The Worst Article You Will Read On Alonso, De Zerbi and Other Contenders to Replace Klopp

The BBC spawns a word-turd

Screenshot of BBC article graphic.

Ahead of the League Cup final, the chat about the new Liverpool manager continues to dominate the news and opinion cycles.

The BBC, courtesy of Carteret Analytics, has run an analysis of the managers in contention, and made the cardinal sin of not really understanding weighting, context, or it seems, football.

They don’t think much of Xabi Alonso or Roberto De Zerbi, surreally, for the Liverpool job.

I don’t think much of the analysis. In fact, it’s perhaps the worst purportedly intelligent piece of football writing I’ve ever read.

Cabaret Anal Ticks, as they should perhaps be called, apparently do this for a living (the company “provides detailed manager assessments to Premier League, EFL, Bundesliga and MLS clubs”, albeit it doesn’t suggest how well they’ve worked out so far); there’s good money in snake oil, even now.

The best thing to do would be to print out the analysis, roll it up into a ball and volley it into the bin.

To me, while there may be some good analysis in there somewhere, it’s mostly pseudo-data bullshit that’s not rooted to the real world.

It’s data unmoored from reality, context and the challenges involved.

I’ll explain why it’s so bad, then give some data that I think is far more helpful.

Horseshit

Above: the results of the analysis I’m criticising.

In 2010 I had a journalist say that my work with Graeme Riley was “a load of bollocks”, when it was essentially creating an annual inflation index for Premier League transfers and applying it to create current day purchase prices. In the years since, various outlets have copied our approach (and some clubs used it). It was fairly simple. It led to books, a European Commission study on transfers, and an academic paper. The concept is as valid in 2024 as in 2010.

I therefore know that people can write off data conclusions quickly and dismissively, without understanding.

And I do like a good coefficient.

But I know enough about football data to smell a rat.

I once had a conversation with Michael Edwards about the issue of weighting across leagues, which was something Liverpool were working on many years ago; how much is, say, 20 goals in League X (Portugal, Netherlands) really worth in Premier League terms?

And obviously taking it deeper than that. Data is not just data. You have to know how to compare apples and oranges if you’re gonna be that silly.

The Athletic recently ran a pretty good and simple piece about using stats and data, and it included obvious things like not comparing a manager’s win percentage at a big club with massive resources with someone at a smaller club with lesser resources, and so on.

Yet that seems to be part of this report, where they judge winning games in a vacuum, outside all context.

So if you’re comparing Roberto De Zerbi with Jürgen Klopp or Thomas Tuchel, as this BBC article does, you’re comparing a team with a relegation-zone budget (18th most expensive £XI this season) with managers working for the past six years with Champions League budgets; or comparing De Zerbi to a manager of one of the Portuguese Big Three, where all the power and success lies.

It seems particularly skewed against De Zerbi, but also draws strange conclusions about Alonso, as if managers are cookie-cutter solutions.

One of the eight metrics they list as using for their analysis is … Shot Conversion, for fuck’s sake!

Shot Conversion!

🤯

If you’re comparing managers working with Mo Salah and Diogo Jota, and before that, Sadio Mané; or Harry Kane and Thomas Müller; or Robert Lewandowski and Thomas Müller; or Son Heung-min – as they are doing with the managers at Liverpool, Bayern and Spurs – with someone whose main striker is Danny Fucking Welbeck (and an 18-year-old from the youth team and a 22-year-old import), what do you expect?!

Can Brighton afford the most ruthless finishers in football? Of course not.

How is this allowed to be part of the evaluation across such different realities? One-eighth of the model is already garbage in, garbage out.

I mean, this is cretinous. Really cretinous.

If it is to be included, maybe look at the cost of the strikers and midfielders expected to convert the shots. Look at the defenders and midfielders and keepers, denying opposition chances. Look at the cost of the teams overall, as I’ve spent the last 14 years doing via accurate inflated current-day transfer fees.

As I keep saying, working on a smaller budget doesn’t scale up if you play low-possession, long-ball football.

