Riccardo Calafiori and the Leftorium
Why aren't Liverpool chasing Bologna's Riccardo Calafiori, and does footedness matter?
Do you watch The Simpsons? Well, If you don’t, you at least know what the show is about, right? In one memorable episode, Ned Flanders decides to open a store which is entirely dedicated to selling products to left-handed people.
The Leftorium, he called it. The store looked good, and he did his best to promote it, but Flanders struggled to make a profit. He just didn’t get enough business to survive.
Well, Flanders deserved to fail. I’m not sure how he didn’t see this coming. It was bound to happen. Why? The answer is simple. People who favour their left hand simply aren’t that common. In fact, you’re talking about roughly ten per cent of the population.
Opening up a store which ignores 90 per cent of people isn’t smart. Lefties are a rare breed.
Now, this Substack is about football. We aren’t allowed to use our hands in this sport, but nevertheless, lefties still aren’t that common. In the Premier League at any given time, roughly 25 per cent of players are left footed.
So in essence, for every left-footed player, there are three righties. That makes lefties pretty attractive when building a squad, and generally more valuable when they emerge as hot commodities on the transfer market.
It also perhaps explains the lack of lefties at Anfield right now. You’ve got Andy Robertson, Kostas Tsimikas, Mohamed Salah and Harvey Elliott. That is it. Four from a neighbourhood of about 25 players in the squad. And only two of those guys played over 1,500 minutes in the Premier League last season.
Liverpool are different to their rivals in that sense. Five left-footed players amassed over 1,500 minutes for Manchester City last term in Bernardo Silva, Erling Haaland, Phil Foden, Joško Gvardiol and Nathan Aké. Six if you include Ederson. Arsenal also had five, and Gabriel Jesus would have made six if he had played just 23 minutes more.
The Reds break the mould in the centre-back department, too. Pretty much every top side in the country has a left-footed centre-back. Gvardiol, Aké, Gabriel Magalhães, Levi Colwill, Benoît Badiashile, Lisandro Martínez, Sven Botman, Pau Torres, Micky van de Ven.
Indeed, when speaking about Aymeric Laporte’s importance in 2018, Pep Guardiola said:
“Especially because he is left-footed playing on the left side. He gives us an alternative for the build-up, quicker and faster than the other ones who are right-footed.”
When Mikel Arteta replaced Unai Emery at Arsenal, his first signing was Pablo Mari from Flamengo in the middle of the campaign. He became the club’s only left-footed option at the time, with his boss stating:
“Mari balances what I want to do from the backline. He gives more options, more solutions, he opens up the pitch more.”
Liverpool, by contrast, have nobody. And that has been the case since Ragnar Klavan departed six years ago.
That void could explain why many supporters seem baffled by the club’s lack of an attempt to compete for the signature of Riccardo Calafiori, who has shined at EURO 2024 this summer.
The Bologna defender is good, available, attainable, he’s 22 years old, and perhaps most importantly of all, he’s on the shelf in the Leftorium. Calafiori is a left footer, and one who seems capable of playing as a centre-back and as a full-back.
So why aren’t Liverpool interested, then? Well, his injury record is gruesome, but beyond that, there is part of me that wonders whether the Reds actually care about footedness.
If there’s one thing I love about applying data to sport, it is how the numbers cut through the noise by underlining what matters and ignoring everything else. This player is boss, it doesn’t matter if he failed at Chelsea, and it doesn’t matter if he got relegated once.
By applying science to recruitment, you can really hone in on what matters, including footedness. I’m not clever enough to conduct an experiment of that nature, but the nerds at Liverpool are.
I did look at footedness in the Premier League back in 2020. At the time, the most two-footed player in the division was Fabian Delph, followed by İlkay Gündoğan, André Gomes and Fred. Liverpool’s best was Adam Lallana, but how much does it matter?
Obviously it’s nice if a player can use both feet, but one of the most one-footed players in the history of the sport was Ronaldinho. He coped just fine. The same goes for Thiago Alcântara, and I think Toni Kroos is cut from a similar cloth.
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