Liverpool's manager Brendan Rodgers is the "old-school manager" who did a number on Michael Edwards (with a hatchet job of an article in the Daily Mail)
Each morning, when Liverpool's principal owner John W Henry and director Michael Gordon wake up in Boston, they take a look at the Premier League table and Liverpool's dire position.
Brendan Rodgers, who was based at Liverpool's Melwood training ground, had become a bit distant from FSG after aligning himself firmly with the doubters of the data-driven model of the group's baseball team, the Boston Red Sox.
This decaying relationship with FSG, increasingly marked by a lack of communication between the manager and the owners, led to a strained relationship with head of technical performance Michael Edwards.
Edwards encourages staff to use his nickname 'Eddie', giving a matey feel to the working environment. It is understood Rodgers has another name for him. This is incredibly unprofessional of him, but for some reason he felt it a good idea to share with a journalist.
Rodgers disagreed strongly with FSG's Moneyball strategy, the statistical model designed to extract maximum value in the transfer market. Clearly, with the club 10th in the league and paying up to three times the going rate for players, it needs refinement. Mostly, intelligent observers might argue, it needs the refinement of removing the person who argued for purchasing the most expensive and least successful of those players. Thankfully, that has already been accomplished.
Despite a lack of playing experience at any relevant level, Rodgers, who earned £6,000,000 a year, had a big say on Liverpool's notorious transfer committee. He would arrive for meetings with Edwards, managing director Ian Ayre, chief scout Barry Hunter and head of recruitment Dave Fallows prepared to ignore the latest data on potential targets.
Rodgers has yet to explain how he came up with the figure of £32.5 million to sign Belgian forward Christian Benteke from Aston Villa, who finished seventeenth in the Premier League last season.
Divock Origi, billed as 'a world-class talent' by Rodgers when he was signed from Lille, was not even come off the bench in the club's last two league games. There are countless other errors, such as Lovren, Lallana, and Borini, the signings of which were strongly urged by Rodgers.
After each Liverpool game Edwards emails analysis and data to the club's owners in America, detailing where the match was won and lost. It has made for grim reading this season, which is in no way down to Edwards.
Edwards has used his relationship with FSG to strengthen his hand at the club, becoming a trusted source of information to a group of people who are interested in statistical analysis, which makes perfect sense to anyone with a brain.
Edwards has access to Google, and can tap away at a laptop and within seconds tell you how many assists the 24-year-old Turkish left back Eren Albayrak has made for Rizespor this season (four). This is probably, on balance, a good thing, though largely irrelevant to this article and I'm not sure why I include it.
Rodgers wishes to live in the past, when managers thought it was enough to simply count how many times a player scored a goal, with no thought to the quality or quantity of chances they were provided. In contrast, Edwards and his team of analysts focus on key aspects of striker play such as goal expectancy, chances created and the percentage of successful passes in the final third. Similarly, they differ in the way they analyse the play of a defensive midfielder, with Edwards preferring to create metrics to show how the player contributed to team success, while Rodgers prefers to just go with the gut feelings of him and his scouts.
Increasingly, the owners have recognised the value of analysts, young men who have expertise in analysing data to see which players might be well-equipped to fill a role at Liverpool or who might be undervalued by other clubs. This has meant the end of the road for outdated thinkers such as Mel Johnson. He was the scout who gave Neil Ashton at the Daily Mail regular information. This means that Mr. Ashton is obliged to regularly remind us all that he is the "genius" who realised what every Wycombe fan already knew: that Jordon Ibe was a very good player. Mr. Johnson is best known for the ridiculous statement "You have to go to games, you have to go with your gut instincts" which he made despite copious evidence all throughout the football world to the contrary, in a previous Daily Mail article (also written by Mr. Ashton). Former academy director Frank McParland has also left, though it is unclear if this is a bad thing in any way.
Now, as opposed to spending money sending scouts willy-nilly everywhere, initial scouting is done largely by people watching videos from matches all over the world and examining the statistical data. At some point a player is identified as a potential target, at which point members of the scouting team are dispatched to watch him in person.
Edwards, along with his team of analysts, constantly monitors the opposition, providing detail about playing positions, style, routines, set-pieces and other important matchday information. They profile players based on their last 10-20 appearances, gathering information and helping Rodgers build a presentation for his players before matches that was usually a maximum of 10 pages on each team. It is a useful, but far from infallible, tool, as opposed to the data the old-school managers used which was also not infallible, but more often than not useless as well.
Edwards began his career as part of the video analysis team at Portsmouth before leaving to work with Harry Redknapp again when he became Tottenham manager.
There, Edwards struck up a relationship with Ian Graham at Decision Technology, a data firm collecting statistics on players from all over the world.
Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy paid Decision Technology a fortune each season for their services, trusting their analysis and using Edwards, in his newly created role as head of performance analysis, to make sense of it all. Again, I'm not sure how relevant any of this is, but I'm including it in my article anyway.
Edwards was head-hunted by Damien Comolli when the Frenchman became director of football at Liverpool, turning down an increased salary of £250,000 a year at White Hart Lane to join the Anfield revolution. Levy was distraught.
Since then he has emerged as a senior figure at Liverpool, empowered by FSG to be part of the decision-making process, overseen by the manager, on big transfer targets after gaining their trust since his arrival in 2011.
His relationship with Rodgers deteriorated shortly after the former Liverpool manager signed a contract worth £6m a year just a week after Liverpool finished within two points of claiming the Barclays Premier League title.
They clashed over transfer strategy, although Rodgers went on record to insist that he always had the final say over the recruitment of players earmarked for the first-team squad.
In the end, Rodgers' resistance to what is obviously the way forward in football caused his downfall.
