When Moneyball works too well: Milan, Toulouse and what happens when the nerds take over

Even the most brilliant minds still haven't figured out how to stop the ball from bouncing.

Before becoming a co-owner at Toulouse, Luke Bornn had worked as an executive with the Sacramento Kings and as the director of analytics with Roma in Serie A. Before that, he was a professor at Harvard. And before that, he spent some time at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

To address what you're thinking: "[I] built bombs," he joked.

Not really. He worked on a problem where he helped prevent helicopters from falling out of the sky. One bullet hole in a propeller? Totally fine. Two bullet holes in a propeller? No one knows. Three? That thing suddenly drops back to Earth. By using little sensors scattered across the helicopter, Bornn helped discover that you could detect minor changes in the vibrations of the chopper as the holes in the propellers piled up. A similar process is now used to determine when bridges are on the verge of collapse.

Compared to that, this whole soccer thing should've been easy. But there were two big problems, then and now: randomness and rules.

In Bornn's first season with Toulouse, they missed automatic promotion from France's second division by two points. "You think, 'Geez, if I had done that right earlier in the season or if I had the wherewithal to spot this error after the second game instead of after the fifth game, we maybe would have won another game," he told me. "'We would have been promoted.' That's how close it is, and there's so much randomness."

Instead, they entered a two-leg playoff with Ligue 1 club Nantes. Over the pair of matches, the clubs played to a stalemate, two goals apiece. Except, Nantes stayed up because of France's away-goals rule.

"A tiebreaker is why we didn't get promoted," Bornn said. "But I think the nature of sports is that it feels like there's so many little things you can always do better. And so there's this constant struggle to figure out where you should focus your time and attention. And it was actually a good experience because it forced everyone to realize little decisions matter."

The next season, they got more of the little decisions right, won Ligue 2 outright, and produced a better goal differential (plus-49) than the second- and third-place teams combined. The following year was supposed to be a consolidation campaign: figure out which players to move on without weakening the team too much and establish Toulouse as a Ligue 1-quality team that was only at risk of relegation if a bunch of things went seriously wrong.

Toulouse did that, finishing 12th in their first year in Ligue 1 under the new ownership. But then they did another thing, too: they won the French Cup. They didn't just win it, either. They won 5-1 and they won against the team, Nantes, that had kept them out of Ligue 1 two years prior. It was the culmination of an alternative, analytical team-building approach -- but not because they had a trophy to show for it. No, simply because it had to be.

"The minute we won the cup, I had to totally disconnect from Toulouse," Bornn said. "It's totally independent."

Part of the reason Toulouse experienced so much success is that the nerds became the owners. Along with "Moneyball" hero Billy Beane, Bornn is part of an ownership group with the private equity firm RedBird Capital. First, they bought Toulouse in 2020. Since they were in the second division and French football was in something of an economic crisis, the club was cheap.

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However, Toulouse still played in one of the bigger stadiums in France -- it had hosted matches at the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2016. Plus, the club had been in Ligue 1 for 17 straight seasons before being relegated in 2019-20. The bones were there for this to be an ever-present Ligue 1 team. Just achieving that would've made Toulouse a worthwhile investment. From there, the paths to all levels of European competition and its attendant riches were much more open in France than in any of the other Big Five leagues.

The same calculus wouldn't have applied in Italy -- unless you could acquire one of the clubs who were already there. And in the summer of 2022, the RedBird group acquired AC Milan. Milan were an all-time super-club, waiting to be made super again. They'd just won Serie A, but that title was achieved with some smoke-and mirrors: third-best goal differential and fourth-best xG differential. After seven years outside of the Champions League, they'd qualified for two consecutive seasons. With a bigger budget, more cachet, and some analytical excellence, why couldn't this club become the clear best in Italy and one of the best in the world again?

The problem, really, is that this group might be too good at this. Although Milan didn't win the league again this past season, they finished fourth and qualified for the Champions League again. And with Toulouse's cup win, they qualified for the Europa League.