It does, however, if you play expansive football.

Ange Postecoglou had two years at Celtic working with the best players in Scottish football. So what? Kyogo Furuhashi doesn’t have to be the best finisher in the world to score goals for Celtic against teams with a fraction of their talent and budget and crummy goalkeepers. Furuhashi scored a ton domestically, and none in six games in the Champions League. How does Furuhashi’s shot conversion rate, good or bad, relate to Postecoglou at Spurs, and the idea of Postecoglou at Liverpool?

Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann each have spent much of the past 2-3 years working with the absolute crème de la crème at Bayern (and PSG and Chelsea), and still been sacked; but obviously their data will still largely be great, as it’s Bayern, and a bad season for Bayern is not winning every single game; ditto PSG.

Any manager can win things with PSG. It’s been proven. It’s harder not to; as with Bayern.

“Carteret also found none of his [De Zerbi’s] metrics are a match for Klopp. Indeed he is significantly lower across the board - strategic intelligence, tactical command, attacking coefficient and shot conversion.”

Actually, the data they use show De Zerbi has better possession stats than Klopp.

It’s in their own fucking list!

They also show Alonso’s possession stats as lower than they are this season, as he’s raised Leverkusen’s possession stats massively. But they’re averaging out over the past six years. Yet that’s not his style, is it? That’s more down to what he inherited.

Alonso inherited a low-possession team. He made them mid-possession last season (as they played more on the break), and super-high possession this season. He took them from 18th when he took over to 6th, then now to eight points clear.

De Zerbi inherited a mid-possession team last season and made them super-high possession right away.

And not sterile possession.

It says it’s based on the past six seasons, but as I’ve said before, five seasons is a generation in football.

Where are the metrics for tracking improvement? Year-on-year improvement is arguably as important as anything.

In terms of improvement, as a manager, individually, and what that manager has done for the club.

Do we need to wait four years before seeing if Xabi Alonso is actually any good? It seems to suggest as much.

Do Liverpool want a manager who was good six seasons ago?

Or one who is elite and cutting edge now?

By that very logic, to judge a player over six years’ data Liverpool would never have signed Alisson, Mo Salah, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané, Virgil van Dijk, Ibrahima Konaté, Luis Díaz, Diogo Jota, Darwin Núñez, Fabinho, Andy Robertson, et al.

If you wait for six full seasons of data, you’re too late.

Someone else gets them. Their price goes up. Most of these players were signed on the previous year or two of data, and potential. On signs of rapid improvement. Where they are now, not where they were six years ago (go back six years when looking for a wide forward this summer, and the data would say sign … Sadio Mané!)

By this logic, the only players signed in the Klopp era would have been Thiago Alcântara and Xherdan Shaqiri. They’re probably the only ones who were highly impressive as recently as three years before Liverpool signed them, let alone six.

A year before he was signed, Liverpool’s data analysis identified Diogo Jota as the closest clone of Mané. Few Wolves fans would have agreed. They didn’t rate him, but Liverpool saw something. But it was based on that season, not years earlier (albeit you can still go back further).

Equally, Liverpool didn’t only sign players from Bayern, Barcelona, Real Madrid, et al, where they’d proven themselves in great teams. They signed players from Wolves, Southampton, Southampton (okay, so quite a lot from Southampton), Hull, and three were from teams that were relegated.

Most of Liverpool’s best players were signed on the previous year’s data, and potential, allied to eye-test scouting. Alisson had less than a year of data for Roma when the move was put in place, and before that, a year on their bench.

“Nope, we need to wait for five more years of data, guys! Let’s wait until he’s in his 30s!”

Or, “That Salah looks good now! But we can’t sign him as he was shite at Chelsea a couple of years ago, and we have to look at each of his past six seasons equally”.

Barcelona would never have appointed Pep Guardiola, using this methodology. Arsenal wouldn’t have appointed Mikel Arteta. Dortmund would never have appointed Klopp. Newcastle would never have appointed Eddie Howe.

