No place for Steven Gerrard in the age of analytics

Last night, FC Midtjylland beat FC Copenhagen 2-0 to effectively seal their first-ever Danish league championship.

Midtjylland’s upstarts have attracted more international attention than any previous Danish champions. People have been talking about a data revolution in football for years, and the little club from Jutland is the vanguard.

The chairman, Rasmus Ankersen, summed up their approach in an interview with Dutch journal De Correspondent: “We redesigned the club based on a question: what would a football club look like if it had no human eye and ear?”

The impetus comes from Midtjylland’s English owner, the financier Matthew Benham, who also owns Brentford FC. On Saturday, Brentford announced that Ankersen would join their new management team as co-director of football.

Brentford need new management because in February, they announced that their popular manager, Mark Warburton, would leave at the end of the season whether or not the club gained promotion to the Premier League. Warburton later explained: “I think the manager has to pick the team and have the final say . . . I think there’s going to be a much greater emphasis on mathematical modelling than currently.” He could not accept the reduced role Benham had in mind for him.

Article of faith

It’s an article of faith in English football that the manager should run the club. By disrespecting that tradition, and sacrificing Warburton to theoretical principles, Benham attracted a great deal of flak.

Consciously or not, Benham’s critics were tapping into a seam of conservative thought that stretches back two centuries to the Romantic movement, which was a reaction to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution that had begun to transform life in Western Europe.

Where Enlightenment thinkers saw the new mechanised factories as engines of progress that would create wealth and raise living standards, the Romantics saw dark Satanic mills despoiling the formerly green and pleasant land.

The idea that human intuition should be subjugated to the diktats of mathematical models is unromantic by definition. Many football fans regard the encroachment of analytics into the game as an effort to unweave the rainbow. To such people, there is something disturbing and uncanny about Ankersen’s vision of “a football club with no human eye and ear”.

Maybe it’s the apparent erosion of human agency that seems threatening. If decisions that were the preserve of scouts and managers are being taken out of their hands, how long before the players themselves are automata carrying out the instructions of a computer?

At this point, we should probably remind ourselves that players have always submitted their individual wills to external imperatives. It’s called tactics. The full-back who hurls every throw-in down the line is not doing so spontaneously; he’s obeying his manager’s instructions. Analytics will simply allow teams to devise more effective tactics.

The application of machine memory to football will change the game, however. As Ankersen told De Correspondent, Midtjylland signed Tim Sparv from Greuther Fürth in Germany's second division after their mathematical model led them to conclude that Fürth were a much better side than their league placing suggested. Since Sparv was one of their most consistent players, he was probably undervalued by the market..

Traditional metrics

Sparv didn’t stand out on any of the traditional metrics. Ankersen said: “We have another number six, Izunna Uzochukwu, who looks the more impressive player. He is very strong, very athletic, and he makes a lot of spectacular interceptions. Our opponents’ coaches are often in awe of what he does. Sparv seldom gets that credit, but we believe that this is because his positioning is so great. He sees problems before they arise, and so he doesn’t need to tackle or run as much as many other central midfielders do.”

If the rise of the machines is good news for the Sparvs, whose qualities were previously too subtle to be appreciated by most people, you wonder what it means for future Steven Gerrards.

When Gerrard made his debut in 1998, the world’s most powerful supercomputer weighed 47 tons, cost $94 million and boasted less computing power than a Mac Pro desktop you can buy today for €3,000.

Supercomputing power that was then available only to governments is now available to everyone, including football clubs looking to measure how effective their players are. Players can no longer get by on being brilliant at the things that bring a crowd to its feet. Maybe Gerrard was the last great player of English football’s age of innocence.

An algorithm would record that “red number eight” shot from unrealistic range, lost possession with over-ambitious passes, and wandered out of position. The rationalised football of the future will discourage the very habits that made supporters love Steven Gerrard.

Those supporters will remember Gerrard’s career in a series of shimmering images: famous goals against Manchester United and Olympiakos, the Cup final bullet, that header soaring past Dida in Istanbul. And, inescapably, the tragic slip that was his career’s true final act, whatever the garbled postscript of the past year.

Gerrard couldn't summon a final great moment as Crystal Palace ran amok amid the ruins of Brendan Rodgers's Liverpool. The last memorable image of his Anfield career was provided not by him but by his youngest daughter, Lourdes, who walked out on to the pitch with her dad and sisters, and had to clap her hands to her ears to protect them from the roar.

Algorithms of the future analysing Gerrard’s career might well conclude that he was not that great a player. Those of us who saw him play won’t feel the need to argue that they’re wrong. We’ll just know.