Michael Edwards – the soccer visionary FSG merely can not dwell with out

This is an up to date model of an article first revealed in June 2020.

Perhaps the perfect place to begin is the story Harry Redknapp tells when he’s requested about Michael Edwards and the exceptional chain of occasions that first took a pissed off IT trainer from Peterborough to a place of energy and affect at Liverpool.

Redknapp had been Portsmouth supervisor when Edwards — or ‘Eddie’, as he’s generally identified — was given his massive break in soccer and, over a decade since they final labored collectively, he obtained again in contact some time in the past to request a favour.

“I’d met a guy who had only a few weeks to live,” Redknapp says. “This poor guy was in his early forties. He had been married only a couple of years and he knew he was dying. Someone had got in touch and said, ‘Harry, he’d love to meet you. He’s football mad’. So I went round to his house one Sunday and spent a couple of hours with him, his wife and his in-laws. He was an amazing boy, so strong, and he told me it was his dream to go to Liverpool.

“I rang Michael Edwards and, straight away, he went, ‘Harry, not a problem’. I arranged a car, I got a driver. Eddie sorted everything else. There wasn’t any of the, ‘Oh, Harry, I’m sorry, mate, you know how busy I am’, that you can get sometimes.

“He put himself out, he organised the full day and treated him incredibly. We have to remember we are in a position where we can make a difference to people’s lives. Sadly, this guy died four or five weeks later. Eddie had got him into the directors’ box, introduced him to everybody — Kenny Dalglish, Jurgen Klopp — the boy had the best day of his life. Loved every minute of it.”

It was all finished with no publicity, after all, as a result of Edwards had a strict understanding with Liverpool that, so far as the media are involved, he would relatively hold everybody a protracted arm’s distance away and talk about as recurrently as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Edwards was the sporting director who recognized Klopp as supervisor and introduced in, amongst others, Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane, Alisson and Virgil van Dijk.

It was the gathering of gamers that helped Liverpool finish their 30-year look ahead to a league title and turned a drifting large into the champions of England, Europe and the world, surpassing even the achievements of the membership’s sides from the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.

Yet the paradox, at a time when one of many banners on the Kop learn “Champions of Everything”, was that Edwards didn’t also have a Wikipedia web page. If you typed in his title, the primary end result was that of an ex-pro from Notts County.

Loads has modified since then for the University of Sheffield graduate, who has simply been persuaded to return to Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s American proprietor, practically two years since leaving the membership. Edwards can be returning to a brand new, greater function as FSG’s director of soccer operations.

He can have a outstanding say in selecting Klopp’s successor and his affect will shortly change into obvious when he brings in Richard Hughes, previously Bournemouth’s technical director, to fill the vacant sporting director place at Anfield. Liverpool, as soon as once more, can be counting on Edwards to work his magic behind the scenes.

There was a protracted interval, nonetheless, in his first spell on Merseyside that the one {photograph} of Edwards within the media’s possession got here from a Just Giving fundraising web page for the 2018 Manchester half-marathon, for which the listing of donations included £5,000 from a sure Mr J Klopp. Edwards may freely stroll round Anfield with out anyone recognising him and that was precisely how he preferred it.

“He isn’t the most stereotypical football director,” Redknapp says. “In fact, he is probably the most un-stereotypical. You won’t often see him in a suit. He isn’t a go-getting, big-personality kind of guy. You look at him, he used to have this spiky hair… a very inoffensive, quiet guy. You’d probably think he should be standing behind the goal.”

Don’t be mistaken, although. Others speak about Edwards as a fiercely pushed, clever and bold particular person who possesses the streak of ruthlessness that’s usually required to succeed in the highest in soccer.

Edwards has upset a couple of folks alongside the best way and was one of many three members of workers from Anfield cited within the alleged hacking of Manchester City’s scouting system in 2013. Liverpool provided a £1million ($1.3m at at present’s charges) settlement, together with a legally binding confidentiality settlement, to cease the matter going any additional. As relations between the 2 golf equipment deteriorated over the next decade, Edwards’ presence was one of many causes there was solely a skinny veneer of cordiality at boardroom degree.