Indeed, if you had to go back over a six-year period, then Chelsea would not have appointed Jose Mourinho in 2004, as his success was pretty much from 2003. The six years would also have included early failed attempts at management, to suggest he wasn’t what Chelsea needed.

We have to avoid recency bias and getting giddy over the latest cool coach, but you can’t fairly judge different managers at different points of their careers, peaking at different times, over a six-year period.

Six years is ludicrous.

This method clearly favours – to a silly degree – someone who is on the downslide or who players are wary of, after a good period four-six years ago (Julian Nagelsmann?), ahead of someone on the upward curve, having a great 2023/24 after a great 2022/23 (Alonso, De Zerbi, relative to their teams’ budgets, ambitions, etc.).

Football has changed so much, even in the past 1-2 years.

By 2018 I felt that Mourinho was a busted flush. I wrote it many times. His approach was too confrontational, his tactics dated and risk-averse. He’d lost his youthful zest, and looked jaded and bitter. In 2004 he was horrible but also horribly effective.

But in 2018 this methodology would have said he was the man to get, as the previous six years included success at Real Madrid and Chelsea.

He was a “winner”, right? And this model really likes a winner from five or six years ago, clearly.

This method would rate Antonio Conte as a better bet than De Zerbi and Alonso. And that’s utter garbage.

“With the exception of his brief stint at Shakhtar Donetsk - when he won two-thirds of his matches and led them to the Ukrainian Super Cup - De Zerbi's teams have been firmly mid-table, Carteret says.

There is not a lot, therefore, in an assessment of his results that suggests he can win the Premier League with Liverpool.”

De Zerbi also took Sassuolo to two consecutive 8th-placed finishes, which is hardly ‘mid-table’ given the budget, and compared with the most common finishes before and after, which were, bar one season, lower-half. I get that it’s not the same as winning the league in Germany, but they write that off, too, if it’s too recent.

The Cabaret Act didn’t dare put him in, but the metrics they use would surely put Brendan Rodgers above Xabi Alonso, based on old successes at Celtic and Leicester that fall within the timeframe.

It would favour Erik Ten Hag, based on his Ajax win%; certainly if it likes Postecoglou, whose big success was doing what Rodgers did at Celtic.

The whole premise ludicrously favours big-name managers at big-spending clubs (or dominant clubs in smaller leagues) for the past six years, whose teams create shitloads of chances and naturally win more games than most other teams; and doesn’t seem to weight for development, progression, improving players, working with less money, and so on.

Indeed:

“Objective achievement rating: A measure of overall ability based on the premise that the primary objective is to win football matches - rather than, for example, long-term player development or balancing of club finances.”

Well that’s just fucking stupid!

Of course Ruben Amorim at Sporting, one of Big Three in Portugal, is more likely to win games than anyone at Brighton; and Nagelsmann, at Leipzig and Bayern, has had tons of funds. Tuchel at Bayern, Chelsea and PSG.

Just as a Liverpool manager will almost always win more games each season than someone outside of the Big Six.

The piece also says Klopp’s “strategic intelligence rating is very high and his tactical command rating is even better.”

That’s great.

But then it says Liverpool mostly stick to 4-3-3, which seems to counter ‘tactical command’.

It then disparages Alonso as a “tinker man” (WTF?! is this a report from 2024 or a teenager writing about Claudio Ranieri 20 years ago?), which is ludicrous for a manager top of the Bundesliga by a mile, achieved with outsiders, with 30 wins from 34 games in all competitions, and no defeats this season.

I mean, that idiot Alonso just changed his system to play Bayern Munich and they threw it away with, er, a 3-0 win.

“Not only does Alonso play predominantly with three at the back, he is a bit of a ‘tinker man’, having used six different formations this season alone. Klopp, by comparison, has essentially used slight variations on one formation - an attacking 4-3-3 - a set-up Alonso has only used three times this season.”

Look at him, with his fancy changes!

Next they’ll be telling us that Pep Guardiola isn’t very good and won’t do much as a manager as he likes to mess with things.

