'What happened to me was not fair' - former Liverpool transfer chief speaks out

Former Liverpool director of football Damien Comolli believes his treatment at the Reds was “unfair”.

The Frenchman was one of the very first hires by Fenway Sports Group when they took over the club in October 2010, with Comolli, who had previously been at Tottenham Hotspur in a similar capacity, tasked with implementing a data driven approach to player recruitment.

The use of data in recruitment was something that FSG were keen to bring into Liverpool from day one, allowing a couple of years for the team behind the scenes to get the data pipelines in place so that more rational decisions, removing as much element of risk as possible, could be made in the market.

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FSG principal John W. Henry had been enamoured with the idea of data, or ‘Moneyball’ as it became popularised through the Hollywood movie of the same name starring Brad Pitt, so much so that he had tried to bring Pitt’s real life character, Billy Beane, to the Boston Red Sox to implement the same sabermetric approach to baseball that had seen the Oakland Athletics upset the odds in the MLB with a roster pieced together for a fraction of the cost of their rivals.

Identifying undervalued talent was the goal, the kind of talent that had been hiding in plain sight, not used in the appropriate way by those who weren’t concerned with the science behind it all.

Comolli shared that vision and the love of data, something that he still does, and something that has been prominent in the success of French side Toulouse during his time as chairman, with Les Violets having won Ligue 2 in 2021/22 before