and a very long article

How Football Leaks Is Exposing Corruption in European Soccer
While Rui Pinto sits in jail, his revelations are bringing down the sport’s most famous teams and players.
By Sam Knight 5:00 A.M.

The first person to receive an e-mail from the whistle-blowing organization Football Leaks was António Varela, a columnist at Record, one of Portugal’s three national sports newspapers. The message arrived early in the afternoon of September 29, 2015. Varela, a precise, watchful man in his early fifties, clicked on a link, which took him to a blog entry that had been created at 5:17 A.M. that day. “Welcome to Football Leaks,” it read, in Portuguese. “This project aims to show the hidden side of football. Unfortunately, the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say ‘enough.’ ” Below was a collection of previously unseen documents involving Sporting Lisbon, the eighteen-time winner of Portugal’s national league. “Contracts in Portuguese, contracts in English, contracts in French,” Varela told me recently, in Lisbon. “I had no doubts about it. They were real documents.”

European soccer, which reaches its annual climax this weekend, with the final of the Champions League, the game’s most prestigious club competition, is a wonder of the sporting world. Storied teams such as Liverpool and Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Juventus, rise and fall. Each year, the finest players and coaches conjure, in new forms, soccer’s essential, unthinking grace.

The business side of the sport, however, is more like a painting by Bruegel the Elder. Since 1955, the best teams from each country have played against one another, and that has given rise to a dense intermingling of tactics, feuds, and money. Money above all. “Money scores goals,” as the German saying goes. Unlike American sports, with their draft picks, salary caps, and collective-bargaining agreements, European soccer is a heedless, Darwinian affair. Spending rules are broken. Salaries are secrets. The best leagues are awash in Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds, and Chinese conglomerates. Rumors fly. Middlemen thrive. “Between clubs, it’s not only that we don’t trust each other,” a director of a top European club told me. “We betray each other constantly.” Last season, according to the accounting firm Deloitte, European soccer had revenues of twenty-eight billion dollars, about the same as Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Football League combined.

The first documents released by Football Leaks related to a controversial investment model known as third-party ownership. One of the ways that clubs make money is by buying and selling players. T.P.O., which originated in Latin America, allows external parties to buy a stake in promising young players, in the hope of profiting from a huge transfer deal one day. (In 2017, the Brazilian striker Neymar was sold by Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for around a quarter of a billion dollars.) Proponents of T.P.O. describe it as a form of lending, but many fans believe that it gives investors too much control over a club’s roster and the shape of players’ careers, by influencing when and where a player might be traded.

In Portugal, one of the most vehement critics of T.P.O. was Bruno de Carvalho, the president of Sporting Lisbon, who described it as “a monster coming to football.” FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, banned the practice in May, 2015. But the contracts that Varela read on Football Leaks showed that Sporting Lisbon had entered into a secret, T.P.O.-like arrangement with an Angolan club named Recreativo da Caála. “It was powerful,” Varela said. “People say one thing but they are doing something completely different.”

Varela’s story filled two pages of Record the following day. By the end of the week, Football Leaks had posted confidential contracts from F.C. Porto and Benfica, Portugal’s biggest teams; Olympique Marseilles, a leading French club; and F.C. Twente, of the Netherlands. Fans learned that Jorge Jesus, the coach of Sporting Lisbon, was earning five million euros a season—an extraordinary salary for the Portuguese league—while other files confirmed rumors and disclosed hidden investors. Together, they gave a sense of seeing the business of soccer for the first time.

Football Leaks was hosted by LiveJournal, a Russian blogging service, suggesting that it was the work of Russian hackers. But Varela was struck by the technical nature of the documents. He thought that a disaffected lawyer might be responsible. “They were framing the problems with too much accuracy,” Varela said. At the same time, he worried that the data might be stolen. In late November, after Football Leaks revealed that F.C. Twente had sold stakes in seven of its first-team players to a single investment fund, its president resigned. The club was fined a hundred and eighty thousand euros, and was banned from European competition for three years.

In mid-December, a spokesperson for Football Leaks, calling himself John, agreed to answer questions e-mailed by the Times. “People may think we are hackers, we are only regular computer users,” John said. He claimed that the organization had been given three hundred gigabytes of data by insiders, who were dismayed by soccer’s excesses, and that it was receiving more all the time. “The fight has been hard,” John wrote. “But we won’t stop.” The interview transfixed Rafael Buschmann, a thirty-three-year-old sports reporter at Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, who had covered organized crime and the financial side of soccer for ten years. “I was totally electrified to get a hand on this data,” he told me.

For all John’s bravado, it was clear that Football Leaks was having problems. The first blog was shut down by LiveJournal. So was a second. There were days when the documents were hard to access, or infected by malware, which suddenly filled the screen with pornography. Buschmann wrote to the site for weeks, but received no reply. On January 3, 2016, the group finally responded: “What is your problem with football? Kind regards, FL.” That evening, confidential contracts related to the image rights of Cristiano Ronaldo, at that time the star forward for Real Madrid, appeared on the blog.

Buschmann and John began exchanging messages every few hours. Six weeks later, Buschmann flew to Budapest to meet him. He expected to find a former senior employee of FIFA or UEFA, which administers European soccer, who had gone rogue. But, in a small hotel near the city center, he met Rui Pedro Gonçalves Pinto, a twenty-seven-year-old antique dealer with spiky hair, from northern Portugal. It was around 5 P.M. and Pinto hadn’t yet eaten breakfast. Real Madrid and A.S. Roma were playing that evening. Pinto took Buschmann to a Serbian restaurant to watch the game, and ordered a meat platter. They partied for two days. “I was nearly to death,” Buschmann told me. Before the reporter left, Pinto gave him two hard drives, containing eight hundred gigabytes of data. In the following three years, Pinto supplied Der Spiegel with four terabytes of confidential information, more than eighty-eight million documents—a leak almost twice the size of the Panama Papers and sixty times that of Edward Snowden’s.

The information provided by Pinto has led to the conviction of dozens of top soccer players for tax evasion. It has prompted the Las Vegas police department to investigate an allegation of rape against Ronaldo. It has also revealed likely rule-breaking by Manchester City, the all-conquering champions of the English game, and a plan by Europe’s leading teams to leave their national leagues and form their own competition. Since 2016, Der Spiegel has partnered with media organizations in thirteen European countries to publish hundreds of stories, rewriting much of what was known about the soccer business and changing it in the process. The scale of Football Leaks—its totalizing nature—has brought about a novel anxiety among the sport’s fixers and dealers. “People are going to think at least twice before they do something which is not a hundred per cent straight,” a Portuguese agent told me. Last November, in response to Der Spiegel’s stories about a breakaway league, fans in Germany mounted protests in stadiums across the country.

But Pinto is a confounding figure. With a high-school diploma and no formal I.T. training, he has managed to obtain, and interpret, information that European tax prosecutors and investigative journalists have sought for years. “For me, he is a genius,” Buschmann told me. “The question is, what is the other side of his personality?” As soon as Football Leaks appeared, it had the air of an illicit enterprise. For a long time, after Pinto was identified as the ringleader of the project, he denied his involvement and narrowly skirted arrest.

In January, Pinto was detained in Hungary, on charges of cyber crime and extortion. While he waited to be extradited to Portugal, where he faces up to ten years in prison, I spent two days talking to him in his apartment in Budapest. Pinto is now thirty, but his fresh face and adolescent haircut give him the look of a student who has missed his last deadline. Each day, I arrived at around 1 P.M., when Pinto had just got out of the shower. Many of his answers had an artful, knowing quality. At tense moments, his face broke into a disarming smile. “I really don’t consider myself as a hacker,” he told me.

Pinto prefers to talk about what he has uncovered, and to describe the evolution of European soccer from a varied and distinctive game to a corrupt playground for the international élite, in which only the richest, least scrupulous clubs can thrive. Pinto sees the future currently awaiting European soccer as bland and predictable. “It will be like plastic,” he said. “Everything would be like a plastic thing.” Pinto has studied the cases of celebrated leakers (his lawyer, William Bourdon, represented Snowden), and I often got the impression that he is trying to expand the definition of what a whistle-blower can be. In 2016, Buschmann asked Pinto where his information came from, and he replied, “Some of our sources do not realize that they are our sources.” One afternoon with me, Pinto mused out loud about why none of his insiders had gone public. He questioned whether Europe’s whistle-blowing protections were strong enough. I suggested that perhaps his sources hadn’t gone public because they didn’t exist and that Football Leaks was the result of Pinto’s hacking alone. “That would be a plot twist,” he said, flashing me his smile. “The biggest plot twist ever.”

Pinto grew up in a small, blue-tiled house on a hill in Vila Nova de Gaia, which faces Porto, Portugal’s second city, across the River Douro. On a dazzling morning in April, four of the eight newspapers on sale in town had stories about him on the front page. Pinto claims that he learned to read by listening to soccer commentators and matching the names that he heard against what was written on the players’ shirts. At the age of four, he began to stay up late on Sundays, to watch the highlights from the weekend’s games, and to keep notebooks, in which he would write down scores and players’ statistics.

“My father once said that football will destroy my life, because I was kind of a fanatic, actually,” he told me. Pinto’s father, Francisco, designed dress shoes at a local factory. His mother, Maria, looked after him and his sister, who is ten years older. Francisco dabbled in antiquities, and when Pinto was seven his father bought an Intel Pentium desktop computer with a dial-up Internet connection and installed it in the living room, to buy and sell ancient coins online. “EBay at that time was an extremely awesome opportunity,” Pinto recalled. “I learned everything sitting next to him.” Pinto became fascinated by the Phoenicians, and by the Iberian and Celtic tribes that settled in Portugal before the Romans came. He watched the History Channel and dreamed of becoming an archeologist.

When Pinto was eleven, his mother was given a diagnosis of advanced lymphoma. He visited her in the hospital every day after school. After she died, he resolved to tell no one. “I just pretended that nothing happened and that is all,” he said. He started skipping classes. He stayed up late, online. In school, Pinto was a quiet, distracted presence at the back of the class, who seemed to get his information from elsewhere. “It’s very, very difficult to characterize Rui,” Mario Falcão, Pinto’s high-school geography teacher, told me. “If he wanted it, he would probably be the best pupil from the class, but he was not.”

In 2004, when Pinto was fifteen, his team, F.C. Porto, won the Champions League, led by a brash, exacting coach named José Mourinho. Pinto was ecstatic. “He came very happy to class,” Falcão recalled. But most of the time he was not there. Pinto’s father often apologized for his son’s poor attendance. “What can a father do with a teen-ager who passes all the night with the computer?” Falcão said. Pinto digitized the records of the school library. When I asked Falcão whether he agreed with Pinto’s description of himself as a normal computer user, he said, “No,” and then repeated the word eight times.

