Not sure this has been posted before but I think it's an interesting article and the film is very good if anyone has thought about seeing it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/west-bromwich-albion/9218479/West-Brom-the-real-Moneyball-story-of-the-season-as-Liverpool-face-replacing-Damien-Comolli.htmlWest Brom the real Moneyball story of the season as Liverpool face replacing Damien Comolli
What next for Liverpool? When the American owners, John Henry and Tom Werner, arrived at the club they spoke impressively about their long term plans for rebuilding Liverpool as a force in English football.
By Duncan White
11:00PM BST 21 Apr 2012
With the sacking of Damien Comolli as director of football they have clearly come to question some of those plans — will they stick with the director of football model? Will they continue to apply Moneyball and statistical theories to football?
At the moment it is not clear what the owners’ strategy is. The timing of the decision to sack Comolli is explained by the need to give any new man time to get to work before the opening of the summer transfer window, but most clubs are already finalising their target lists and making their first approaches. Liverpool cannot afford to be left behind.
So will they return to a more traditional English-style hierarchy, with the manager all powerful? It seems highly unlikely.
Their problem seems to have been with Comolli not with the role itself. Indeed, they only need to look at Sunday’s opponents to see the director of football system as a working success: West Bromwich Albion are the closest thing to a Moneyball team in the Premier League.
People tend to mean what they want by Moneyball when they apply it to football.
The concept does not easily translate from baseball but, in basic terms, it means finding players in unexpected places, players that are undervalued because they are misunderstood, players whose statistics belie any subjective impression you may have of them.
It helps if these players are young because they should increase in value as they mature.
No club has been applying these principles more effectively than Albion. For the last five years Dan Ashworth has been director of football, having initially joined to coach in the academy.
As part of his duties he runs the Albion scouting network and does so much travelling himself in pursuit of talent that he has earned the nickname Marco Polo.
His track record is remarkable. He went to Russia to sign Peter Odemwingie and to Holland to get Jonas Olsson for a fraction of their true value.
Youssouf Mulumbu and Graham Dorrans were signed for a total of £275,000 and their combined value now probably exceeds £10 million. He saw potential in Jerome Thomas and Steven Reid when others had lost faith in them.
Albion have paid bigger fees when needed — Shane Long cost £4.5 million from Reading — but rarely do their signings lose much value. The one that did not work out was for Spanish midfielder Borja Valero, signed for nearly £5 million in 2008.
If Albion can do it, why can’t Liverpool? The big problem is that of scale. WBA do not have the same level of expectation of their players as Liverpool.
At this level, there are simply more bargains to be found. To find players who can get you into the Champions League is far harder — players of that quality are very rarely playing below themselves or available cheap.
It is hard to do what Ashworth is doing at Albion but it would be even harder at Liverpool unless the owners were prepared to be extraordinarily patient.
Time is another problem: Ashworth has been through relegation and promotion in his five years in the role at Albion.
It takes time to bring the right people in, whether it is scouts or coaches. And it takes time to judge whether the director of football is doing a good job himself — are his players good value for money?
Is the academy producing talent? In the context of the job, Comolli had only just got started at Liverpool.
The other problem is that the best people doing the job of director of football — Ashworth and Nicky Hammond at Reading — tend to be those who prefer working with a low profile.
That is something you cannot have for a club the size of Liverpool. It is going to be formidable challenge for the Fenway Group to find the right replacement — the number of credible candidates is very small. It could be the most important decision they make.
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Just kidding 
This is a tough one. I would have to go with Stilian Petrov. Not just because of his battle with cancer. He seems a very genuine bloke and he is a good player as well.