Liverpool nearly missed out on signing Mo Salah in 2017 as Jurgen Klopp preferred a different player

Liverpool had to persuade Jurgen Klopp to sign Mo Salah in 2017, with the former Reds boss preferring to make a move for a player he was more familiar with from Germany.

Though the £43m Liverpool spent on signing Salah eight years ago looks better and better with each passing year, with the Egyptian proving integral to first Klopp and now Arne Slot, the German manager still needed convincing about the club’s data-led approach when he first joined the club.

Rather than focusing on the eye-test – a subjective approach based on opinions – Liverpool had formed a recruitment department that relied on data and numbers to inform their decision-making. Ian Graham was the club’s head of research in 2017, around the time Salah – ranked at no.1 in FourFourTwo‘s list of the best right-wingers in the world right now – Virgil van Dijk, Sadio Mane and Andy Robertson were brought to Anfield, and highlights who Klopp actually wanted to sign ahead of Salah.

Liverpool signed Mo Salah but had to initially persuade Jurgen Klopp

Having been impressed with young German forward Julian Brandt, then of Bayer Leverkusen, Klopp urged Liverpool to try and bring him to the Premier League. He was soon won over by the club’s reasoning, however.

“Brandt is a good player and Jurgen would have known him a lot more,” Graham tells FourFourTwo. “Michael [Edwards], Dave Fallows and Barry Hunter, who led the recruitment department, did a great job of persuading Jurgen. A lot of bosses can’t be persuaded, it’s to Jurgen’s credit that he was.”

Klopp proved more receptive to data than predecessor Brendan Rodgers – Graham had got him onside by buttering him up during a convivial first meeting after the manager’s arrival.

“He hadn’t been exposed to much data analysis before, I don’t think he’d seen expected goals,” Graham adds. “I showed him analysis of Dortmund’s performances in 2014-15, when they were in relegation trouble at Christmas. They should have finished second (on xG), but they were hugely unlucky with finishing, for and against.

“I went through it game by game, pointing out how they should have won certain matches. He knew Dortmund were much better than the results were suggesting that season, and he was like, ‘Yeah, of course we should have f**king won that game, we battered them!’”

Rapport established, the recruitment department carefully chose how to present information to Klopp, whenever they thought a particular player was worth signing.

“He didn’t like to look through tables of numbers or charts,” Graham says. “The way to persuade him wasn’t to say, ‘Look Jurgen, Mo’s in the 95th percentile at this particular KPI’.

“It was to show him a video and say, ‘You know when Liverpool try to do this move and it breaks down? This is Mo in the same move, this is what he can do’.”