Pinto enrolled at the University of Porto, to study history, in the fall of 2008. The following month, Banco Português de Negócios, a private bank, was nationalized amid allegations of fraud and money laundering, marking the start of the country’s financial crisis. Pinto became part of what is known as Portugal’s geração à rasca (“generation in trouble”). Unemployment among the young reached almost forty per cent. Hundreds of thousands of people emigrated. “These younger people, twenty-five years or less, have to tell themselves this is not going to work,” Filipe Carreira da Silva, a sociologist at the University of Lisbon, who has studied the economic crisis, told me. In 2009, the shoe factory where Francisco had worked went bankrupt. (He had taken early retirement, to concentrate on antique dealing.) In 2011, Portugal accepted a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. “I mostly lost my motivation to do anything,” Pinto said. “More and more events started to appear and to show everyone how doomed was Portugal.”

In 2013, Pinto took part in a study-abroad program in Budapest. “I am not a rich person, so I could not go to a city like London or Paris,” he told me. When he arrived at his student dorm—in a complex of large Soviet-era apartment buildings in the east of the city—he experienced a sense of release. Budapest was fun. He loved the light on the Danube and the cobbled streets. Mixing with students from across Europe, Pinto gained a broader sense of the Continent’s economic crisis. He read about attempts by the German tax authorities to trace money that had been moved offshore. When he considered Spain, Italy, and Greece, where painful austerity measures had led to widespread street protests and the rise of populist parties, Pinto was struck by the passivity of his home country. “If you look at the Portuguese people, most of the young people, they don’t want to get involved in any of this,” he said. “They accept everything so easily.”

In the fall, Pinto returned to Vila Nova de Gaia. He was in the sixth year of a three-year history degree. He helped his father with the antique dealing, but not much else was happening. On September 18th, Pinto had €31.67 in his checking account. The following day, he received a transfer of €34,627 from a client account at Caledonian Bank, a small private bank in the Cayman Islands. On Friday, October 11th, Pinto received a second windfall from Caledonian Bank—this time from an account belonging to NetJets, the private-jet-rental company—of €227,332.80. Two days later, he paid a cell-phone bill of fifteen euros.

The second transaction triggered an alert at the bank. The transfer was cancelled and the money was returned to NetJets. According to a criminal complaint, filed with Portuguese prosecutors the following week, someone had used a phishing attack to access Caledonian Bank’s backup e-mail servers. Equipped with usernames and passwords, the hacker had ordered the transfers to a Deutsche Bank account in Lisbon registered to Rui Pinto. The data from the first transaction were garbled, but the second transfer appeared to have been executed at 5:46 A.M. on October 10th, from a computer-science lab at the University of Porto.

Pinto hired a lawyer, Aníbal Pinto, who works out of a glass-walled office on the outskirts of town. (The two men are not related.) When I asked Rui why he had hacked into Caledonian Bank, he told me that he copied about a terabyte of data from the bank’s servers, which he intended to hand over to European tax investigators. “It was kind of interesting to find out what was going on,” he said. But he never followed through. Pinto’s account was frozen on November 6th. The police investigation was slow. The bank refused to name the victim of the first transaction and the lab at the university did not keep computer-use records for more than seven days. Pinto maintained that the second transfer was a banking error and that the money from the first one belonged to him.

During the summer of 2014, Aníbal Pinto reached a deal with Caledonian Bank, in which his client agreed to return half the first transaction and keep the rest, a total of €17,313.50. Pinto was never charged with a crime.

In February, 2015, Pinto moved to Hungary for good. “Portugal is a lovely country for a holiday,” he told me. “Just that.” His father now traded in old posters, photographs, railway maps, and flyers, mostly from the nineteenth century. Budapest was rich in ephemera from the industrial revolution and the early twentieth century, which the Pintos sold for ten or twenty euros per item online. In his first months in the city, Pinto went for interviews at a few call centers, where he could use his English and Portuguese.

But he was increasingly distracted by soccer. That spring, Swiss police, acting on instructions from the F.B.I., arrested nine FIFA officials at a meeting in Zurich, on corruption charges relating to the organization’s decision to award the upcoming soccer World Cups to Russia and Qatar. Pinto was also concerned about the fate of his home-town club. A week after F.C. Porto’s victory in the Champions League in 2004, Mourinho had left to manage Chelsea, a London club that the previous year had been bought by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. During the intervening decade, Porto had found it impossible to match the spending of the biggest clubs, in Germany, Spain, and England, or of trophy assets, like Paris Saint-Germain, which had been acquired by the Emir of Qatar.

Like other teams outside the gilded élite, Porto was taking ever-greater financial risks in order to compete. When Pinto was back in Vila Nova de Gaia, he had travelled to a few away matches with the team’s hard-core supporters’ club, the Super Dragons. At the games, he heard about a company named Doyen Sports Investments, backed by Kazakh money, which had been involved in several recent transfers. “Something was not O.K. with football,” Pinto said. “The fact that I got such a confirmation coming from so close to Porto make me decide to act.”

During the summer, Pinto acquired thousands of internal e-mails and contracts from Doyen. He would not tell me how. “What I can say about it is that it was surprising how confident these football entities are,” he said. “They think they are untouchable.” One transaction that Pinto pieced together—a loan deal between F.C. Porto and Real Madrid for a young Brazilian midfielder named Casemiro—appeared to include a seven-hundred-thousand-euro fee for the son of Porto’s club president. “I felt like they were stealing my football club,” Pinto told me. “And that no one in Portugal even cared about it.”

Doyen, which had offices in London and Malta, was run by Nélio Lucas, a charismatic Portuguese agent in his late thirties. Between 2011 and 2015, Doyen invested around three hundred million euros in T.P.O. deals. When Football Leaks went live, that fall, Doyen was the common thread in many of the stories. On October 3rd, four days after Pinto posted the first documents, Lucas received an e-mail in excellent Portuguese from someone calling himself Artem Lobuzov. (The name belongs to a Russian freestyle swimmer who competed in the 2012 Olympics.) Lobuzov threatened Lucas with more damaging disclosures. “The leak is worse than you can imagine,” he wrote. Lobuzov said that journalists were desperate for him to share what he had. “You certainly wouldn’t want that, right? But we can talk . . .”

Lucas reported the e-mail to the Portuguese police, who had already received a complaint about Football Leaks from Sporting Lisbon. In the following days, Lucas shared his conversation with Lobuzov with detectives from the country’s cyber-crime unit. On October 5th, Lobuzov said that a payment of between five hundred thousand and a million euros would be a “good donation” to make the material disappear. Lucas played along. Four days later, Lobuzov e-mailed to say that his lawyer was waiting for Lucas to make contact. The lawyer’s name was Aníbal Pinto.

A meeting was arranged for October 21st, near Lisbon. Aníbal Pinto flew south, from Porto. A driver picked him up from the airport and took him to a roadside café on the A5 highway, around ten miles west of the city. Pinto was uneasy. “Lawyers usually meet in their offices,” he told me. The location had been chosen by the police. A surveillance van was stationed out of sight. Pinto was joined by a lawyer for Doyen and by Lucas, who was wearing a wire. Two plainclothes officers sat at a nearby table.

The men discussed a possible contract between Doyen and Lobuzov, worth three hundred thousand euros over five years. Conscious that the police were listening in, Lucas floated the idea of Lobuzov coming to work for Doyen as an I.T. consultant. He asked Pinto about his client’s hacking abilities. “I immediately explained, this is a young Portuguese kid,” Pinto recalled. “Not a major criminal organization.” But Pinto described the Caledonian Bank case. “I already had something similar with him,” Pinto explained. Toward the end of the meeting, when Doyen’s lawyer was in the bathroom, Lucas offered Pinto a million euros to reveal his client’s name. Pinto refused.

Rui Pinto told me that he posed as Artem Lobuzov to check that the documents he was posting were real. “I wanted basically to see the reaction,” he said. “I know it was a naïve attitude.” In early November, Lobuzov announced that he was walking away. Lucas and Doyen ultimately came to suspect a different reason that Lobuzov had broken off contact. The company hired a Portuguese security firm to study its servers. The investigation showed that Doyen’s staff had been the victims of a phishing attack during the summer of 2015, in which they received replicas of Dropbox folders from contacts at various soccer clubs. On July 19th, Lucas had received a file named “Players,” supposedly from an official at F.C. Porto. When he attempted to open it, the file installed malware, which forwarded the contents of Doyen’s London servers to a Russian e-mail address. The hack raised the possibility that Lobuzov was able to read Doyen’s communications with the police in real time. (Pinto told me that this was not the case; he read the messages only months later.)

The end of 2015 was a heady, disorienting time for Pinto. Fresh documents were pouring into Football Leaks from law firms, clubs, and agents. There were thousands of PDFs and e-mails, which Pinto had no easy way of searching. He worked at night, combing through documents page by page. “It was extremely hard for me at that time to realize the extent of the wrongdoings,” he said.

Pinto sought to post at least two contracts every day. But he was often disappointed by the media coverage, which reduced Football Leaks to a source of gossip about famous players. On January 20, 2016, Pinto published the transfer contract of Gareth Bale, a Welsh winger who had moved to Real Madrid from Tottenham Hotspur, in the summer of 2013, for a little more than a hundred million euros. The contract was the seventy-seventh published by Football Leaks. It showed that Madrid had announced a fictitious, lower fee, in order not to offend Madrid’s star player, Ronaldo, who was acquired for ninety-four million euros. “It caused a kind of impact,” Pinto said. “But, yeah, it’s just nonsense.”

By the time Pinto met Buschmann, from Der Spiegel, a few weeks later, he was considering abandoning the project. “It was, like, messing up with my mind a bit,” he said. After the Lobuzov e-mails, Lucas had hired Marclay Associates, a London-based private intelligence firm, to unmask Football Leaks. By mentioning the bank hack, Aníbal Pinto had given the investigators a valuable clue. In March, 2016, a Web site called Football Leaks: Revealed briefly appeared, naming Rui Pinto as the source and publishing his photograph. The site was taken down, but Pinto was shaken. He finds Hungarian winters hard at the best of times. “It’s like an extra weight over my shoulders,” he told me. That spring, Pinto decided to pause Football Leaks for six months, to enable Der Spiegel to work through the data. But he would continue to look for secrets. “There was something in him,” Buschmann told me. “It was very powerful—to bring him to this point and not to let him stop.”

Since 2011, Der Spiegel has occupied an austere tower in Hamburg, overlooking the city’s former docks. The Football Leaks data are kept on the tenth floor, in an office labelled “Geräteraum,” or Equipment Room. On an overcast morning in March, I sat in the Geräteraum with Buschmann, his editor, Michael Wulzinger, and Nicola Naber, a researcher, who have been the principal custodians of Pinto’s data since the spring of 2016. They had tidied the office for my arrival, taking down diagrams and wall charts used to plot the latest wave of Football Leaks stories, which were published last November. Only a few pink Post-it notes remained on the glass wall next to Naber’s desk: “Write”; “Confront”; “Write”; “Confront.”