Not that Liverpool’s proprietor, John W Henry, or his colleagues at FSG, can have cared too vastly about that element once they lastly obtained wind that Edwards was, in spite of everything, open to the concept of main the membership into the post-Klopp period. 

Edwards was a youth and reserve-team footballer at Peterborough United who by no means totally made the grade and, having been launched on the age of 18, skilled to be a trainer earlier than getting his first job in a neighborhood highschool. He is the lorry driver’s son who grew up in Fareham, Hampshire, and developed a fetish for numbers and statistics. The “laptop guru” as he was known as in a single headline.

There is one story that ought to make it clear how extremely the 44-year-old is regarded at Anfield. It goes again to the evening — June 25, 2020 — when Manchester City misplaced 2-1 at Chelsea and the defeat meant Liverpool had received their first title since 1990. 

When the ultimate whistle sounded at Stamford Bridge, the Liverpool chairman, Tom Werner, pulled out his cell phone to get in contact with the individuals who had made it occur.

And the primary individual to obtain a congratulatory textual content from Liverpool’s chairman? Klopp, maybe? No, it was Michael Edwards.

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After every part that has occurred since Klopp arrived on Merseyside, it might probably really feel like a trick of the creativeness that Liverpool gave critical consideration to hiring Eddie Howe relatively than the person who, eight and a half years later, counts as Anfield royalty.

Howe was on a three-man shortlist with Klopp and Carlo Ancelotti for the supervisor’s place and it was a part of Edwards’ job, then as Liverpool’s technical director, to find out who had the excellent credentials to exchange Brendan Rodgers.

Ancelotti handed all the factors by way of his file within the Champions League and the statistics regarding his groups at Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea and Real Madrid, however his switch file counted towards him as a result of the system devised by Edwards and Liverpool’s analysts intentionally positioned much less emphasis on a supervisor’s recruitment in his first 12 months.

Their principle was {that a} supervisor won’t have the final word say when it got here to switch enterprise throughout his first season however, in years two, three, 4 and 5, that supervisor’s affect could be better and signings wouldn’t occur with out his enter.

A whole lot of Ancelotti’s recruits had been deemed to be on the older aspect and that jarred with Liverpool’s pondering. Edwards wished gamers aged 26 or below who had been approaching their peak years and would nonetheless have a re-sale worth three or 4 years later.

Howe, now at Newcastle United, was managing Bournemouth and had a popularity for creating youthful gamers and taking part in engaging soccer.

He had additionally been a participant at Portsmouth when Edwards was beginning out on the south coast membership. Their friendship, nonetheless, by no means got here into it. Howe didn’t have the expertise of competing within the Champions League, whereas Klopp ticked each field by way of achievement, switch enterprise and taking part in model. Edwards made his advice to FSG and left them to get on with the enterprise of constructing it occur.

Since then, maybe the perfect indicator of Edwards’ affect is to contemplate Klopp’s line-up for his first Liverpool sport — a goalless draw at Tottenham Hotspur on October 17, 2015 — and evaluate it to the workforce that’s now taking over Manchester City and Arsenal to win the title.

Simon Mignolet was Liverpool’s goalkeeper that day behind a again 4 of Nathaniel Clyne, Martin Skrtel, Mamadou Sakho and Alberto Moreno. Lucas Leiva, Emre Can and James Milner fashioned the midfield and the entrance three had Adam Lallana and Philippe Coutinho on both aspect of Divock Origi. Liverpool’s substitutes had been Adam Bogdan, Kolo Toure, Jerome Sinclair, Joao Carlos Teixeira, Connor Randall, Jordon Ibe and Joe Allen, who by no means did fulfil Rodgers’ description as “the Welsh Xavi”.

