Liverpool place faith in Moneyball and baseball's Brad Pitt

Billy Beane revolutionised the world of sports when he joined the Oakland Athletics, a team in Major League Baseball. Beane, a former player on the Bay Area team, implemented an innovative system for signing players through the study of data and statistics. This system allowed them to acquire players who had been let go by other teams and that fit their needs and, above all, their budget, making the Athletics a competitive team that qualified for the playoffs every year.

It was the famous 'Moneyball' that first appeared in a book about the data study and was finally brought to the big screen, with Brad Pitt playing Beane. Now that movie can change scenery and move onto the football pitch if Beane, vice president of baseball operations and minority shareholder of the Athletics, finally agrees to take on a role with Liverpool. At least that is the intention of Fenway Sports Group, the American company that is the majority shareholder of Liverpool.

In fact, Beane already spoke to the Liverpool Echo back in August about Liverpool and the way in which he views the decision-making process when it comes to signings and new additions.

"It [the term 'Moneyball'] 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 40 million pounds 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." Beane, who owns shares in Burnley and AZ Alkmaar, is the man chosen by Reds' owner John Henry to try to make the team's signings profitable by applying his 'Moneyball' method with the same success to the world of football as he had in baseball.