The first hard drives that Pinto gave to Buschmann contained around eighteen million files. Der Spiegel bought new servers and created a secure network to handle the data. “We went shopping,” Naber said. The magazine’s I.T. team converted PDFs and e-mails into searchable text, while the reporters worked on Intella, specialized software used by prosecutors in fraud cases, to make connections within the documents. When I visited, the Intella home screen showed some sixteen million e-mails, eighty-five thousand presentations, six hundred and eighty thousand spreadsheets, and a hundred and five thousand contacts in the Football Leaks database. I typed in the name Jordan Pickford, the current goalkeeper for the English national team. There were twenty-four hundred and twenty-four results. Mesut Özil, an ethereal German playmaker for Arsenal, the team that I support, generated eighty-six hundred and twenty-nine.

An early story that the Spiegel team worked on was about Ronaldo’s tax affairs. Ronaldo, a five-time winner of the Ballon d’Or, for the world’s best player, is a near-mythical figure in Portugal, and Pinto’s favorite player. In the spring of 2016, Pinto had discovered a company named Tollinn, in the British Virgin Islands, which Ronaldo might have been using to evade taxes that he owed in Spain. For weeks, Naber set about matching Ronaldo’s global assets—two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars in 2015—against his tax obligations and offshore income. It was all in the data. “You sit here thinking, What would I need to know?” Naber told me. “And then you think, I would need to know the raw income in Ireland. You look it up and it is there. It’s crazy.” (Last June, after pleading guilty to tax fraud in Madrid, Ronaldo was given a two-year suspended jail sentence and fined almost nineteen million euros.)

A few revelations leaped out. Wulzinger showed me the paperwork for the transfer of Paul Pogba, the midfielder for the World Cup-winning French national team, who moved from Juventus to Manchester United for a hundred and five million euros in the summer of 2016. The contracts promised forty-nine million euros to Pogba’s agent, Mino Raiola, who represented all three sides in the deal. More often, however, the Spiegel team chased tantalizing hints in a sea of information. They came to see the sport in another way. One evening in 2017, Buschmann was in a restaurant, watching Madrid’s two major clubs compete for a place in the Champions League final. At one point, his mind drifted to the various funds and middlemen implicated in the match. When Buschmann looked at the clock, twenty minutes had passed. “I have often had the feeling in the last months and years that I can’t watch the game like before,” he told me.

Pinto didn’t have that problem. During the summer of 2016, the European Championship was held in France. Pinto followed the Portuguese team, captained by Ronaldo, obsessively. “Most people, they don’t know how to separate things,” he told me. “Outside of the pitch, I don’t see Ronaldo the same way I see him inside the pitch.” Against the odds, Portugal reached the final, playing France, in Paris. Pinto watched the game in a pub in Budapest. Ronaldo left the field with a knee injury in the twenty-fifth minute, Portugal beat France in extra time, and Pinto burst into tears.

The reporters in the Geräteraum sought to observe clear boundaries with Pinto. There was a risk of inciting him to hack. “When I have a source where—maybe five or ten or fifty per cent—he could be a hacker, it is totally impossible for us to ask him about documents,” Buschmann said. But there were times when they needed him. In the fall of 2016, Der Spiegel and its partners in European Investigative Collaborations—the reporting consortium that has worked on Football Leaks—were approaching the deadline for their first set of stories. But there was a glitch: thousands of documents weren’t showing up in the Intella software. “Our I.T. team worked on this for weeks,” Buschmann said.

One weekend, Pinto flew to Hamburg. During the afternoon, he insisted that Buschmann take him to see Hamburger S.V., the local Bundesliga team, play a match. He drank a few beers. “For me, it was totally stressful,” Buschmann said. “The stadium was full of cameras.” In the evening, Buschmann took Pinto to the Geräteraum and showed him the problem. Pinto sat at a desk next to the window. It was the first time he had used Intella. Buschmann left the room to make coffee. “When I came back, he was ready,” Buschmann said. The problem was fixed.

That December, Der Spiegel and the E.I.C. published their first Football Leaks stories. The leading articles were about Ronaldo’s finances, Doyen’s aggressive T.P.O. deals, and a network of Argentine agents who used shell companies and straw men in the Netherlands to evade taxes. The first stories went live at nine on a Friday night. In Budapest, Pinto was madly scrolling Twitter. He messaged Buschmann, “This is the most important day of my life.”

In early 2017, Pinto came across a file that was labelled “Las Vegas.” “I was kind of curious about it,” he said. “Why ‘Las Vegas’? Let’s see what’s in here.” The file contained e-mails between U.S. and Portuguese lawyers about an alleged incident that had taken place at the Palms Place Hotel, in Las Vegas, on the night of June 12, 2009. “I got shocked,” Pinto told me. “It was a rape case.” The documents included a settlement agreement, signed on January 12, 2010, between a “Ms P” and “Mr D,” in which Ms P was paid three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. A confidential side letter identified Ms P as Kathryn Mayorga, a former model who was then working at an elementary school, and Mr D as Cristiano Ronaldo.
Pinto alerted Buschmann, who was at work on a book about Football Leaks with Wulzinger, and writing at home in Münster, a two-and-a-half-hour train ride from Hamburg. Clubs and companies implicated in the first wave of Spiegel stories had mostly reacted with silence, or with fury that the information had come to light. In late December, 2016, officials from Europe’s top leagues had written to FIFA, saying that a breach of the Transfer Matching System—the global clearing house for soccer transfers—was the only plausible source of the leaks. More private investigators were hired to find out where the information was coming from.

One evening, taking the subway in Hamburg, Buschmann realized that he was standing on the wrong platform. As he ran to make his train, a wiry older man with a passing resemblance to Clint Eastwood switched platforms, too. The doors closed before the man got on. A few days later, Buschmann noticed the same man, in a heavy gray coat, entering a bookstore in Münster. “I thought, O.K. Be cool. It is maybe something paranoid,” he told me. It was only when the man sat near him in a restaurant in Berlin, three hundred miles east, that he was sure he was being followed. The rest of the Spiegel team believed that their e-mails and movements were being tracked, too. “They knew more than we would like,” Wulzinger said. When Buschmann travelled to Las Vegas to investigate the rape allegation, he saw the man again, watching from a parked Volvo.

The defensive response to Der Spiegel’s stories made Pinto question the appetite of soccer’s regulators to clean up the game. In interviews as John, he invited FIFA and UEFA officials to make contact with Football Leaks, but no one did. Pinto sees most soccer journalists as deferential to the sport’s powerful broadcasters and sponsors. “They don’t want the people to see the truth,” he told me. Pinto sometimes refers to “real fans,” who will demand a financial and moral overhaul of the sport, as the intended audience for Football Leaks. But it is not clear whom he means by this, or whether such a group exists.

On April 14, 2017, Der Spiegel revealed the rape allegation against Ronaldo without naming Mayorga. The timing was propitious. Ronaldo, then at Real Madrid, was playing in a two-match Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich, the country’s biggest club. But the story gained little traction. GestiFute, a Portuguese soccer agency that represents Ronaldo and Mourinho, and whose president, Jorge Mendes, is one of the most powerful figures in the game, dismissed the article as “a piece of journalistic fiction.” Ronaldo scored two goals in the first game against Munich and a hat trick in the second. “Our story nearly was atomized,” Wulzinger said. “The public did not take notice of it.”

In Portugal, too, interest in Football Leaks had fallen away. After the initial stories about Sporting Lisbon and F.C. Porto, the platform had focussed mainly on the sport’s larger leagues. But, on a Tuesday afternoon that April, Francisco Marques, the communications director for F.C. Porto, was leaving a restaurant near Porto’s stadium when he received a message from an encrypted e-mail platform called Tutanota. It appeared to include an internal media-briefing document belonging to Benfica, F.C. Porto’s archrival. Marques asked the sender how he could be sure that it was real. “I think the attached images will suffice,” the source wrote, including screenshots of three Benfica officials’ in-boxes. One image had been taken in the previous half hour. A few days later, Marques received about twenty gigabytes of internal Benfica e-mails.

The rivalry between Benfica and F.C. Porto contains multitudes. It is the south against the north; the capital against the rest; cosmopolitan glamour against honest toil. Between them, the clubs have won the Portuguese league sixty-five times. In a country of ten million people, Benfica claims to have six million supporters, an assertion that gives rise to the idea that it is the most powerful institution in the country. Supporters of other clubs refer to Benfica as the Octopus and to the supposed shadowy nature of its influence in Portuguese society as Benfiquistão, or Benficastan. When I asked Marques whether he considered returning the e-mails, he laughed. “No,” he said. “This is a war.”

Marques has a show on Porto’s TV channel, and in the weeks that followed he began to read the Benfica e-mails aloud on the air. He excluded personal gossip and salacious material, and focussed on evidence of Benfica’s attempts to control the Portuguese game. In one instance, he shared secret briefings distributed to pro-Benfica commentators on Portuguese TV. In another, he read an e-mail correspondence referring to the “priests”—a group of eight referees who could be relied on to favor Benfica at decisive moments—which ended, “Now delete everything.” There was a PowerPoint presentation, from June, 2012, in which Benfica officials mapped out a five-year plan to “dominate the external environment” and increase the club’s power over Portugal’s politicians, journalists, and justice system. “Now it is public,” Marques said. “It is not fair. The competition is not fair.”

In early June, Marques handed the Benfica e-mails to the police. He had wondered whether they were connected to Football Leaks in some way. The source described himself as a Porto fan but a critic of the club’s president. On the afternoon of July 12th, Marques received a Tutanota e-mail with four attachments, concerning a deal that Benfica had struck on land taxes around its stadium, in Lisbon. Marques never heard from the source again.

On October 19th, the police raided Benfica’s Estádio da Luz, in northern Lisbon. Six weeks later, the leaks started again. This time, the source simply posted the club’s e-mails, unedited, on a blog titled O Mercado do Benfica, or the Benfica Market. “There were many dirty things,” Marques told me. The e-mails contained medical records and conversations between club officials and their wives, along with player contracts, tactical reports, and the club’s internal finances. A senior Benfica official compared the leaks to being under a terrorist attack. “We don’t know when it comes, the next one, where it comes from, or what sort of missile it is,” he said. “We don’t know anything.” The police raided the club’s offices twice in the early months of 2018. That March, the head of Benfica’s legal department, Paulo Gonçalves, was arrested on suspicion of bribing three judicial officials to provide him with updates on the case.

The Benfica scandal, the biggest in Portuguese soccer in recent decades, has driven the enmity between the clubs to new heights. Benfica is currently suing F.C. Porto, seeking seventeen million euros in damages. When Marques dropped me off at my hotel in Porto, he showed me his phone, which each day is deluged with messages from Benfica fans, promising to kill him. “It changed my life,” he said, not entirely unhappily. “Now I can’t go to the south.”

