Why 'innovator' Sam Allardyce can make a difference at Leeds United

Nineteen years to the day since Eddie Gray’s Leeds were dismantled by Sam Allardyce’s Bolton at the Reebok, well-placed folk at Elland Road suggest the top flight’s most celebrated firefighter could be coming to save the day once again.

This morning’s biggest story in football was that Leeds are set to sack Javi Gracia and director of football, Victor Orta, and are in talks to appoint former Wanderers manager Allardyce, now 68.

Placed 17th in the Premier League and facing leaders Manchester City at the weekend, the job of keeping Leeds from the drop is by no means a simple one – with games against Newcastle, West Ham and Tottenham to come.

Allardyce has performed some notable rescue acts, his first establishing Wanderers among the elite in the early noughties. Since then, the Big Sam: Relegation survival specialist caricature has been something of a misnomer. He did turn around the fading fortunes at Sunderland, Crystal Palace and – to an extent – Blackburn Rovers, with the one blot on his club copybook his last top-flight position, at West Brom.

None of Everton, West Ham or Newcastle United were in especially perilous positions, certainly in comparison to Leeds at present, and yet the Red Adair tag has stuck with him for the last decade-and-a-half.

Of course, the inglorious way his short stint as England manager ended fed the narrative that he was somehow a footballing dinosaur, rather than an innovator. Even for someone so notoriously thick-skinned to criticism, that chapter cut him deep.

Within the game, his talents have always been more appreciated. Allardyce was branded a “genius” by Pep Guardiola a couple of years back, and while social media may scoff at his recent links to the Leeds job, many Bolton supporters will vouch that many of the negative insights made down the years have been lazy and inaccurate.

Consider any of the four goals that beat Leeds that May afternoon, sending youngster Alan Smith walking off the field in floods of tears. World Cup winner Youri Dorkaeff’s clever run picked out by a sumptuous, rolled pass from Jay-Jay Okocha, or Kevin Nolan running on to another brilliant ball from the Nigerian wizard to roll in the fourth, or as commentator Alan Parry put it, “another nail in the Leeds coffin.”

Though there were times when Bolton had to be pragmatic and functional, there were many others when the spontaneity and skills of his foreign legion would take over and make a completely mockery of the route one critics.

Allardyce was far hungrier for modern thinking than people gave him credit for, and it came to pass that Bolton Wanderers under his watch effectively became football’s first data driven club.

Writing in his new book “Expected Goals” author and respected journalist Rory Smith delves into the story of how football has embraced data analytics, from Charles Hughes and the ‘Position of Maximum Opportunity’ to the multi-million-pound in-house data mines now created at top clubs around the globe. Bolton’s role in establishing practices now considered commonplace features heavily.

Back in the late nineties, Allardyce had famously convinced Eddie Davies and Phil Gartside to invest in ProZone, which as a second-tier club had been completely unheard of at the time. Thus began the building of his famous ‘War Room’ – including data analysts like Dave Fallows, Gavin Fleig and Ed Sulley, who would mine the numbers in a way that nobody else had managed to that point.

“What emerged from Allardyce’s laboratory was – at least outside of (Valeriy) Lobanovskyi’s Dinamo Kyiv – the first data-driven team, certainly in football and possibly in sport more broadly,” Smith wrote.

“Two years before Billy Beane’s epiphany in Oakland started to transform baseball and a decade before football clubs started investing heavily in their data departments.

“Allardyce was writing almost exactly the same story in strikingly similar circumstances, distilling what he had found in the data into a set of unorthodox principles that defined how his team played.

“He had called them his ‘fantastic four’. He knew that, if his team kept 16 clean sheets over the course of a 38-game season, it would not be relegated. He knew that if his team scored first it would have a 70 per cent chance of winning a game. He knew that if players covered more distance at a speed above 5.5 metres per second than their opponents, the chances of winning would go through the roof. And he knew that a third of all goals came from set pieces.

“He knew all that, rather than believed it, because that is what the numbers had told him. And so he built a team in accordance with the knowledge that he had gleaned.

“Data suffused almost everything Bolton did. It went beyond the fact that Allardyce and his assistant, Phil Brown, drilled their players relentlessly on set pieces, defending them and attacking them. He learned that, in the average game, the ball switched between teams – what we now call turnovers – more than 400 times.

“That highlighted to him the importance of switching immediately into a defensive mindset once possession had been lost, or sparking into life as soon as it was won back.

“Ten years later, a succession of German coaches would have the same insight and develop the counter-pressing game in response. Allardyce, in some lights, got there first. What Bolton did in the early 2000s, seems sophisticated even 20 years on; at the time, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest it was revolutionary.”