A “Moneyball” African All-Star Team Aims To Find The Next Yan Diomande

When former Houston Astros GM Jeff Luhnow made the move from baseball to soccer, one thing really surprised him.

“I didn’t quite appreciate or realize the enormous amount of pressure that the fans and media and stakeholders can put on a club to make a change in a coach.”

Luhnow is the CEO of Blue Crow Sports Group, which has Spanish side Leganes, French Ligue 1 side Le Havre and Mexican side Cancun Futbol Club in its portfolio of clubs.

New owners often like to make their mark straight after they buy a new team, but at Le Havre, which Blue Crow acquired this year, Luhnow says the last thing he wants to do is change something that is working. At Blue Crow’s other clubs, he learned this difference between baseball and soccer the hard way.

He says “it’s a lot easier in baseball to appreciate that you might be going through a lull and that there’s fluctuations throughout the season,” but in soccer there’s less time, and as players can only be bought or sold in the short transfer windows, changing a head coach is the only way to change the dynamic enough to potentially change a team’s trajectory.

Luhnow was part of the “Moneyball” revolution that swept through baseball in the 2000s, where teams introduced more data and analytics to gain an edge. He took that approach to another level, at one point employing a rocket scientist, and using analytics in player development. He won the World Series with the Houston Astros but was fired following the team’s sign stealing scandal.

Now, he’s trying to bring the Moneyball approach to soccer.

Bringing “Moneyball” to LaLiga

Luhnow’s not the first who’s tried it. The protagonist of the “Moneyball” story, Billy Beane swapped the Oakland A’s for Oakwell to help English third-tier side Barnsley come within three games of reaching the Premier League. And Fenway Sports has used analytics successfully at both the Boston Red Sox and at Liverpool FC.

Luhnow says he talked to Billy Beane about his experiences in soccer when making the move and says there are many issues that are consistent across elite sports. The big difference though is that soccer is a more dynamic game than baseball, making it a lot harder to draw insights from data or analytics, and you can’t be as confident in your results as in other sports.

However, he says this means the barriers to entry are higher “So once you accomplish something unique, whether you’re Red Bull or Brentford or whoever, it’s harder for others to just copy it.”

Lots of clubs talk about things like following the Brentford model, but it’s easier said than done as you need “culture that will do things in a different way, that will innovate and be willing to take some risks. And that’s something that’s hard to do for a lot of clubs.”

Blue Crow’s blueprint for success is to create a talent pathway, starting primarily with young players from Africa, and developing those players so they can perform at an elite level.

Finding The Next Yan Diomande

The posterboy for this blueprint is Yan Diomande, who broke into Leganes’ team at the end of last season, and after just ten games in La Liga, was sold to Bundesliga side RB Leipzig in the summer for around $23 million.

Sudeep Ramnani, founder of Blue Crow’s majority shareholder 885 Capital, which also backs the successful Baller League, says the case of Diomande is a ”great initial validation of Blue Crow’s ability to identify talent and to develop talent.”

Ramnani believes that the group’s talent identification and development methodology will allow them to find potential superstars earlier than other clubs and create a pipeline for them to develop and eventually move to Spain or France.

Blue Crow’s initial strategy had been to take players from Africa to Dubai at the age of 18 and give them a season playing, training and developing at Elite Falcons FC, which under Blue Crow won back-to-back promotions to reach the United Arab Emirates’ second tier. Yan Diomande also spent some time training with the Falcons as part of his development.

But Luhnow says the group has now shifted its strategy, exiting from the Elite Falcons, and instead aiming to develop young players capable of joining Leganes or one of Blue Crow’s other sides on their 18th birthday.

It’s doing this by creating an as-of-yet-unnamed all-star youth team in Botswana.

“African All-Stars”

Luhnow says this they’ve signed players from at least 15 countries across Africa and have a facility with a gym, dormitory and classrooms for the players’ education. He says this team will spend a lot of time traveling in Europe, playing against under-19 teams from Spain and France sort of like a youth version of the Brentford B team.

He says his dream is “someday in the not too distant future, this team from Botswana plays Real Madrid’s under 19 team and beats them” and every scout in the world starts paying attention to the team’s players.

Not every player will be a success, and Blue Crow’s multi-club strategy is partly about having a large portfolio of players to reduce the risk of fluctuations in form through the law of large numbers. The differing fortunes of Le Havre, who are mid-table in Ligue 1 at time of writing, and Leganes, who are quite far back in the race for promotion to La Liga, show the need for multiple clubs.

But if the group’s Moneyball strategy of a pan-African super team pays off, then in a few seasons, Leganes and Le Havre’s squads will be full of players looking to be the next Diomande.