Spurred by the Benfica leaks, prosecutors looked at other recent sports-related crimes in Portugal. These included the Doyen extortion case against Artem Lobuzov, which had been dormant for more than two years. A handwritten note in a Portuguese police file, dated April 27, 2018, said that the Doyen complaint had been investigated alongside the alleged hacking of Sporting Lisbon, in the early days of Football Leaks, in the fall of 2015. “A suspect has been identified,” the note read. “Rui Pinto.”

At the time, Der Spiegel and the E.I.C. were preparing their second wave of Football Leaks articles. At the beginning of 2018, Pinto had given Buschmann more hard drives, which brought the number of documents in the Intella database to more than seventy million. The team in the Geräteraum decided to pursue two stories that had eluded European soccer journalists for years. The first was about how the most profligate clubs—namely, the Qatar-backed Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, which is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family—had been able to defy the sport’s spending rules. Since 2013, under a set of regulations known as Financial Fair Play, European clubs have had to balance their expenditures against their income from soccer-related sources in order to take part in UEFA competitions. But, for years, the teams with the wealthiest owners seemed to benefit from suspiciously generous sponsorship and marketing deals, which helped to keep their finances in line.

The Football Leaks data showed that, in the summer of 2012, P.S.G. signed a five-page sponsorship contract with the Qatar Tourism Authority for more than a billion euros. (A UEFA investigation later calculated its true market value to be around fifteen million.) Internal e-mails from Manchester City suggested that club officials were massaging deals and supplementing them with funds from Sheikh Mansour’s holding company, Abu Dhabi United Group. In the spring of 2013, Manchester City’s chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, e-mailed one of the club’s directors, Simon Pearce, to check that it was O.K. to alter a series of contracts, in order to comply with UEFA’s rules. “Of course,” Pearce replied. “We can do what we want.” (Manchester City denies all allegations that have originated from the Football Leaks data, saying, “The attempt to damage the club’s reputation is organized and clear.”)

Der Spiegel also pursued a story about a long-rumored plan for Europe’s biggest clubs to leave their national leagues and form a closed, N.F.L.-style competition covering the Continent. The idea of a soccer “Super League” has been around since the late nineteen-eighties. It is the logical commercial end point for a sport in which a handful of teams currently dominate their domestic markets, but in many countries it would break more than a century of sporting tradition. By searching the e-mails of senior officials at Europe’s leading clubs, the reporters at Der Spiegel discovered detailed discussions about the formation of a Super League in early 2016. That February, Bayern Munich—the most successful team in the history of German soccer—explored the legal implications of withdrawing from the Bundesliga. In the following months, executives from seven powerful clubs, including Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester United, and A.C. Milan, met twice to discuss potential formats for the breakaway league. One presentation was called “A Super League Scenario for Top European Football.”

A club director involved in the discussions told me that the plan was a negotiating ploy. “It was no secret,” he said. But he didn’t make the idea sound entirely abstract, either. When I asked whether a Super League in European soccer was inevitable one day, the director replied, “In a certain form, yes.” He weighed the pros and the cons of the format. “You have to be careful,” he conceded. “There is the fact you are killing the rest of football in Europe.”

In the summer of 2018, the rape allegation against Ronaldo gained fresh impetus. Encouraged by the widespread reporting of sexual misconduct by powerful men and the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims, Mayorga hired a new lawyer, Les Stovall, who wrote to Pinto through an anonymous e-mail address, asking if he had any other documents. Pinto unearthed multiple versions of a twenty-seven-page transcript of an apparent interview of Ronaldo, identified as X, conducted by a member of his legal team, Paulo Rendeiro, about the alleged attack. Answers in the earliest version of the document appeared to corroborate Mayorga’s account:

X: She said that she didn’t want to, but she made herself available. The whole time it was rough, I turned her onto her side, and it was fast. Maybe she got some bruises when I grabbed her. . . . She didn’t want to “give it to me,” instead she jerked me off. I don’t know any more exactly what she said when she was jerking me off. But she kept saying no. “Don’t do it”—“I’m not like the others.” I apologized afterward.

In the transcript, Mayorga was identified as Ms C:

Question: Did Ms C ever raise her voice, scream, or yell?

X: She said no and stop several times.

Pinto sent the transcript to Stovall, who forwarded it, with other information from Football Leaks, to the Las Vegas police on August 25th last year. In September, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Mayorga accused Ronaldo of raping her, and the Las Vegas police opened an investigation. Ronaldo has protested his innocence throughout. In an Instagram video posted two days after the story appeared, he described the reporting as fake news. “It’s normal,” Ronaldo said. “They want to be famous to say my name. But it’s part of the job. I’m happy man, and all good.”

On September 13th last year, two weeks before Mayorga’s interview appeared, Sábado, a Portuguese magazine, named Pinto as the source behind Football Leaks and the prime suspect in the release of the Benfica e-mails. Pinto’s face was on the cover. The Portuguese media harried him, and his Facebook page rapidly filled with threats from Benfica fans. Pinto had worried about being publicly identified, and about how best to defend himself, for some time. In 2017, prosecutors from France’s Parquet National Financier, an anti-corruption unit, had made contact with Football Leaks, inviting John to share his data. (France has some of the strongest whistle-blowing protections in Europe.) The following summer, Pinto approached William Bourdon, who specializes in whistle-blower cases, and asked him to broker a meeting.

In late November, Pinto travelled to Paris to meet with the P.N.F. “I spoke as a witness,” he recalled. “Basically said what kind of data I have, how I got the data, and that is all.” Pinto told me that he also met with officers from France’s witness-protection program, who gave him a secure phone with which to contact them in case of an emergency. “They considered that my situation was quite alarming,” he said. After he returned to Budapest, Pinto resolved to move to France in February. “All this situation was a bit stressful,” he told me. Pinto confided in Buschmann. “He said often to me, ‘I will have a family, I will have kids,’ ” Buschmann said. “ ‘I will have a normal life.’ ”

In the middle of January, 2019, Pinto’s father and his stepmother, Elizabeth, visited him. “They suspected that something was going on,” Pinto said. When they arrived at Pinto’s apartment, on a quiet, residential street in Budapest’s seventh district, they couldn’t open their luggage. Their suitcases had combination locks, which seemed to have been tampered with. The following evening, Pinto and his father went to the supermarket. When they returned to Pinto’s street, there were police cars and men in uniform. “I realized, O.K., they are coming for me,” he said. Upstairs, the police seized Pinto’s laptop, three cell phones—including the one belonging to the French authorities—three USB sticks, and fourteen hard drives, containing twenty-nine terabytes of data. Pinto was taken to a detention center, where he asked to call his lawyer. The police said no. “They said, ‘This is not an American movie,’ ” Pinto recalled.

Pinto was released under house arrest. When I visited him, in late February, he wore a Levi’s T-shirt, jeans, and an electronic tag on his left ankle. His parents had stayed in Hungary, but his apartment felt spare, as if he had recently moved in. There was a double bed in the living room, where his parents slept, a table with a brown synthetic tablecloth, and some small, gaudy landscapes on the walls. The police had taken his DVR.
Pinto was spending most of his time thinking about his case. According to the arrest warrant issued by the Portuguese authorities, he was being held on six charges, relating to the alleged blackmailing of Doyen and the hacking of Sporting Lisbon contracts in the fall of 2015. The warrant made no mention of the Benfica e-mails and the subsequent embarrassment for Portugal’s biggest soccer club, which Pinto was convinced were the real reasons for his arrest. “Politicians, prosecutors—even police detectives—they lose their focus when it comes to football,” he said.

When I asked Pinto if he had anything to do with the Benfica scandal, he denied it, in Pintoesque fashion: “I’ve never seen a statement from the police or the Portuguese authorities linking me to this.” He worried that his gargantuan data set, of which Der Spiegel possesses only around fourteen per cent, might be lost or destroyed if it were handed over to the Portuguese police. He was also afraid of being attacked by Benfica’s most notorious supporters, a group called the No Name Boys. I asked Pinto if he was aware of the irony of being killed by soccer fans. “Yeah,” he replied. “I’m aware of that.”

The following week, Pinto had an extradition hearing at Budapest’s central courthouse. I arrived early, with Buschmann. The corridor outside the courtroom filled with news crews and lawyers. Bourdon was there, wearing a long green overcoat. Pinto is five feet six inches tall. When he appeared, led by two thickset Hungarian police officers, he looked like a student on a Eurail trip gone wrong. “He is a cat,” Bourdon murmured. “A poor, fragile cat.” Extraditions between E.U. member states are almost always routine affairs. When the judge ordered that Pinto and his data be handed over to the Portuguese authorities, Bourdon slapped his rollerboard suitcase in frustration. After the hearing, Pinto sat on a bench in the corridor in handcuffs and gave an impromptu news conference to some Portuguese journalists. “I did this for the public,” he said. “I did this for all football fans.” The journalists wanted more, but Pinto seemed to dry up. “What else can I say?” he added. “I have to go to a Hungarian prison.”

Pinto was extradited to Lisbon on March 21st. Three days before he was handed over to the Portuguese police, Belgian prosecutors came to Budapest and copied all his data. Pinto’s hard drives, which are heavily encrypted, are what he hopes will eventually secure his freedom. “It is one thing to copy them—it is another thing to have access to them,” a member of his legal team told me. In February, prosecutors from Eurojust, the E.U.’s judicial-coöperation unit, met in Brussels to discuss how to analyze the Football Leaks data in a systematic way. Jean-Yves Lourgouilloux, of the P.N.F., described Pinto as a whistle-blower and confirmed that the French authorities had looked at twelve million documents so far. The following month, UEFA announced that, as a result of the Spiegel coverage, it was investigating Manchester City, the newly crowned English Premier League champions, for breaking its financial rules. The club faces a potential ban from the Champions League. “You don’t have to convince me that Pinto is at risk of one day being convicted as a hacker and for stealing information. It’s true, there is a risk. But Snowden did the same,” Bourdon told me. “There is a principle of proportionality—of the violation of the law compared to the services rendered. Pinto came from nowhere and he opened the eyes of millions and millions of citizens.”

In Portugal, Pinto’s return was front-page news. When I was in Lisbon last month, an impersonator was playing him on Portuguese late-night TV. The name of the character was Rui Pinto, the Hacker. In the last months of the Benfica Market, which has gone quiet since Pinto’s arrest, the blog took on a broader, anarchic quality, posting e-mails from one of Portugal’s largest law firms, and also secret judicial documents. Although Pinto denies any involvement, he is widely seen as a figure of general, youthful rebellion in a country where other forms of activism have been absent. “Rui is literally one in a million,” Carreira da Silva, the sociologist, told me. He is also a hero to everyone who hates Benfica. During my conversation with Marques, F.C. Porto’s communications director, we discussed the greatest recent figures in Portuguese soccer: Mendes, the agent; Mourinho; Ronaldo. “Now we have four,” Marques said. “Football after Rui Pinto is better.”