Edwards helped Klopp construct nearly a completely new XI however, to begin with, he needed to get the arrogance of the supervisor and create a relationship the place they totally understood each other.

“It is a very good relationship,” Klopp stated. “He is a very thoughtful person. We don’t always have to have the same opinion from the first second of a conversation, but we finish pretty much all our talks with the same opinion. Or similar opinions.”

It was Edwards, for instance, who pressed Liverpool to signal Salah and satisfied Klopp to ignore the actual fact the Egyptian had struggled beforehand with Chelsea.

Klopp’s desire was stated to be Bayer Leverkusen’s Julian Brandt, a future Germany worldwide he knew properly from his time managing Borussia Dortmund, however Edwards continued in his perception that Salah was the higher choice. Klopp listened, took it in and determined to belief his colleague. Salah has since established himself as an genuine Premier League nice and a serial breaker of scoring information.

Edwards’ success can not simply be measured by the gamers Liverpool have signed when a few of his extra spectacular enterprise has revolved across the ones the membership have moved out — and his capacity to get some enormous switch charges.

Coutinho’s £142m switch to Barcelona was the most important deal, however Liverpool additionally raised vital sums by offloading fringe gamers. Ibe and Brad Smith went to Bournemouth for a mixed £21m. Kevin Stewart moved to Hull for £8m. Leicester City paid £12.5m for Danny Ward and Crystal Palace paid £26m for Sakho.

All this was masterminded, to a big diploma, from Edwards’ first-floor workplace at Liverpool’s coaching floor. His door was at all times open. It was instantly reverse Klopp’s workplace and the poster-sized “Class of Melwood” image on the wall was as a result of yearly the complete workers — from the safety and kitchen employees to the first-team gamers and supervisor — posed for an all-in-it-together {photograph}.

Edwards and Klopp, the older man by 12 years, had been described by one colleague as “kindred spirits”, freely wandering out and in of one another’s places of work. During the switch window, Edwards’ tv could be switched on to indicate the rolling news protection. The two males swapped opinions, they debated and generally they disagreed. They additionally spent many lunchtimes taking part in padel after getting hooked on the game throughout a winter coaching camp in Tenerife. They even organized for a court docket to be constructed on the coaching floor.

The two males, it’s understood, had been now not as shut by the point Edwards introduced his departure within the type of an open letter that stunned many individuals given he had by no means wished to talk publicly earlier than.

“I had always planned to cap my time at the club to a maximum of 10 years,” he wrote. “I’ve loved working here, but I am a big believer in change. It’s good for the individual and, in a work setting, good for the employer, too. Over my time here, we have changed so many things (hopefully for the better) but someone new brings a different perspective, new ideas and can hopefully build on (or change) the things that have been put in place beforehand.”

Edwards went on to eulogise about his assistant, Julian Ward, who was taking on as sporting director, whereas praising his different colleagues within the recruitment division as “geniuses… without doubt the best in their field in world football.” And Klopp? “Being manager of Liverpool is probably harder than playing (the shirt hangs heavy, so they say), but he has delivered so much joy to the fans and reasserted so many of the club’s historical values that he will go down in history as one of the club’s managerial greats.”

Rodgers, in distinction, had seen Edwards as a menace to his authority at a time when the workings of Liverpool’s “transfer committee” had created all types of politics behind the scenes. It was an ungainly title and an ungainly time. Rodgers was not a fan of the setup and it turned a supply of remorse inside Anfield that the membership’s proprietor had ever coined the title.

In actuality, it was the form of operation that would have been discovered at nearly each main membership, the place there was an understanding that the supervisor was too busy to go on abroad scouting missions himself and change into embroiled in negotiations that would take months. Edwards was a part of a bunch that included the then chief govt, Ian Ayre, together with the analytics workforce, senior teaching and scouting workers and generally representatives of the membership’s business division.

