For a decade now Fenway Sports Group have put major emphasis on data.
With John Henry having been an early adopter and pioneer of the 'Moneyball' method, using it to great success to turn the Boston Red Sox baseball team from a franchise 86 years without a World Series to one that has won four in the last 18 years, the FSG supremo and his team wanted to adopt the same strategy at Liverpool.
Acquiring the Reds in 2010 from the near ruinous regime of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, FSG sought to implement their new method in a bid to end Liverpool's own trophy drought, the Reds without an English league title since 1990.
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It took a decade but that feat was achieved, with a Champions League title also added the year before and the Reds having come close to further domestic and European glory.
A little over a fortnight ago it emerged that FSG were considering their options when it came to their long-term commitment to the club, exploring the possibilities of both the sale of a minority stake and also a full takeover.
That has been followed by Mike Gordon, FSG's day-to-day link between the Reds and the FSG hierarchy, passing over his responsibilities to Liverpool CEO Billy Hogan, with Gordon to assume the task of leading on the investment options or sale of the club.
On Thursday there was more upheaval, with sporting director Julian Ward, who had been in post for six months after taking over from Michael Edwards, and director of research Dr Ian Graham both revealed to have tendered their resignations, the duo to leave the club at the end of the season.
In the case of Graham, who arrived at the club in 2012 as a hire by former sporting director Edwards, he was a major asset in FSG realising their data vision, tasking Graham with the responsibility of setting up a system that the club did not have in place.
Speaking at the Financial Times' Business of Football Summit earlier this year, Graham said: "My first year at Liverpool in 2012, the first 12 months was exclusively built on recruitment applications. I told our owners it would take a year to build that stuff and they said 'fine'.
"That long-term planning and adoption of data was rare at football clubs at the time and luckily for me the owners saw the value in it and we have had some success with that approach.
"Liverpool is a lucky place to be. When I arrived there was very little in terms of anyone doing anything with data in any sort of systematic way.
"Coming into an organisation that doesn't have data meant that we could build it in the way that we wanted."
The departure of someone so key to putting the practices in place that FSG had wanted to see delivered when they acquired the club, at the same time that the owners are seeking either a partial or full sale of their stake in the Reds, creates a large degree of uncertainty, especially on the back of the departure of Edwards, Gordon's transition to a new role, and Ward's impending departure.
The owners, as Gordon attested to, saw the value in the data driven model at the start of their tenure and they were able to see success achieved through that. But with a changing landscape, the player trading model becoming harder to rinse and repeat each summer and rivals spending ever more in the market and snapping up multiple clubs and following their own data path, maybe the reliance on it has become less prominent.
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