While Pinto awaits his trial, he is being held at a prison next to police headquarters, in central Lisbon. Francisco Teixeira da Mota, Pinto’s Portuguese lawyer, told me that he expected prosecutors to try to add the theft of Benfica’s e-mails to the case. “That is a risk that can happen at any moment,” he said. Pinto is being kept away from the other prisoners, for his own protection, but when he is allowed to exercise or to venture outside his cell he sometimes hears them yell his name, in what he takes to be encouragement. To pass the time, he has been reading a book about espionage during the Second World War. I once asked Pinto whether he was an idealist, and he surprised me by seeming not to know the word. We were in his apartment in Budapest. He opened a laptop and looked it up. “A person who is guided more by ideals than by practical considerations,” Pinto read from the screen. “Utopian, visionary, wishful thinker, fantasist, fantasizer, romantic, romanticist, dreamer.” It was enough. “Maybe this word applies to me. Maybe, yes.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 3, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Final Whistle.”

[Chester Perry]

Quite a bit of questioning over whether the announced bid for Newcastle is likely to go through - some questioning if he is another Bassini type figure

https://twitter.com/AdamParsons1/status ... 4028345349" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and this from the Telegraph

Newcastle United sceptical that bid from Sheikh Khaled will lead to sale - Luke Edwards - 27 May 2019 • 10:36pm

Newcastle United remain privately sceptical that an offer from Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed Al Nehayan will lead to the sale of the club as Mike Ashley looks to bring an end to his 12-year reign at St James’ Park.

Although there was an initial wave of excitement on Tyneside after the Bin Zyayed Group released a statement confirming they had “agreed terms” the optimism was gradually replaced with familiar misgivings. This will be the fifth time in 11 years that Newcastle have supposedly been on the verge of being sold by Ashley, but on each occasion the talks have collapsed and there are growing fears this will follow suit.

Telegraph Sport understands that although a price has been agreed with the Al Nehayan, the United Arab Emirates based businessman is yet to provide proof of funds with sources indicating there is a long way to go before a deal is concluded.

Manager Rafa Benítez has also been told it is business as usual as no takeover is imminent. Other interested parties are also adamant claims Newcastle are on the verge being sold to Al Nehayan are completely false. It is also understood that a report stating that papers have been submitted to the Premier League to ratify the takeover are also inaccurate.

The statement said: “We can confirm the representatives of his Highness Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan are in discussions with Mike Ashley and his team about the proposed acquisition of Newcastle United Football Club.

“We view it as an honour to have the opportunity to build on the strong support, history and tradition of the club.

“We have agreed terms and are working hard to complete the transaction at the earliest opportunity.

“Best Regards, Midhat Kidwai, Group Managing Director, Bin Zayed Group."

According to reports in the Middle East, Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed Al Nehayan who is a distant relative of Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour has also promised to keep manager Rafa Benítez and provide money to improve the squad in this summer’s transfer window.

However, sources closer to St James’ Park insist nothing has been finalised and privately, senior figures, including managing director Lee Charnley and manager Benítez, were as surprised as anyone to learn the club was on the verge of being sold on Sunday night and have been trying to seek clarification from Ashley before they make any official comment.

That will inevitably raise fears that this is just another false dawn, with all the claims and counter claims reminiscent of so many previous unsuccessful takeover attempts at St James’ Park.

Ashley has tried and failed to sell Newcastle several times since he bought it for around £140m from former owners Sir John Hall and Freddie Shepherd in 2007. Some have even questioned whether he has ever been serious about selling given his inability to find a buyer.

“The first aborted attempt came in 2008, shortly after Kevin Keegan had resigned as manager in protest at boardroom interference in recruitment.
Ashley also put the club on the market for just £100m in the summer of 2009, following relegation to the Championship. On both occasions, there were strong reports a sale was close to being agreed, only for the talks to collapse and Ashley to remain at the helm.

The club was put up for sale again two years ago and once more deals were supposedly in place for him to sell. Financer Amanda Staveley claimed she was close to completing a takeover in December 2017 only for Ashley to dismiss her attempt as a “complete waste of time” a few weeks later.
More recently, former Manchester United and Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon announced he was trying to buy the club, but although he was given access to the date room for due diligence before Christmas, a bid never materialised.

Al Nehayan has previously failed in a bid to buy Liverpool, with the Merseyside club pulling out of talks in August last year when he was unable to provide proof of funds or pay a £25m deposit.

Crucially, this time, the Sheikh is not the only interested party who has been locked in negotiations with Ashley, which increases the chances of a successful takeover taking place.

Telegraph Sport has been aware of talks taking place under strict rules of secrecy for some time. Interestingly, Ashley insisted he would walk away from any deal if details were leaked before an agreement was in place, as he was tired of people using the club to boost their profile.

Indeed, sources close to those talks have reacted with scepticism to claims Al Nehayan has beat them to it, with two well-placed figures dismissing claims Ashley has sold the club as “bulls---t” and “complete b-------.”

EDIT and this https://twitter.com/CraigHope_DM/status ... 8904705025" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In post #1170 Royboyclaret was trying to decipher how the newly confirmed overseas PL TV deal would breakdown for clubs - Here the Telegraph shares it's interpretation along with wondering how the big six can be kept satisfied in the future now the rest gave them some concessions - As ever behind a paywall

Cartel power of 'Big Six' will only increase after grab for overseas rights money - Jason Burt - Chief Football Correspondent

Now we have a figure for the increase in Premier League international broadcast deals: £1 billion. Speaking at a conference last week Richard Masters, the interim chief executive, confirmed there should be a 30 per cent rise in the rights for the next three seasons to 2022, meaning the value will go up from £3.2bn to £4.2bn. Happy days.

And what a relief for the Premier League and its 20 clubs especially when there has been a drop in the value of the UK domestic rights, down around £400 million (to about £5bn) for the same period. An informed debate is underway, discussing whether broadcasting income has not just peaked but is actually going down the other side of the vertiginous hill.

On balance then, the fees are still going up – a rise of around nine per cent as the overseas increase more than compensates for the decrease in domestic rights. And those overseas rights need to keep going up because, according to Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, there will be a 20 per cent drop in the kind of prices Sky and BT Sport are willing to pay when the next round of negotiations come around.

The Premier League knew this would happen. In an interview with Telegraph Sport three years ago the then chief executive Richard Scudamore claimed the league was “nowhere near” saturation point but only because there were so many overseas markets – India and China, in particular – to exploit.

The prediction was that the overseas rights would grow and, within a decade, outstrip the value of domestic rights and that appears to be happening even more quickly. It also needed to happen to keep the clubs or, rather, the so-called ‘Big Six’ of Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal and Manchester United, happy and on board.

But at what price? What also happened last year, in one of Scudamore’s last acts before stepping down, is hugely significant and bears out predictions that the financial gap between the ‘Big Six’ and the rest of the Premier League is simply going to widen. The power of the ‘Big Six’ is growing to an unprecedented, cartel-like level.

A new agreement was struck which changed the formula over how the overseas money is distributed. The six will get a bigger piece of the pie. Until now it has been shared equally. For example, this year Huddersfield Town earned the same as Manchester City from international TV rights: £43.2m.

With the domestic rights the money was always divided part equally, part according to where a team finishes and part according to how many times they are shown on TV, which, naturally, favoured the six clubs. So, overall, City earned £151m and Huddersfield £96.6m with the biggest difference of course made up with the merit money (ie the gap between finishing first and 20th). City earned £38.4m and Huddersfield just £1.9m in merit fees.

That is changing. The international rights will soon no longer be shared equally, as has happened in every previous deal, which means where a team finishes in the league will become a factor – capped at 1.8 times more than the lowest-earning club. The gap will grow and grow. Over a three-year cycle it will equate to another £90m - £30m per season – more for the champions.

The argument from the ‘Big Six’ is that, with overseas rights even more than domestic rights, they drive the interest in the Premier League and, clearly, they have a point. Asian audiences do not get up early to watch Huddersfield or Fulham but are enthralled by Liverpool or Tottenham.

That is indisputable but it is also against the essence of the Premier League whose distribution model, already skewed towards the ‘Big Six’, at least has had a greater element of democracy about it than other leagues and hence played to that competitiveness as its biggest selling point: the notion that anyone can beat anyone on their day.

Those days are already not only fewer than ever but with this new model are going to become rarer still. The chances of any team breaking into the top six, without catastrophic failure by one of the big boys, is extremely remote.

The Premier League will become increasingly dependent upon overseas rights and a tipping point will soon be reached, maybe even in the next round of negotiations for 2022-25, when they outstrip the deals to show games domestically, which raises the spectre of – what happens next? How can the ‘Big Six’ be satisfied?

How overseas TV cash is carved up in new model

Under the new distribution model, Premier League clubs will be guaranteed £40.7million from overseas TV rights, with the remaining income given out according to their league position for the first time. This is how the surplus cash will be carved up:

1 - £23.8m
2 - £22.61m
3 - £21.42m
4 - £19.04m
5 - £17.85m
6 - £16.66m
7 - £20.23m
8 - £15.47m
9 - £14.28m
10 - £13.09m
11 - £11.9m
12 - £10.71m
13 - £9.52m
14 - £8.33m
15 - £7.14m
16 - £5.95m
17 - £4.76m
18 - £3.57m
19 - £2.38m
20 - £1.19m

Everything appears to be under debate – a restructuring of the Champions League, the threat of a breakaway European Super League – which would inevitably mean those big clubs becoming ever more powerful and dominant in their national leagues.

Warnings have been sounded that, for example, limiting access to the Champions League by guaranteeing places in it for clubs already involved – which is one of the proposals put forward by Uefa – would be anti-competitive. But then the problem with changing the formula of how the Premier League distributes its money means it is heading that way anyway.

Of course England is fortunate that it has a ‘Big Six’ – not a big one or two. City have become the first club to retain the Premier League in a season when Juventus won the Italian title for the eighth year in a row, it is seven years for Bayern Munich in Germany, Paris Saint-Germain won in France for the sixth time in seven years and Barcelona have won four of the last five Spanish titles.

But the ‘Big Six’ are breaking away. Not literally but effectively and the consequences of changing the way in which the money is distributed are beginning to dawn. The chasm will grow not shrink. “The key thing about the Premier League is that you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Masters also said last week. The reality is that we do.

Ferguson makes his point
It is hard not to read significance into Sir Alex Ferguson’s praise of Bayern Munich. Speaking ahead of Manchester United’s Legends match, a 1999 Champions League final reunion, Ferguson told MUTV: “Bayern is a club run in the proper foundation of it. Former players run it really, Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. They run the club in the right way and they are always winning the league in Germany. They’re a great club.”

Although clearly not as undiplomatic as the forthright tirade recently issued against the United players by lifelong fan Geoffrey Boycott, also broadcast on the club’s in-house TV station, it felt far more resonant given who said it and that it invited such an obvious comparison. A comparison that Ferguson did not have to spell out.