Alonso is not wedded to three at the back; he took over a team that couldn’t defend, so introduced the system. He’s flexible, as they admit, when also criticising him for being flexible.

“Carteret also found the pace and attacking set-up of Alonso's teams do not attack or play with as much pace as Klopp's Liverpool. Nor is his style as successful as Klopp’s.”

The people have clearly never watched Liverpool play, especially when “slight variations” on 4-3-3 do nothing to cover how it’s 3-box-3, and that, within games, it’s often impossible to tell what formation Liverpool are playing.

Against Luton it looked like 2-4-4, or at times, 2-2-6. Often Klopp has switched to a clear front four. There’s no ‘slight’ to the variations you see when you watch Liverpool play with two eyes attached to a human brain.

(And there’s a different use of pace in the Leverkusen team.)

Liverpool rarely have four defenders back in possession. And most people say that Liverpool have been playing a 3-box-3 for a year now, not 4-3-3. And even the 4-3-3 could become 2-3-5.

And again, Liverpool also do not need a manager whose team pass the exact same way at the exact same speed. Different players can do different things. Weight of possession (to control games), and creation of lots of chances/xG without conceding too much, is what matters.

Klopp, as any good manager should, uses tons of variety, tinkering within games, for example, by regularly making five subs. He rotates from game to game. Each team has different strengths and weaknesses depending on which of the 30 players he’s used are starting and coming on as subs.

The team play short, fast football, a lot of the time, and at other times, go very vertical. They mix it up. Long, short, fast slow. Just like Alonso surely would with the same group of players.

And to say “Nor is his [Alonso’s] style as successful as Klopp’s” is to miss the point that:

a) whose is?

And,

b) it’s actually more successful this season so far, which is the best anyone has ever done in German football history and it’s not being done with Bayern’s riches. I mean, what more can Alonso do?

It’s a contradictory pile of rubbish, and that the BBC has published it suggests it hasn’t gone to Liverpool FC, and thankfully they wouldn’t be paying for this tripe.

Where are the metrics about knowing the league, and the culture, as Alonso and De Zerbi do?

Where are the metrics, for their standout pick Ruben Amorim, when it comes to breadth of experience, who’s who career, from player to manager, has been Portugal, Portugal, Portugal? Amorim looks great – fair enough! – but I’d score him a zero for breadth of experience, and not that great for European win%, where he’s far inferior to Alonso so far. His teams don’t hit 60% possession either, but they do get close enough to get a pass from me.

Alonso has already managed in two different countries, and played for the best/biggest clubs in the best three leagues. Quantify that, please?

Or De Zerbi, who played and managed in Italy, but also Ukraine, and now has two seasons in England.

Where are the metrics about improving the team inherited, and making its style more progressive? Handling pressure? Transmitting composure?

It’s not even asking the right questions. Balancing the league and midweek European games is also key.

Improving players, at Liverpool, is key, as a self-sustainable club, not a sugar-daddy-doping club, and not the horse in a “one horse town” league.

But so is “fit”, and mindset.

Quantify the time and leeway a fanbase will give a manager; as important as almost anything in football (if the fans don’t take to you, you’re already behind the eight ball, and it can go wrong for perfectly talented managers – you can have great ideas but it’s no good if the crowd is silent or booing, and the players have gone into their shells).

Julian Nagelsmann feels like a horrible fit in almost every way, beyond having a modern style of play, yet they rate him way above Alonso and De Zerbi. Where’s the metric for ‘pissing off everyone at the club’, for Nagelsmann?

Then there’s the age of the team to take into account when assessing a manager. Introducing young players. Integrating cheap foreign signings who take longer. What Alonso and De Zerbi are doing is so different to what Tuchel, Amorim and Nagelsmann faced.

Just looking at who are the most winningest managers over the past six years is bonkers. You’ll miss out on the next big thing, by the very definition of the criteria, as six years is an eternity in football.

I appreciate that you get no guarantees with De Zerbi’s lack of big club experience, but I’ve never seen a manager who has done so many “big club” things with such a small budget.

