Jurgen Klopp’s master plan is to win with minimum effort
More of the same
If this sounds familiar to Liverpool fans today, it is because he is following that same strategy that saw him accomplish the nearly impossible, wrestling the title away from Bayern. Remember when everyone was shaking their heads and snickering behind their hands when Klopp brought on a throw-in coach? No one is laughing now.
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He not only has a specialist coach for dead balls, he has a sports psychologist, a philosopher, and other specialists on board that you wouldn’t usually associate with a sports team. He has applied a philosophy to do everything within his power (within the rules) to give his teams the best possible chance for success. And he is using science and data to do it.
So, I believe it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that given everything that is in his experience, he and his staff have planned this current campaign very carefully match by match, using data analytics, game theory, and scientific projection analysis, that was developed and pioneered by Dortmund over a decade ago, and has been adopted to some degree by every top tier side in European football.
Most fans are unaware that at every match, home or away, there is a scientific data analysis crew in the stands somewhere, keeping tabs on heat maps, heart rates and rhythms, and a plethora of other data that teams utilize in real time to make on field adjustments and substitutions.
This data driven scientific real time analysis gives club managers information and data to effectively assess and know instantly when a players work rates are declining, for instance. What is more it can predict at which point in a match where a player can be expected to drop off in form. Teams track this data for their players over an entire season and that data base grows from season to season. They also maintain a similar database for every opposing player they may face in any given season.