[Vegas Claret]

Hopefully the super league will mean the big teams **** off into it and have to ditch their domestic leagues

[Chester Perry]

Hopefully the super league will mean the big teams **** off into it and have to ditch their domestic leagues

I cannot believe these clubs would ditch that level of income or FIFA/UEFA would allow.

It could only happen if they took all the TV monies for the top leagues in Europe away with them leaving the remanents of the PL with the equivalent of the current EFL deal. They would also have to make up for the additional home games they have lost out on for all those mid week nights they have currently.

One thing for sure, any super League breakaway would never have to games kicking off at the same time as the money they want would mean broadcasters would demand screening every game live, meaning games more or less every day during the season.

[Chester Perry]

@Swiss Ramble takes a timely look at Derby's finances as they are to spend another year in the Championship - meanwhile we wonder what chicanery will Mel come up with to avoid FFP sanctions in the coming accounts?

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 1115725824" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[LeadBelly]

Their stadium had a book value of £41 million but Mel bought it off them for £81 million; the "extra" £40 saving their bacon somewhat. I wonder what rent he's charging them?
Perhaps Mel will buy Keogh this year for £50 million and lease him back for ten bob a week.

[Chester Perry]

There is no wriggle room left for Morris now at Derby - the Sevco has the staff costs, the Stadium has been sold, amortisation is reduced by residual values. All this is why he put £23m of new share capital in last summer and will have to do something similar again this summer if he wants another push. That is £200m they are into him for, and why it is up for sale. #lovingtheclubtoitsdeath

[Chester Perry]

I regularly refer to Simon Chadwick (@Prof_Chadwick) now he and his primary research partner Dr Paul Widdup have been given a column at Offthepitch.com - here is their first offering - a look towards this weeks European finals and how they are played by teams who are English in name only

https://offthepitch.com/a/europes-club- ... sh-affairs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

an article looking at Chinese sponsorship in football

http://www.ejinsight.com/20190528-footb ... n-mystery/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Following on from Simon Chadwick's comments on the Qatar/Leeds situation (see post #1203) and his suspicion Roma was the more likely target for a complete take over following a falling out between the Qatari's and the French on a number of levels today he posted this to further support his theory.


https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 4742831104" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

KPMG has launched it's top 32 Football club valuation report

https://www.footballbenchmark.com/docum ... 19_WEB.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

9 Premier League clubs and not including us

EDIT Compare those valuations to these https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 8884926465" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; which use the Markham multivariate model I have referred to before https://www.sportingintelligence.com/wp ... -paper.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and then to the approach outlined by vysyble outlined in post #1218

[Chester Perry]

David Conn analyses Arsenal's finances ahead of the final in Baku and suggests that missing out on Champions League (again) is not too big of an issue (the £35m drop in revenue not withstanding) - should be good news for Man Utd (together with the 25% wage reduction)

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... are_btn_tw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

speaking of Baku - our friends Prof Simon Chadwick and Dr Paul Widdup have this article outlining the complex web behind the choice for the Europa League Final

https://www.policyforum.net/bakus-foot-in-the-league/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[ecc]

Hi Chester,

Thank you very much for providing all these details. I didn't know about the site (Off The Pitch). It looks pretty good.

Cheers.

[Chester Perry]

Hi Chester,

Thank you very much for providing all these details. I didn't know about the site (Off The Pitch). It looks pretty good.

Cheers.

it continues to expand and definitely getting some good contributors on board - it is a shame a lot falls behind a paywall - usually there is 30mins to an hour of initial posting where the article is free to read (like the Telegraph) before it does so - so I catch when I can

[Chester Perry]

An article in the Independent about how Champs League finalists Liverpool and Spurs are among the best run clubs in football

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foo ... 32816.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It is fascinating stuff, this analytics and I am still waiting for the day when my free view for this apparently excellent if lengthy article
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/maga ... 4KY7QwQP4c" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; - if anyone wants to transcribe I would be grateful

[Vegas Claret]

This is a good thread CP !

[Chester Perry]

post #1208 included an interview with Khaldoon Al-Mubarak here we have the concluding part

https://www.mancity.com/citytv/intervie ... w-part-two" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Whatever you think of the club and it's owners, you have to recognise the strategy, quality of leadership and sense of purpose

[Falcon]

New York Times Article on analytics transcribed for you here:

Jürgen Klopp was in his third week as Liverpool’s manager, in November 2015, when the team’s director of research, Ian Graham, arrived at his office carrying computer printouts. Graham wanted to show Klopp, whom he hadn’t yet met, what his work could do. Then he hoped to persuade Klopp to actually use it.

Graham spread out his papers on the table in front of him. He began talking about a game that Borussia Dortmund, the German club that Klopp coached before joining Liverpool, had played the previous season. He noted that Dortmund had numerous chances against the lightly regarded Mainz, a smaller club that would end up finishing in 11th place. Yet Klopp’s team lost, 2-0. Graham was starting to explain what his printouts showed when Klopp’s face lit up. “Ah, you saw that game,” he said. “It was crazy. We killed them. You saw it!”

Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was about to fire, Graham fed a numerical rendering of every attempted pass, shot and tackle by Dortmund’s players during Klopp’s tenure into a mathematical model he had constructed. Then he evaluated each of Dortmund’s games based on how his calculations assessed the players’ performances that day. The difference was striking. Dortmund had finished seventh during Klopp’s last season at the club, but the model determined that it should have finished second. Graham’s conclusion was that the disappointing season had nothing to do with Klopp, though his reputation had suffered because of it. He just happened to be coaching one of the unluckiest teams in recent history.

In that game against Mainz, the charts showed, Dortmund took 19 shots compared with 10 by its opponent. It controlled play nearly two-thirds of the time. It advanced the ball into the offensive zone a total of 85 times, allowing Mainz to do the same just 55 times. It worked the ball into Mainz’s penalty area on an impressive 36 occasions; Mainz managed only 17. But Dortmund lost because of two fluky errors. In the 70th minute, Dortmund missed a penalty shot. Four minutes later, it mistakenly scored in its own goal. Dortmund had played a better game than Mainz by almost any measure — except the score.

In soccer, pure chance can influence outcomes to a much greater extent than in other sports. Goals are relatively rare, fewer than three per game in England’s Premier League. So whether a ball ricochets into the net or misses it by a few inches has, on average, far more of an effect upon the final result than whether, say, a potential home run in baseball lands fair or foul or an N.F.L. running back grinds out a first down. Graham brought up another game to Klopp, against Hannover a month later. The statistics were weighted even more heavily in Dortmund’s favor: 18 shots to seven, 55 balls into the box compared with 13, 11 successful crosses from the wing to three. “You lost, 1-0,” he said. “But you created double the chances —”

Klopp practically shouted. “Did you see that game?”

“No, no, it’s just ...”

“We killed them! I’ve never seen anything like it. We should have won. Ah, you saw that!”

Graham had not seen that game, either. In fact, he told Klopp, he hadn’t seen any of Dortmund’s games that season, neither live nor on video. He hadn’t needed to, unless he wanted to experience one of the breathtaking acts of athleticism that can occur in soccer, or the drama of two teams fighting to assert their will upon the other — the reasons, in other words, that most fans watch sports. To understand what happened, all he needed was his data.

Analytics has famously influenced the tactics in professional baseball and basketball in recent years. Ultimately, it may have just as
great an impact on soccer, which traditionally hasn’t relied on statistics to figure out much of anything. Graham, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Cambridge, built his own database to track the progress of more than 100,000 players from around the world. By recommending which of them Liverpool should try to acquire, and then how the new arrivals should be used, he has helped the club, once soccer’s most glamorous and successful, return to the cusp of glory.


Two Sundays ago, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in the sport’s history. It lost only one of its 38 games in the Premier League, yet it finished second. Manchester City, the defending champion, edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of its league games since January. (In the Premier League, as elsewhere in soccer, a victory counts as three points in the standings and a draw counts as one; Liverpool set the record for the most points in a season, 97, by a runner-up.) In an added fillip for North American fans, Liverpool is owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, while Manchester City has a business relationship with the New York Yankees.

At the same time as it was trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in England, Liverpool was competing against the top teams from other countries in Europe’s Champions League. In the semifinals of that tournament this month, it overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team. On June 1, it will face a Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final.

More than other major clubs, Liverpool incorporates data analysis into the decisions it makes, from the corporate to the tactical. How much that has contributed to its recent performance is itself hard to measure. But whatever the outcome of the final, the club’s ascent has already started to make number-crunching acceptable, even fashionable, in England and beyond. As more clubs contemplate employing analysts without soccer-playing backgrounds to try to gain a competitive edge, Liverpool’s season has served as something of a referendum on the practice.



Klopp analyzed no data at Dortmund. In this, he was like most managers. He was consumed by coaching his young team on the field. But by the time Graham left his office that morning in 2015, Klopp’s epiphany was complete. He was convinced that Graham, despite having watched none of Dortmund’s games, appreciated the unusually bad fortune that had befallen the team almost as keenly as if he’d been coaching it himself. Later, Klopp learned that without Graham’s analysis of that season, which was only one aspect of as thorough an investigative process as any soccer club had undertaken to replace a manager, he never would have been hired. “The department there in the back of the building?” he said recently, referring to Graham and his staff. “They’re the reason I’m here.”

In the 79th minute of the second game of the Champions League semifinal, in early May, a ball was deflected out of bounds for a Liverpool corner kick. Trent Alexander-Arnold, a 20-year-old fullback, was about to move toward the middle of the field to let a Liverpool teammate take it. But as he started to walk away, Alexander-Arnold noticed that Barcelona’s players seemed distracted. Only a few were looking his way. “It was just one of those moments,” he said, “when you see the opportunity.” Alexander-Arnold took four steps, a feint as if heading back to his position. Suddenly he reversed direction, ran to the ball and thumped it toward Barcelona’s penalty area.

By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the semifinal contest back on even terms. The team scored three unanswered goals, matching the three that Barcelona scored at home in the first game of the home-and-away series. Before the series started, Barcelona were the strong favorite to advance to the final, and the outcome of the first game validated that assessment. After that, someone who wanted to win $100 betting on Barcelona needed to risk $1,800 to do it.



For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool was dominant. It won 10 titles in England’s top division. It won the European Cup, which preceded the Champions League, four times in eight years. Liverpool F.C. was so successful that for a time it figured as one of England’s most visible exports. Fan clubs were organized throughout Europe, and in places that hadn’t previously followed the sport, such as Australia and across America.

