Cody Gakpo, Bob Paisley and Moneyball

Few players score Premier League goals more often than Cody Gakpo. The Liverpool forward performs well at a stat which could be football's Moneyball metric

Is Cody Gakpo underrated? It doesn’t feel like he is universally popular among Liverpool supporters so it seems a reasonable question to ask.

His record is perhaps better than many people realise. Since his debut for the Reds almost two years ago, Gakpo has scored 17 goals in the Premier League. If that sounds underwhelming, consider that only 40 of his 70 appearances have been starts.

If we look at non-penalty goals per 90 minutes, only nine men with at least as much playing time have better records than the former PSV Eindhoven man. Mohamed Salah is one of them, as you’d expect, but the rest of Gakpo’s Liverpool colleagues have to fall in behind him.

There has been a remarkable variety to his goals too, in light of how relatively few he has bagged. Gakpo scored the last Liverpool goal from at least 30 yards (at West Ham in 2023), the furthest out header since he joined the club (versus Sheffield United) and unleashed one of the top five finishes by a Reds player in the last eight seasons.

The 25-year-old has found the net against Everton, Manchester United and Tottenham, twice each for the latter two. In the space of five days last week, Gakpo added Real Madrid and Manchester City to his goal résumé.

Seeing one of those strikes shortly after a Moneyball meme made me think of how Cody might’ve made Bob Paisley smile. What the hell am I on about? Our story begins at the turn of the millennium in Oakland.

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