“De Zerbi has certainly created headlines in the UK (as have Brighton as a club generally), but a fully objective analysis of his performance levels (rather than a subjective view of his approach and personality) illustrates that he falls short significantly (in every key metric) from what is required for the next Liverpool manager.”

Also, they give De Zerbi close to zero for “Tactical command”, yet managers like Klopp and Guardiola – true experts – think he’s brilliant. They know it when they see it.

The same seems to be said of Alonso, who is also rated poorly by this piece of “analysis”.

Alonso is on the rise, due to smarts. De Zerbi knows the league, and has reinvented what’s possible for a smaller club, so that it plays like a Big Six team.

Possession and Touches In Opposition Box

The analysis says De Zerbi falls short “on every metric”, but like Alonso, he has taken a c.54% possession team into the impossible arena of 62%.

I’m increasingly convinced that (perhaps unlike 2005-2015) possession is vital, and have researched a further piece on the correlation between possession and success. (I’ll share a few bits now.)

For the piece I was writing I looked at the main four European leagues, this season and last season, for 156 club/seasons. (Twenty teams in three of the four leagues x2, and 18 teams in Germany x2.)

I found that by banding together possession rates (sub 40%, 40-42%, 42-44%, etc., up to +64%), the relationship between possession and xG Difference (r2/R-squared) is 0.938, or 93%.

And but for the roguish 16 teams that average 46-48% possession, the r2 rises to 0.954, or 96%.

(I’m not a mathematician but r2 seems a solid way to analyse data.)

Individual clubs occasionally pop outside the model as outliers, as happens with all models; but not often, and not by much.

As such, possession now seems more than 9/10ths of the football law.

I can find zero examples of low-possession (under 50%) or even ‘lower’-possession teams (under 56%) excelling anywhere towards to the top in the main four leagues this season or last, but it may still work for smaller clubs or lower-budget sides to get you up to mid-table.

(More on all this next week when I finish the piece.)

There seems to be no acknowledgement for the outlying achievement of De Zerbi and Alonso getting their teams up to 62% possession per season, and doing so with tons of touches in the opposition area – very attacking, but can control games. That’s mostly what you need.

Have 60% of the ball and have 1,100+ touches in the opposition box, and you won’t go far wrong. It immediately makes it harder to concede lots of touches in your own box, for example.

(Leverkusen are close to 62% possession, and on course for 1,285 touches in the opposition area, when extrapolated from 22 games to 38, the number played in England, with 34 played in Germany.)

Yet De Zerbi apparently “falls short significantly (in every key metric) from what is required for the next Liverpool manager."

For me, possession and controlling the game is the most important metric in football right now, as everything else springs from it.

And De Zerbi, miraculously, has created a team that averages over 1,100 touches per season in the opposition box – last season and this season (extrapolated to 38 games).

Apart from the Big Six, no clubs in England get close to 62% possession per season, nor 1,100 touches in the opposition box.

In a different data set, I looked at only Premier League teams since 2017.

The r-squared here is lower (71%), but there are more outliers above and below the line, as you’d expect; more noise.

However, the pattern is clear.

With 45% possession you will not reach 1,000 touches in the opposition box.

With 50% possession you will not reach 1,100 touches in the opposition box.

Yet with 60% possession, only one team has had fewer than 1,000 touches in the opposition box. While this is often better teams just being better, it’s achieved by Brighton as well.

Out of the 140 ‘team/seasons’ in the Premier League over the past seven campaigns (with this season’s data extrapolated to 38 games after 25/26 so far), there have only been 17 examples of 60% possession and 1,100+ opposition penalty box touches in a season.

Seven are Man City. Six are Liverpool. Two are Arsenal. And the other two?

… Brighton.

Man United? Zero. Spurs? Zero. Chelsea? Zero.

League title challenges in the past few seasons by Man United, Spurs and Chelsea? Zero.

By Man City, Liverpool and Arsenal? Plenty.

