Moneyball guru Billy Beane has lauded Liverpool for their astute work in the transfer market in recent seasons.
Beane was brought to fame when he begun using sabremetrics - the empirical analysis of baseball statistics to decide recruitment decisions - while in his role as General Manager of the Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics.
The Reds have spent big money on transfers in recent years, but Beane says it has been their ability to maximise the value of those signings, using Mohamed Salah as an example, which has lead to their recent success.
"It has a lot of different meanings. The assumption when that term is used is that you are always looking to spend as little as possible, which actually couldn't be further from the truth," Beane told the Liverpool Echo.
"Some business decisions - or sporting decisions - cost a lot, but they are worth far more than you put into them. For example: Michael Jordan. Whatever he was paid by the Chicago Bulls, he was worth exponentially more.
"We are ultimately trying to find undervalued assets and hope that the player value would continue to increase. The challenge in Oakland is that there were a lot of good decisions that cost a lot of money that we were not allowed to make.
"At Liverpool, a great example is Salah. They spent about £40m on him from Italy, which is a lot of money. At the time, people thought that was too much but as it turned out, he was worth far more than they paid for him.
"To me, that's a great example of exploiting a data advantage - spending a lot of money, but getting far more value out of it than what people expect."