Rodgers nonetheless had the facility to veto transfers and, early on, was most likely entitled to query Edwards’ information. Liverpool had made a flurry of signings — Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto and Tiago Ilori, to call however three — who handed by way of Anfield with out making a beneficial influence. Lazar Markovic was the most costly failure, costing £20m, and never everybody appreciated Edwards’ often blunt, very matter-of-fact method.

Scouts had been moved out, some unhappily. Mel Johnson, the talent-spotter who had really helpful Jordan Henderson, claimed in a single interview that Liverpool missed out on Dele Alli as a result of the membership relied on their “computer and stats-led” method. The sport, Johnson complained, was “not played on a computer”, declaring that skilled soccer folks had been being edged out. “Some of these IT guys have come straight out of university and landed jobs at top clubs, despite having no football background whatsoever.”

The politics ultimately contributed to Rodgers, now at Celtic, shedding his job on Merseyside. Ultimately, although, he might need to just accept that he underestimated Edwards, notably when it got here to the £29m signing of Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim.

Rodgers had not been eager on Firmino whereas Edwards and the scouting workforce had been sure the Brazilian could be a really perfect wearer of Liverpool’s colors. Chief scout Barry Hunter had tracked him in Germany and the numbers confirmed how, by being concerned in 45 league targets within the two seasons as much as 2015, Firmino was the second-highest performing Brazilian in Europe, second solely to Neymar, then at Paris Saint-Germain. Rodgers remained unconvinced and, to start with, Firmino was used on the precise wing.

But it didn’t work out badly. “One of the questions I always get asked is: ‘Who was/is your favourite player?’,” Edwards wrote in his open letter. “That’s a really difficult question to answer, so I won’t even try. All I will say is my dog is called Bobby.”

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When Barry Fry was requested if he had any specific reminiscences of Michael Edwards, the previous Peterborough United supervisor needed to apologise.

“I’m embarrassed to say no,” Fry, now the League One aspect’s director of soccer, informed The Athletic. “I don’t remember the boy at all, I’m sorry.”

Edwards had been a part of a junior soccer academy in Southampton earlier than being really helpful to Peterborough for his or her youth system, happening to signal a two-year apprenticeship at London Road.

“Probably not the most talented, but he worked hard,” is the decision of 1 former team-mate. “A proper squad player, who made the best of what he’d got. He was never going to be a star but he was always quite dependable. And very clever. He was probably old for his time, the way he thought about everything and the way he spoke. You could tell he had a good head on his shoulders.”

Edwards was a right-back who would often be moved right into a holding midfield function and, although he was not considered loud or a shouter, there was one event when he turned on two team-mates and accused them of pondering they had been “big-time”.

“There were two colleges in the area,” one other former Peterborough participant says. “Some of us — the ones who never got the better qualifications — went to Huntingdon College. Michael went to Cambridge to do leisure and tourism with the more intelligent lads, one day a week. Academically, he was very able. On the pitch, you could see he understood the game.”

It didn’t work out, although. Edwards left Peterborough with out making a first-team look and needed to make a brand new profession for himself. He went again to varsity and enrolled for college, acquiring a level in enterprise administration and informatics. He returned to Peterborough to begin his first educating job within the city, however colleagues say he missed being round soccer and was not enthused by his new occupation.

His breakthrough got here in 2003 when Portsmouth agreed to tackle Prozone, the soccer knowledge firm. Other golf equipment had already signed up and Simon Wilson, one in every of Edwards’ former Peterborough team-mates, was within the related division at close by Southampton.

“I said to Simon we had won a contract with Portsmouth and needed an analyst,” Barry McNeill, then Prozone’s enterprise growth supervisor, says. “He rolled off a few names and said, ‘There’s one guy I know who’s probably not happy where he is, why don’t you have a chat with him?’.”