Obviously Brighton aren’t going to challenge for the league with the players they have, but their style of play is a virtual 100% match for scaling up.

(And on xPoints last season, Brighton would have finished 4th.)

Indeed, Man United have terrible underlying numbers, despite the big budget. What United have are some brilliant fast attackers, but they don’t play football, and don’t control games. They’re in with the bog-standard, middle teams, as you can see on the graphs (grey diamonds).

They do get touches of the ball in the opposition box c.1,000 times a season, but without the control of possession it means it’s frantic and random, and they concede a lot of xG. They’re more like Brentford than Brighton.

Chelsea and Spurs at least have some promising possession and attacking stats, but Spurs (and the analysis recommends Postecoglou!) have conceded almost as much xG as they’ve created; Man United have conceded more xG than they’ve created, with just 51% possession, which is way below what’s now required.

I like Postecoglou, but they seem to be basing it on his Celtic tenure, as his Spurs have been exciting but porous.

Brighton are an excellent football team, built on journeymen and unproven talents.

In the Premier League, Bundesliga and La Liga, the best teams all average 60% possession or more. Even smaller clubs like Leverkusen and Stuttgart, who sit 1st and 3rd. In Italy, Napoli won the title last season with 61% possession, even though Italian football is different, and has few teams above 55% (which is where Inter hover now; while Juventus are actually sub-50% for possession, which I said a while ago made them seem likely to fall away, since when they’ve lost two and drawn two).

Possession is increasing amongst the very best clubs, as are touches in the opposition box.

If you want a DNA fingerprint of what I want the Liverpool manager to do, it’s to have his team have +60% possession and to exceed 1,100 touches in the opposition box a season.

(Plus, all the qualities I’ve been outlining for weeks now.)

And if you can do that with Brighton, as De Zerbi has for two years running, then you can probably do that, and more, with any bigger club. After all, it’s easier with better players.

What would Salah, Jota, Núñez, Díaz, Gakpo, Szoboszlai, Mac Allister, Gravenberch, Alexander-Arnold, Elliott, Jones, et al, do with 1,100+ touches in the opposition box, compared to some South American kids and Danny Welbeck?

Brighton simply don’t have elite finishers, do they?

In fact, they don’t have many elite players, full stop. If they do, they sell them.

De Zerbi helped develop and improve players, dramatically; and two midfielders were sold for almost £200m over the summer.

How’s that factored in? Not just the improvement but then losing your two best players in the summer, and still remaining competitive when stepping up into the gruelling grind of weekend-midweek-weekend? Where’s the acknowledgement of that? Have these people paid any attention whatsoever? Plus, topping their Europa League group on their European debut.

Again, it doesn’t mean De Zerbi is perfect, but to suggest he’s this also-ran is crazy.

Data without context does more harm than good. In this case, to give a bigger sample size they’ve gone too far back in time.

It’s horrific analysis, perhaps spewed by some badly-coded AI bot.

I mean, on Alonso:

“Empirical testing suggests that these football intelligence skills are transferable between clubs and leagues, but it is a risk for Liverpool to appoint a manager with such limited experience,” Carteret said.

“When you then layer on a distinct difference in the style of play and approach to tinkering with formations, it becomes a significant risk to appoint Alonso.”

Utter horseshit.

Re: Liverpool and Leverkusen in 2023/24, there is no great “distinct difference” between two teams who have 61-62% possession and both have close to 1,300 penalty box entries (within 0.5% of each other), and very similar xG Difference.

As these factors correlate with success, I’d say the teams are very similar.

Add an xG Difference around +1 per game, and again, it’s almost identical.

On the two scatterplots, Leverkusen would sit almost exactly next to Liverpool’s green diamond on both.

Compare that to Man United, with 51% possession (to Leverkusen and Liverpool’s c.61-62%), 25% fewer penalty box entries, and an xG Difference per game of -0.11 (as opposed to over +1), and as an example you can see what really different teams actually look like.

Alonso is still my man, but De Zerbi is up there, too, the more I dig into his data.

And the less crap analysis about either of them, the better.

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