Harvard physicist opens up on role played in Liverpool transfers and matches

Liverpool fans may expect the club to have highly-intelligent people working behind the scenes at the club - but that might not extend to a scientist with a PhD in physics from Harvard.

William Spearman, who joined the Reds in March 2018, has taken an unusual route into football.

Now working as Liverpool ’s lead data scientist, he first started looking into sports analytics shortly after working on the project to discover the Higgs boson particle at CERN.

Born in Chicago, Spearman began by delving into American football and baseball - but it was football that ultimately captured his imagination.

“The thing I’d really enjoyed about physics was working on a problem that there’s no established solution for,” he told Liverpoolfc.com .

“But towards the end of my PhD, I found myself repeating the same type of analysis others had done previously.

“I wanted to work in an area that wasn’t as established, so sports data seemed really interesting to me.

“I was very interested to learn about the work being done in American football and baseball and then I got my first taste of proper football data and that was just fascinating.

“It’s a much more complex sport and that’s what makes it much more interesting to me.”

As his appreciation of the beautiful game continued to grow, Spearman’s next step to joining the Reds on Merseyside came when he and a friend decided to analyse the use of space within football.

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