Edwards was in his early twenties. “We found him working as an IT teacher,” McNeill says. “He clearly had pretty low motivation for that vocation. I interviewed him at a service station between Peterborough and the M1. I explained Prozone, showed him the technology and within a month he was on-site at Portsmouth’s training ground.”

Though Edwards won’t have loved educating, McNeill thinks the expertise hardened him for the soccer enterprise. “The first few years (of teaching) are the toughest because you are totally out of your depth. You need a spine. That was probably great preparation.”

This was a time when knowledge was nonetheless comparatively new to soccer and, all these years later, it’s unusual to listen to one in every of Edwards’ fellow analysts say that “it was only the Sun on a Monday that had passing and possession stats”.

Redknapp had been persuaded by his assistant, Jim Smith, that Prozone was price a go. Smith had been the first-ever supervisor to take it on at Derby County. Steve McClaren, one in every of Smith’s assistants at Derby, then took it to Manchester United. Sam Allardyce, then at Bolton Wanderers, was one other advocate. And, as quickly as phrase obtained out that Sir Alex Ferguson was utilizing it at Old Trafford, different golf equipment began to comply with.

“I would be in Sam’s (Allardyce) office after games,” McNeill says. “If they had beaten Portsmouth, Sam would say to Harry, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why have you not got this? Why don’t you have it? It is as expensive as your cheapest squad player’. He would almost embarrass people to jump on the bandwagon. Harry would have taken a lot more of that from his peers and Jim Smith would have been having a word in his ear.”

Even so, it took some time for Redknapp to become familiar with it.

“There is a famous story where ‘Eddie’ is trying to get through to Harry,” one in every of Edwards’ former associates says. “This is folklore in analyst circles. Harry said, ‘Does your computer say we are going to win today?’. Eddie said ‘yes’ quite flippantly. They lost and Harry quipped, ‘Maybe your computer can play next time’. Nobody even knows if it is true, but we all repeat it.”

In Edwards’ early days, Redknapp known as to ask why he couldn’t get something out of a CD-ROM stuffed with participant knowledge. It turned out Redknapp had put it into the CD participant of his automotive.

Edwards had his personal workplace at Portsmouth and was of an age when he may combine with the gamers with out it seeming uncommon. “On the team bus, for example, he would be with the lads and we would play Mario Kart,” Gary O’Neil, their former midfielder, says. “You might have an eight-person league and Ed would be in it. He didn’t overstep the line, though. He wouldn’t be on lads’ nights out because he was, technically, staff. We were good friends and he came to my wedding.”

O’Neil, now the supervisor of Wolves, remembers Redknapp by no means beforehand being stats-oriented, however one thing will need to have gone proper as a result of Edwards adopted Portsmouth’s supervisor to Spurs in 2009.

“Michael came to Portsmouth as a very young analyst,” Redknapp says. “I remember a massive game, the year we stayed up (2005-06), at Fulham. We were second-bottom and he put this video together to play on the coach. He was scared to show it because it took the mickey out of me. I thought it was a great laugh. He was a smashing lad and when I went to Tottenham I took him with me.”

Edwards stayed at White Hart Lane for nearly two years earlier than Damien Comolli, then Liverpool’s director of soccer, headhunted him as a part of FSG’s directions to implement a brand new data-led method, in line with their administration of baseball’s Boston Red Sox.

Comolli had beforehand been at Spurs, whose chairman, Daniel Levy, was dismayed to find Liverpool had taken away one other of their key males.

Spurs had an unique settlement on the time with a knowledge firm known as Decision Technology and Liverpool wished to see if they might muscle in. Edwards, nonetheless, persuaded his new bosses to go away Decision Technology alone and goal Dr Ian Graham, the info scientist who helped run their operation.

The two males had been on the identical flight to an analytics convention in Boston, Massachusetts. It was an eight-hour flight and, 37,000 toes within the air, Edwards satisfied Graham to hitch him as Liverpool’s head of analysis. The activity was aided by the actual fact Graham was a boyhood Liverpool supporter. Graham, who held a Cambridge doctorate in theoretical physics, knowledgeable Spurs when he returned to England and that started a working relationship that continues to this present day.

