Harry's Games by John Crace

Weymouth, to snap up talent on the cheap that everyone else had missed.’
    In a post-match television interview after Spurs had lost to Wigan, Sky’s Rob Palmer jokingly referred to Redknapp as a ‘wheeler-dealer’.
    â€˜I’m not a wheeler-dealer. Fuck off!’ Redknapp snapped before storming out. The conversation continued off camera. ‘Don’t say I’m a fucking wheeler-dealer. I’m a fucking football manager.’
    Redknapp’s hypersensitivity to the word ‘wheeler-dealer’ was no doubt explained by his having recently been charged with tax evasion. Taken in a certain context, wheeler-dealer can be shorthand for a wide-boy. But in its other sense of a person who loves the thrill of buying and selling, who can’t resist a deal, Redknapp is most definitely a wheeler-dealer, and a very capable one at that.
    Back in 2003, Michael Lewis wrote the bestselling
Moneyball
, a gripping account of how the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team (known in the US as the A’s) – with a payroll of about $41 million – took on and beat much higher-rated teams, such as the New York Yankees, that could afford to pay their players three times as much, by ignoring the conventional methods of assessing the value of a player to a team. Instead of using the same statistics as every other team – batting averages and stolen bases – to judge a player’s ability, the A’s’ analysis, known as ‘sabermetrics’, led them to believe that other criteria, such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage, which were undervalued by everyone else, were a far better guide to potential. As a result, the A’s were able to recruit a number of players in whom the bigger teams hadno interest at a salary level the club could afford. They became competitive as a result by setting an American league record of twenty consecutive victories and winning the American League West in the process.
    Following the success of the A’s and the publication of
Moneyball
, some baseball traditionalists dismissed sabermetrics as a fluky piece of back-room bullshit. But just as many, including, significantly, the big spenders such as the Yankees and the Red Sox, who had lost out when the A’s out-smarted them in the draft and transfer market, thought there was something in it and employed their own sabermetricians. The geeks had finally found a place at the high table of the all-American game.
    The potential for
Moneyball
analysis wasn’t lost on other sports, either, although football has yet to come up with a definitive measure for ranking the effectiveness of player stats. If it had, you can’t imagine Liverpool paying £35 million for Andy ‘He’s big . . . he’s English’ Carroll or Chelsea forking out £50 million for Fernando ‘He’s quick . . . he’s Spanish’ Torres. But many clubs now employ people to spend days in front of a screen replaying old matches, searching for the holy grail of those features of players’ performance that have previously been disregarded and mark them out as something special. Used properly,
Moneyball
cuts both ways; not only does it help you to pick up potential match-winners on the cheap, it helps to prevent you from paying over the odds for duds.
    Redknapp is a long way off being a football geek, or any type of geek for that matter – he likes to give the impression he can barely operate a DVD player. But there is a sense in which he instinctively grasped the principles of
Moneyball
long before the boffins turned it into a science. He had a feel for the kind of player he was after and scoured the country to find them on the cheap. You could argue that he had little choice, as Bournemouth didn’t have the resources to pay a few million for the big stars;but then neither did any other manager in the lower divisions and Redknapp consistently outplayed them in the transfer