English clubs in those days were owned by ruddy-faced businessmen
who had kicked the ball around as boys and made fortunes with stone quarries or parking lots. That changed when the richest men in the world began buying them up. In 1997, the Egyptian businessman and department store owner Mohamed al-Fayed took control of Fulham, a London team in the second division, and led its promotion into the Premier League; in 2003, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who had made his fortune in oil, aluminum and steel, bought Chelsea; in 2007, Stan Kroenke, the husband of a Wal-Mart heir, began accumulating shares of Arsenal. That same year, the family that had controlled Liverpool for half a century sold out to two American businessmen, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Hicks owned baseball’s Texas Rangers and hockey’s Dallas Stars; Gillett parlayed an interest in ski resorts into a Nascar team and the N.H.L.’s Montreal Canadiens. Liverpool itself remained a faded port of half a million inhabitants, only marginally less dilapidated than the gritty, gray-toned, postwar city that had produced the Beatles. Its dockside economy attracted far fewer major corporations than London or even Manchester. And it turned out that Gillett and Hicks had little money left for soccer. Within a few years, Liverpool was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and struggling on the field.

In October 2010, through what was essentially a bankruptcy proceeding, Hicks and Gillett were forced to accept a $480 million bid from New England Sports Ventures. John Henry, the former commodities trader and investment manager who served as the majority shareholder, grew up in small-town Missouri and Arkansas. One of his boyhood passions was A.P.B.A. baseball, a dice game in which the actual performances of major leaguers are translated into cards representing each player; Stan Musial was as likely to hit a triple on Henry’s bedroom floor as he was for the St. Louis Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park. Henry became wealthy from an algorithm he devised that predicted fluctuations in the soybean market. The same sort of analysis is knit into his company’s DNA. Almost no decision there, from hiring executives to where the Red Sox shortstop should play for each batter, is made without it.


At the time that Henry’s group, now known as Fenway Sports Group, acquired Liverpool, the club hadn’t finished atop its league in two decades. Since Fenway couldn’t outspend sheikhs and oligarchs, it needed to be smart. In its first six seasons under Fenway’s ownership, Liverpool finished above sixth place only once. It qualified for the Champions League only one of those years, and was eliminated before the quarterfinals. Its reliance on numbers, many soccer people believed, was undermining the football men who should have been making its decisions. The main obstacle Klopp would need to overcome if he hoped to succeed at Liverpool, the English newspaper The Independent wrote, “will be the club’s deep attachment to the theory that players’ statistics — analytics — can provide most of the answers.”

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. In preparation for the Champions League semifinal, he appeared to focus on how the club’s unusually quick defenders could pressure Barcelona’s forwards, intercepting passes and trying to convert them into instant counterattacks. The plan worked, mostly. In the opening minutes of the first game, Barcelona’s players seemed flustered. But as often happens in soccer, a tactical advantage didn’t translate into an immediate goal. Instead, Luis Suarez, a former Liverpool player, scored for Barcelona.

A 1-0 Liverpool loss would have set up a dramatic second game at Anfield, the atmospheric stadium that has been the club’s home since the 19th century. But late in the match, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, one of soccer’s greats, scored twice more. The last goal was a free kick that curled around a wall of defenders and just past the outstretched hand of Liverpool’s goalkeeper. It seemed to impart the message that no amount of analytical preparation could overcome the transcendent skill of such a player. “In these moments,” Klopp said after the game, “he is unstoppable.”


In the Champions League, goals scored away from home carry additional weight if the score is tied after both games. That meant if Barcelona scored one goal at Anfield, Liverpool would need five to move on. If that wasn’t daunting enough, two of Liverpool’s best players, Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino, were hurt and wouldn’t play. Still, when Divock Origi, the substitute for Salah, scored in the game’s seventh minute, the crowd came alive. Then Liverpool scored two more times early in the second half. That set up Alexander-Arnold’s deceptive corner.

Before taking the kick, he caught Origi’s eye. Then, as Alexander-Arnold raced back to the corner, Origi switched his position. The ball reached him on two hops, and he redirected it into the left side of the net. It was a goal that could never have been scripted, or predicted by any calculations. “We had nothing to do with the fourth goal,” Graham emailed me after the game. “I’m always wary of being assigned credit when none is due.”

The great Brazilian player Pelé once called soccer “the beautiful game.” He didn’t coin the phrase, but after he said it, the description stuck. Fluid, at times balletic, soccer isn’t composed of discrete events, like baseball and American football, and there aren’t dozens of scoring plays to dissect, as in basketball. Rather, much of what happens seems impossible to quantify. Talent is often judged exclusively on aesthetics. If you look like a good player, the feeling is, you probably are.

Most sports use a range of statistics to assess teams and players. Until recently, nobody in soccer cared about much beyond who scored the goals. Now we get updates on how many shots different players have taken, what percentage of the time each team has controlled the ball, and plenty of other metrics. But almost none of that seems to provide a clearer explanation of what’s happening on the field, including which team ends up winning.



For example, a ball deflected by a defensive player over the end line gives the opposition a corner kick — a goal-scoring opportunity. In theory, corners are good, and getting more of them than your opponent would seemingly indicate a successful strategy. Except that corners are more helpful to some teams than others. Teams with attackers who are skilled at redirecting centering passes work to create them, but teams with finishers who have the talent to elude defenders often prefer to take their chances in open play. Those teams don’t try to create corners, and they aren’t especially pleased when they happen.

Or consider time of possession. Teams rarely score without the ball, so having it more than the opponent sounds desirable. Yet some teams don’t want possession of the ball. If you don’t have it, you can’t give it up deep in your own end, a member of Iceland’s defensive-minded national team once told me. Iceland’s ballhandlers aren’t especially adept, so its coaches prioritize keeping the ball far from its goal. In 2016, Iceland advanced to the quarterfinals of the European championships, beating countries many times its size, including England — and tying the tournament’s eventual champion, Portugal. In none of those games did it come close to controlling the ball even half the time.



For these sorts of reasons, soccer was assumed to be unsuited to the analytical approach described in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book “Moneyball,” about how the Oakland A’s baseball team found an advantage by evaluating players using different criteria than everyone else. Soccer seemed impossible to quantify. Much of the game involves probing and assessing, moving the ball from player to player while waiting for an opening. And then the only goal might come from a winger who has done little else — after, say, a faulty clearance by a team that otherwise has been entirely dominant. “Our game is unpredictable,” says Sam Allardyce, who has managed 12 clubs over nearly three decades before Everton fired him last year. “Too unpredictable to make decisions on stats. We’re not talking about baseball or American football here.”

Chelsea created the Premier League’s first analytics department in 2008. Arsenal later bought a statistical analysis company, StatDNA. But the managers of those clubs didn’t see an advantage in applying data to the sport, or they were too busy trying to keep their jobs to figure out how to do it. A few years ago, the OptaPro analytics conference emerged in London as a way for the tiny band of soccer quants to present papers to one another. Still, all those charts with arrows and heat maps revealing where most of the action takes place seemed to have little effect on the game. As new metrics emerged, commentators and coaches took pride in repudiating them. When ESPN’s Craig Burley, a former Premier League midfielder, was asked on the air to comment about a team’s “expected goals,” a formula that calculates how often a team should have scored as opposed to how often it actually did, he replied with disbelief. “What an absolute load of nonsense that is,” he shouted. “I expect things at Christmas from Santa Claus, but they don’t come.”

But teams like Chelsea and Arsenal have resources at their disposal that allow them to accumulate the best talent. Compared with them, Liverpool was essentially in the position of those 1990s A’s teams. A different approach was necessary for it to keep up with them. And all those players running around the soccer field were clearly doing something. Every now and then, too, goals were scored. If collecting and analyzing data could help divine a connection, wasn’t it foolish not to try it?


About half an hour into a game at Anfield last January, the midfielder Naby Keita received the ball from his left and started to dribble with elongated strides. At the time, Liverpool led the Premier League, as it had for much of the season. A loss by Manchester City the previous night gave Liverpool an opening to extend that lead to seven points if it could beat Leicester City now. From his seat in the stands, Graham exhorted Keita.

“Go on, Naby,” he said, in his deep Welsh accent. “Go on!”

Keita passed two Leicester defenders. Then he hesitated for a moment and lost the ball. Graham sighed.

“Ahhhh, Naby,” he said.

Graham grew up an hour’s drive from Cardiff as a Liverpool fan. His childhood in the 1970s and ’80s coincided with Liverpool’s era of dominance. It didn’t hurt that one of the club’s best players, Ian Rush, happened to be Welsh. 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.” Often, the advice contradicts what someone merely watching videos of the games might come to believe. Graham and his team could report that a club’s strong-footed left winger sends booming crosses over the defense toward the goal. But the data indicates that the less impressive crosses coming from the right wing, often accurately placed, result in goals far more frequently. That sounds rudimentary. In soccer, it is practically a revolution.


Graham’s weightiest responsibility is helping Liverpool decide which players to acquire. He does that by feeding information on games into his formulas. What he doesn’t do is make evaluations by watching those games. “I don’t like video,” he says. “It biases you.” Graham wants the club that he works for to win, but he also wants his judgments to be validated. “All of these players, there has been discussion of their relative merits,” he said. “If they do badly, I take it as sort of a personal affront. If I think someone is a good player, I really, really want them to do well.”

Keita is one of Graham’s finds. 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.

Keita’s shifting roles made a muddle of the conventional statistics used to quantify a player’s contribution to his club. For example, the position you play in soccer, unlike basketball, has a significant effect on your chances of putting the ball into the goal, or how frequently you leave your feet to nudge it from an opponent. But Graham disdains those statistics anyway. He has only slightly less contempt for some of the more evolved metrics, like the percentage of attempted passes that are completed. Instead, he 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.

As of the January game against Leicester City, Keita’s play hadn’t seemed to justify Graham’s endorsement. The calculations insisted that Keita was doing as well as ever, but few fans realized that — and some of Liverpool’s executives probably didn’t, either. For Keita’s sake, and for the sake of Graham’s peace of mind, some goals or assists would help. In the second half, Keita dribbled the ball through several defenders. Somehow, he emerged with nobody between him and the goalkeeper. As Graham lifted himself halfway out of his seat in anticipation, Keita shot. At the same time, a Leicester player careened into him. The ball went wide, and to the displeasure of Liverpool’s fans, no penalty was called. Graham groaned. Soon after, Keita was removed for a substitute. Graham clapped enthusiastically as Keita left the field, but when I asked if he thought Keita had played well, he wouldn’t give me a definitive answer. He would tell me tomorrow, he said, after he looked at the data.

Graham was laboring through a two-year post-doctorate at Cambridge when he realized he didn’t want to be a scientist. Most of the breakthroughs in his area, polymer physics, had been made years before. “The classic papers had been written in the 1970s,” he says. “So you’re searching around for something you can maybe make a little progress on.” When someone forwarded him a notice for a job at an analytics start-up that was hoping to consult for soccer teams, he was intrigued. He landed the job and was told to read “Moneyball.”




For four years, from 2008 to 2012, Graham advised Tottenham. 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.”

Graham hardly noticed. He was immersed in his search for inefficiencies — finding players, some hidden in plain sight, who were undervalued. One afternoon last winter, he pulled up some charts on his laptop and projected them on a screen. The charts contained statistics such as total goals, goals scored per minute and chances created, along with expected goals. I was surprised to see Graham working with such statistics, which he had described to me as simplistic. But he was making a point. “Sometimes you don’t have to look much further than that,” he said.