Graham took a key function at Anfield till quitting in November 2022, Liverpool’s worst season of the Klopp period, to begin his personal enterprise. A few months later, he launched Ludonautics, a sports activities advisory enterprise, and was reunited with the person with whom he had shared so {many professional} highs. Edwards took a consultancy function, giving him a degree of independence that was not at all times there throughout his years at Anfield. 

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What folks generally neglect about Klopp’s title-winning season at Anfield is that they did it whereas spending significantly lower than the vast majority of Premier League golf equipment.

Liverpool’s web switch spend of £92.4m from the earlier 5 years was lower than Watford’s, not even half that of Brighton & Hove Albion or Aston Villa and a good bit behind Mike Ashley’s Newcastle United. There was solely Crystal Palace, Sheffield United, Southampton and Norwich City from England’s prime division with a decrease web spend in that point. Manchester City’s complete was £505.6m, Manchester United’s £378.9m. And that, in no small half, was as a result of Edwards’ experience.

All of which makes it simpler to know why Liverpool have been virtually obsessive of their makes an attempt to influence him to return to the membership.

As one individual with inside information of analytics informed The Athletic in 2020, talking anonymously to guard their relationships: “They have barely had a failed signing. I don’t think that can continue, I don’t think anyone is that good. If you get 15 out of 15 transfers right, it can’t always be that way. He (Edwards) is over-performing and it will regress to a mean at some point.”

It was actually a far cry from the time, in 2017, when a web based petition was arrange by a disgruntled Liverpool fan campaigning for Edwards to be sacked. The petition rustled up 36 votes and the primary remark — “he’s useless, just useless” — didn’t age properly.

It was Edwards who satisfied Liverpool concerning the potential of Andy Robertson at Hull City to flourish at a better degree and change into one of many excellent full-backs in world soccer.

It was Edwards once more who insisted when Barcelona signed Coutinho in 2018 {that a} one-off clause was written into the deal to stipulate that the Catalan membership must pay a £100m premium to signal another Liverpool participant over the next two years. He knew Barca would possibly come after their elite gamers and had the foresight to verify it couldn’t occur until it meant some mind-boggling sums.

Colleagues discuss concerning the interval in 2018 when Edwards had it in thoughts that Real Madrid, their opponents in that season’s Champions League ultimate, would possibly more and more be interested in the concept of signing Salah, Firmino or Mane. Liverpool’s response was to tie all three to new contracts, none with launch clauses.

Edwards will be robust. He was unflinching when Can, coming to the tip of his contract, informed the membership he would signal a brand new one however wished a launch clause in it. There was a stand-off. Edwards refused to budge and Can was allowed to go away on a free switch relatively than the membership setting a precedent.

What won’t ever change, it appears, is Edwards’ reticence on the subject of letting us hear what his voice seems like.

“You’d never imagine the guy sat in the tiny Prozone portakabin at Portsmouth would go on to be the guy who plays such a big role at the biggest club in the world,” says O’Neil.

Good luck, too, looking for a photograph of Edwards on the pitch with the Champions League trophy from the evening Liverpool beat Tottenham to change into six-time European Cup winners, including Madrid, 2019, to the listing of Istanbul, 2005, in addition to Rome, 1977 and 1984, plus Wembley, 1978, and Paris, 1981.

Klopp invited all his workers onto the rostrum to hitch within the celebrations. Edwards, nonetheless, most popular to maintain to the sides and take images of the jubilant Liverpool supporters. He consoled a few of his former colleagues from Tottenham, together with Levy, and helped be certain that Liverpool’s equipment man obtained an image with the trophy.

Then the quiet man of Anfield disappeared into the background, simply the best way he likes it.

(Top images: Michael Edwards, left, and John W Henry; by Getty Images)