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The reasoning behind why £51m was spent on these 2 players?

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One of my favourite subjects to talk about on Live4Liverpool.com is the science of sabermetrics and the work of the Oakland Athletic Baseball team’s Billy Beane.

I won’t go over it all again but suffice to say that Beane is a close follower of the Premier League and is a close friend of Damien Comolli. John W Henry wanted Beane to become General Manager at the Boston Red Sox after he took over the Baseball team, seeing Beane’s sabermetric approach to sport as similar to his own systematic quantitative analysis approach which made him a successful businessman. Although Beane rejected the role at the Red Sox, he kept in close contact with Henry and is widely credited for recommending Comolli for the role of Director of Football at Liverpool shortly after the arrival of the American owners last October.

Beane continues to watch the Premier League closely after he became fascinated with the passion and “tribal emotion” of English football, as he liked to call it, after he went on holiday to London in 2003. Like John W Henry in business, Beane had tried to take all the emotion out of his role as a Baseball manager, selecting players systematically on sabermetrics rather than instinct and gut feeling. Up until 2003, Beane felt that the emotion of fans in the English game must have had corollaries in how managers, coaches and scouts approached the game too.

This has begun to change in recent years to the extent that Opta stats are now highly sought after by every Premier League club, which wasn’t the case a decade ago. Beane also believes such a systematic approach to player performance has spread to transfer dealings, he told Esquire magazine:

“If you see the emphasis on young players in the Premier League, there is some evidence. At last the desire to pay for future performance has eclipsed the desire to pay for past performance.”

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