In 2014, Chelsea acquired the contract of the Egyptian attacking midfielder Mohamed Salah. Salah arrived with a reputation as a rising star, though in two years with a Swiss team he scored just nine goals. At Chelsea, he had what was by all accounts an undistinguished tenure, playing in 13 games over two seasons and scoring twice, while spending much of his time being loaned out to other clubs. Eventually, his contract was sold to A.S. Roma, in Italy. At that point, Salah was considered to have little chance of ever succeeding in England.



Playing in the Premier League is unique, according to the English soccer community. Competition is more balanced than elsewhere; nearly every match is a struggle. English players learn the game in frosted conditions that tend to thwart precision passing, fostering a rough, overtly physical style of play. The intensive media attention is distracting. The weather is often terrible. Some players, the assumption holds, just aren’t suited for it. But others don’t get the chance. “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 recommended that Liverpool acquire Salah, who was thriving in Italy. In American sports, the team might have offered another player in exchange. In soccer, players’ rights are bought and sold in a worldwide marketplace. Once a sale price is reached, negotiations begin with the player. If he isn’t satisfied with the salary being proposed, or if he dislikes the city where the team plays or the manager he will play for, he can remain where he is. Grooming emerging talent and then selling the rights to it for a profit can help smaller teams stay solvent. Even some clubs playing in their countries’ top leagues, such as Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen, use the process to generate enough income to remain competitive. “Transfers are where the money is,” Graham said. “They are a huge component of financial performance.”

That July, Liverpool paid Roma about $41 million for Salah. Graham’s data suggested that Salah would pair especially well with Firmino, another of Liverpool’s strikers, who creates more expected goals from his passes than nearly anyone else in his position. That turned out to be the case. During the season that followed, 2017-18, Salah turned those expected goals into real ones. He broke the Premier League record by scoring 32 times. He also became the symbol of Liverpool’s revival. His crown of curly hair and infectious grin, and his stubby legs that somehow ate up ground as he raced across the turf, made him one of soccer’s most recognizable players. In what turned out to be a harbinger of this year’s progress, Liverpool made an unanticipated

run to the final of last season’s Champions League. That provided the first tangible evidence that the strategies put in place by Henry and his Fenway group were working. This season, Salah was one of the three players who led the Premier League in goals. (His teammate Sadio Mané was another.) The website Transfermarkt, which tracks player valuations, estimates his current value at $173 million.


Another acquisition may have been even more important. Soon after arriving at Liverpool, Graham was asked to research a left winger at Inter Milan, Philippe Coutinho. His data strongly endorsed Coutinho. Liverpool bought Coutinho’s rights for about $16 million. Over the next five years, Coutinho’s play contributed to Liverpool’s revival. But his most important contribution was to accrue value. Last year, Barcelona paid Liverpool about $170 million for Coutinho. Soon after, Liverpool spent more than $200 million on three new players: Alisson Becker, the goalkeeper; the midfielder Fabinho; and the fullback Virgil van Dijk. All became crucial contributors this season. These were known commodities, and none came at a bargain price. But without the profit made by selling Coutinho, Henry assured me, those players would not have been acquired.


At Melwood, the club’s training complex in a residential Liverpool neighborhood, Graham works in a white-walled room, down a corridor from the coaches and the cafeteria. Tim Waskett, who studied astrophysics, sits to Graham’s left. Nearby is Dafydd Steele, a former junior chess champion with a graduate math degree who previously worked in the energy industry. The background of the most recent analyst to be hired, Will Spearman, is even less conventional. Spearman grew up in Texas, a professor’s son. He completed a doctorate in high-energy physics at Harvard. Then he worked at CERN, in Geneva, where scientists verified the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson. His dissertation provided the first direct measurement of the particle’s width, and one of the first of its mass. Another club might conceivably hire an analyst like Graham, or Steele, or Waskett, and maybe even Spearman. But it’s almost impossible to imagine any but Liverpool hiring all of them.

As often as possible, the analytics staff arrives at Melwood in time for breakfast. The food in the cafeteria includes locally sourced eggs and five or six kinds of salad greens and beef aged in a glass locker. Players sit at one of two tables with coaches and trainers. The analysts, who look like nobody else in the building, sit at an adjacent table. Greetings are cordial, even friendly. But there’s little evidence that the players know one analyst from another. The morning after the Leicester game, Graham sat with his back to Keita, their chairs touching. Hours before, he’d been shouting at Keita from the stands. Now he was within a foot of him, eating the same poached eggs, yet there was no interaction between the two of them. “If he wants to talk about the game to me, he can initiate that, and I’d be delighted,” Graham said. “Otherwise I’ll leave him in peace.”

At one point, Spearman went to get coffee. He returned with a question rooted in the intersection of breathless fandom and mathematical geekiness: Who would be the most accurately regarded player in soccer? Not the most underrated or overrated, but the one whom conventional wisdom comes closest to gauging correctly.

“It has to be Messi,” he said. “Because if he isn’t the best player in the world, he’s second. So the most that opinion could be off is one place.” As if to punctuate his point, Spearman suddenly spilled his coffee so that it streamed down the middle of the table. The analysts erupted in good-natured jibes. “You’re not doing a good job at convincing anyone that you’re not a nerd,” Waskett said.

Spearman hasn’t had much to do with Liverpool’s recent success. He does almost none of the work that Klopp sees, and he’s rarely involved with discovering players. His mandate is more ethereal. Spearman knows just enough about the sport, or just little enough, to try to change it. “We’re just starting to ask the question, ‘Why don’t we try to play football in a slightly different way?’ ” Graham explains. Soccer is the sum of thousands of individual actions, but the only ones Graham’s model can evaluate are the passes, shots and ball movements that are downloaded from the official play-by-play. “There are still fundamental limitations in the data we have,” Graham says. “It’s still like looking through a very foggy lens.” By working to get the mathematical rendering closer to reflecting what actually happens on the field, recording not just that a defender kicked a pass to a midfielder but how hard it went and what happened when it was received, Spearman is looking to find a path through the fog.



Most of his time is spent creating a model that employs video tracking. It assigns numerical scores to everything that happens to everyone, even when the ball isn’t involved. That includes a fullback racing down the sideline, forcing a lone defender to choose between two players to cover, or a striker getting into position to receive a cross directly in front of the goalkeeper, even if the pass sails over his head — “every action, how much value it adds, how well it was performed,” Spearman says. “Once you have that, you can start to create new approaches.” One might be to script plays, like in the N.F.L., radically altering the nature of a game that has resisted change for more than a century.

First, though, Liverpool needs to figure out how to beat Tottenham. Like baseball’s A’s, this current club still hasn’t won any titles. Another loss in a final, coupled with its Premier League finish behind Manchester City, could be interpreted as confirmation that analytics can get a team only so far. That would be unfair, of course. If soccer were soybeans, you could plug data into an algorithm and know just what to do. Instead, the sport is unpredictable enough to remain fascinating, filled with perfect plans foiled by the imperfections of those sent out to employ them, and undermined by the vicissitudes of chance. The jostle that threw off Keita in the Leicester City game easily could have led to a penalty shot. A successful conversion would have given Liverpool two additional points — and, ultimately, the Premier League title.

But that’s how probability works. Even when odds are diligently calculated, and the options judiciously weighed, the wrong number can still come in. The team that wins isn’t always the one employing the most elegant calculations, or even the one the models predict. It’s a lesson taught by the dice that John Henry rolled during the baseball simulations he played as a kid. That frustrates the analysts, perhaps — but it can make for a beautiful game.

[Chester Perry]

Cheers Falcon really enjoyed that

[Chester Perry]

Another article from Simon Chadwick traces the growth and influence of the Premier League to all the final places in this season European cups, and how it has become big box office

https://theconversation.com/premier-lea ... nce-117030" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It covers a number of themes from other articles this week but adds in the soft power influence that the PL adds to UK PLC

[Chester Perry]

On the day that the Premier League announced that it's free to air tv rights in 40 African countries has been sold to a company run by Sepp Blatters nephew - @tariqpanja writes a story for the New York Times about a host of new evidence left by Chuck Blazer

that PL announcement
https://www.premierleague.com/news/1226895" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

the NY Times article - I still waiting for my free views to rest but no reason why you can't read it if interested

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/spor ... lazer.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT - Infront who have just won those rights are currently dealing with a bit of a sticky situation where it was found an employee defrauded clients to benefit his company - well it's nice to know the Blatter's are still associated in some way to corrupt practices

https://sponsorship.sportbusiness.com/n ... d-clients/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Football experts from 53 of the 55 member associations in UEFA talk about the state of football in their country. A strange source but interesting reading

https://www.bettingcircle.co.uk/whats-t ... n-country/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In 2007 Mathew Briggs became the Premier Leagues youngest ever player when he came on for Fulham against Middlesbrough - Fulham spurned the advances of Man Utd and Bayern Munich for him, he played just 11 more times for them over the next 8 years and is now in the 8th tier of the game - in these 3 videos he tries to understand what and why things went wrong for him - it is an illuminating insight of those who fall away from the magic money tree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsfTV0- ... e=youtu.be" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQJiszIq1o8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg015WkGdFI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Simon Chadwick has been a very busy man in the last few days it would seem - another article, here this time with a prospect that the Middle east quarrel being played out by northern English football teams

https://theconversation.com/english-foo ... 1559116322" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

He also wrote this after the World Cup last year

https://theconversation.com/football-ma ... dis-100103" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

An article on "post access sportswriting" - showing how the print media rinse football's magic money tree to death even when they have almost no real access to players or managers

https://www.theringer.com/sports/2019/5 ... ce=twitter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It is a grim and sorry tale that explains a why stories are so late after the initial event - but that is the economics of the back pages

https://twitter.com/_PaulHayward/status ... 6898172928" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

This Newcastle buyout is throwing out an awful lot of stories with very few confident it will actually amount to anything meaningful

whatever Sheikh Khaled claims

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48449769" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Interesting family history

https://twitter.com/sportingintel/statu ... 6741439489" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Interesting business connections - "Fit and Proper" anyone

https://twitter.com/NcGeehan/status/1133233661019660288" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

By the way if anyone could transcribe that Chuck Blazer article from the NY Times in post #1241 I would be very grateful -(so few free articles/so many good ones to read)

[Chester Perry]

@jonawils with a really good article on why the Premier League is starting to eclipse the rest in Europe

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/a ... red-europe" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

the politics of European Football

https://twitter.com/gdunbarap/status/11 ... 1302180867" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

French FA president Noel Le Graet is one of the most prominent critics of the ECA plans for post 2024 European Club Competition

[Chester Perry]

Following KPMG's football top 32 valuation report (see post #1230) Deloitte have released their annual report into football finance and gone all New Order doing so

https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/s ... ness_group" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

there is an opportunity to download the whole report on that page and those from previous years too