The Reds' successful use of statistics to drive transfer decisions has been backed by the man who pioneered such an approach in baseball
Liverpool’s shrewd transfer policy has been praised by the man who created the ‘Moneyball’ recruitment strategy in the United States.
Billy Beane’s pioneering use of sabremetrics - the empirical analysis of baseball statistics to decide recruitment decisions - enabled him to achieve success as general manager of Major League Baseball outfit Oakland Athletics despite having a much smaller budget than most of their rivals.
Other sports have since been inspired to adopt this strategy to try and spot under-valued players using data and statistics, most notably football.