All of a sudden, Bornn's ownership group was in violation of UEFA's multiclub ownership rules. Those rules, as summarized by UEFA:

• No club, either directly or indirectly, holds or deals in securities or shares of any other club participating in a UEFA club competition;

• No club is a member of any other club participating in a UEFA club competition;

• No one has any power whatsoever or is simultaneously involved, directly or indirectly, in any capacity whatsoever in the management, administration and/or sporting performance of more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition; and

• No one has control or decisive influence over more than one club in a UEFA club competition.

After changes were made in how Toulouse were structured and Bornn and others removed themselves from operations and decision-making, UEFA were satisfied and allowed Toulouse and Milan to both compete in Europe. Milan are obviously the bigger and more lucrative project, so that's where RedBird wants Bornn to be involved.

Do these rules make sense? The better place to start is to ask: "Should anyone be allowed to own multiple clubs?" The benefits are obvious, if you can do it. And that's why, per UEFA, the number of clubs who are part of a single ownership group has increased from 40 to more than 180 over the past decade.

Rather than loaning out a young player and hoping some random club and coach has their best interests in mind, you can loan a player to your other club and have them get coached by coaches you hired and be given however much playing time you'd like them to get. It's kind of like if only a couple baseball teams were allowed to have a farm system -- of course that would be an advantage. Plus, in a sport where personal connections still drive a lot of business, you can establish footholds all throughout the world.

But UEFA doesn't want multiple teams from the same owner in its competitions because, well, what happens if they play each other? How can we know that they'll play the match straight up? Surely the owners would have a financial preference for which team advances. And even if this weren't happening -- if the owners always just stepped back and said, "Let them fight!" -- there's no way anyone watching the match would be sure that what they were seeing was totally legit. UEFA can't risk having even the illusion of impropriety infect its most lucrative revenue driver.

Except, then, doesn't that just then push the issue down to the leagues themselves?

Toulouse pretty clearly tried to win the French Cup -- hence, 5-1 -- but a small part of Bornn & Co.'s group must've hoped that they didn't actually win, due to UEFA's rules that would've been triggered if they did win. What if, say, Strasbourg, the club also owned by Chelsea's ownership group, eventually get close to European competition? Doesn't that then raise the possibility that Strasbourg might suddenly stop trying to win games so the owners don't have to relinquish control? And wouldn't that poke a massive hole in the competitive integrity of Ligue 1, the league that's feeding teams into European competition?

Of course, in this specific example, Chelsea would have to get back into Europe again for that to even matter.

On Thursday, Toulouse take on Liverpool in the Europa League.

Day-to-day, the French club is run by Damien Comolli, the man who first tried to bring Moneyball tactics to Liverpool as the first director of football under Fenway Sports Group's ownership. He oversaw the ill-fated era that led to signings like Stewart Downing and Andy Carroll, and he seemed to prioritize an approach that relied on a barrage of crosses into the box. Crossing has since been written off as an analytically inefficient approach -- the percentage of crosses that lead to goals is so small that it's not worth both risking a loss of possession and sacrificing the potential of working the ball into a better area and creating a better shot.

However, some of those Liverpool teams were better than we remember. In fact, the 2011-12 side had the worst finishing season on measure: they scored 47 goals from 72.4 expected goals. That's the biggest gap in the entire Stats Perform database -- by more than five goals.

Comolli was also at the club for two of the best signings Liverpool have ever made: Luis Suárez from Ajax for €26.5 million and Jordan Henderson from Sunderland for €18m. He also hired Michael Edward and Ian Graham, the club's eventual director of football and head of research who helped build the squad that eventually won every trophy imaginable over the past decade.

While Liverpool were winning their first league title in 30 years, Beane and Bornn brought Comolli to Toulouse to handle the day-to-day operations of the French club. But what took the team from Ligue 2 to the Europa League in a single year? Nothing too fancy, really.

"We're so far ahead in our analytical understanding of the game, relative to the state of execution within clubs," Bornn said, referring to the analytical research being done across the sport as a whole. "So I wouldn't be like, 'Oh, we really need to better evaluate center backs.' No, you need to figure out how to actually incorporate all this information into your decision-making."