Former Liverpool director of football Damien Comolli believes his treatment at the Reds was “unfair”.
The Frenchman was one of the very first hires by Fenway Sports Group when they took over the club in October 2010, with Comolli, who had previously been at Tottenham Hotspur in a similar capacity, tasked with implementing a data driven approach to player recruitment. The use of data in recruitment was something that FSG were keen to bring into Liverpool from day one, allowing a couple of years for the team behind the scenes to get the data pipelines in place so that more rational decisions, removing as much element of risk as possible, could be made in the market.
FSG principal John W. Henry had been enamoured with the idea of data, or ‘Moneyball’ as it became popularised through the Hollywood movie of the same name starring Brad Pitt, so much so that he had tried to bring Pitt’s real life character, Billy Beane, to the Boston Red Sox to implement the same sabermetric approach to baseball that had seen the Oakland Athletics upset the odds in the MLB with a roster pieced together for a fraction of the cost of their rivals.
Identifying undervalued talent was the goal, the kind of talent that had been hiding in plain sight, not used in the appropriate way by those who weren’t concerned with the science behind it all. Comolli shared that vision and the love of data, something that he still does, and something that has been prominent in the success of French side Toulouse during his time as chairman, with Les Violets having won Ligue 2 in 2021/22 before qualifying for the Europa League for this season, where they beat Liverpool earlier this month, by virtue of winning last season’s Coupe de France.
Liverpool have used data to great effect to win everything that club football has to offer over the past decade. But it is the likes of Michael Edwards and Dr Ian Graham, both of whom have now left the Reds, who are most closely associated with the success of the data approach, one where Jurgen Klopp was handed the tools to make magic at home and abroad, which he did with remarkable success.
Both Edwards and Graham arrived from Decision Technology, a firm with who Comolli had worked with at Spurs, and whose Spurs contract prevented Liverpool from working directly with. In hiring two of their key assets, FSG managed to get around that particular problem. Comolli’s time at Liverpool is often viewed in a dimmer light. He wasn’t the man who delivered the vision, but he was a part of starting the wheels in motion. He was the man who brought Jordan Henderson to the club. But it was that decision which was not held in high regard after Henderson’s slow start to the season, and one of the factors that led to his departure from the club. Henderson would go on to captain the Reds to Premier League and Champions League success. Luis Suarez also arrived during his time at the club.
However, other additions like Charlie Adam, Stewart Downing and Andy Carroll were misses in the market for the Reds, and by August 2012, 18 months on from arriving, Comolli had left Anfield.
“It was not fair what happened to me at Liverpool,” said Comolli, speaking to ESPN. “When I got the job at Spurs, I was 32-and-a-half. I’m 51 now, soon to be 52. In 20 years, a lot of things have changed me as a leader and the industry accepting data, plus data being much better than it was before.”
Comolli was sought out for the job at Toulouse by RedBird Capital Partners, the New York-based investment firm that acquired an 11% stake in FSG back in March 2021.
RedBird had been on the lookout for a European club in which to take a controlling stake, compiling a dossier of more than 70 potential targets before eventually landing on Toulouse in the summer of 2020. Comolli has been handed oversight to bring the data plan to life, who said: “There were a lot of discussions over clubs that we could have bought, including big European clubs. It ticked all the boxes.
“Their (RedBird’s) message was very strong: We want to buy a football club and want to be data-driven. That is what I wanted as well,
“The definition of a high-performance environment for me is that we bring people to the best of their capabilities. So if someone can give nine out 10, we cannot build an environment where you give seven out 10. We need to bring him to nine out of 10 every individual we have, that’s the high-performance environment we want to build.”
