Liverpool’s outgoing director of research believes the Reds are not as poor as some have indicated this season.
The Premier League giants nearly won four trophies last season, but are now struggling in the Premier League, out of the domestic cups, and likely crashing out of the Champions League in the round of 16.
However, Dr. Ian Graham, who is leaving the club at the end of the season, sees positives in their performances.
While speaking at the Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit in London, he stated: “In this situation when the team has been going through a difficult time but the underlying numbers or underlying performances aren’t as bad as results would suggest, that is the time when it is nice to be the data person as it is a very easy message to sell inside the club that we aren’t as bad as everyone says we are and we’re not as bad as even you may think we are.
“Given the difficulties we’ve had achieving results, our underlying performances are good. And in the long term we should worry about underlying performance and not the results in the last three games.
“I think it was Arsene Wenger that said he wasn’t interested in the result of the next game, he was interested in the result of the next 10 games.
“It is a much more difficult message to sell when we have had a season like last season where the message was we weren’t a 90-plus points team. Very few teams in history have underlying performances that are 90-point performances, so that message of ‘we’re not as good as you might think we are’ based purely on results is a little bit more difficult to sell.
“Inside a club, when we are doing worse than performances suggest, is the time to get people onside as you have got a very positive message that very few other people in the club are giving.
“When future results reflect the underlying performance that gives some basis for you to say ‘look, the data analysis has some grounding in reality’. I’m not saying our performance was good against Real Madrid but some of those goals had large elements of luck or unexplained variants included in them.”