In Ian Graham’s brilliant book How to win the Premier League , the former director of research at Liverpool laid out some fairly stark statistics.

Between 1992 and 2021, roughly half of all signings played under 50 per cent of their new team’s games over the first two seasons.

These were significant deals – they had to have cost over £8m to qualify. What was even more surprising was that it didn’t matter how high the fee was, the figure (46 per cent) stayed stubbornly the same.

It was not a question of the player not being good enough – just that the club signing him has misjudged his ability to fit into the team they are building.

Back when Graham was building the cutting edge data operation that has catapulted Liverpool to the summit of English football, this was the area they saw

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