For many people, the answer lies with Billy Beane. A talented player himself, he never fulfilled that natural ability in his six seasons in the top flight, played variously with the New York Mets, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers and, lastly, Oakland. Beane, 41, became general manager five years ago and has slowly effected a revolution in approach to baseball that has become the subject of a book that is dividing the baseball cognoscenti in the United States.

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, was at No 4 in the New York Times bestseller charts this week after seven weeks on the list, charts the tale of a very different Mr Beane and of his methods. Lewis was given wide-ranging access to the Oakland backroom staff, to meetings and matches, and has written a compelling account of how sabermetrics would appear to be the future for baseball — and, perhaps, many other sports, too.

Sabermetrics derives from the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research, and is, as Lewis calls it, intellectually rigorous baseball analysis. It is the application of science and statistics to the sport and Beane has taken this method of analysis to heart, using it in order to buy low-priced players in the annual Major League draft who, statistically, are proven performers but who have been discarded from the main roster of their present club or who have not been highly rated at high school or college for some other reason. Oakland buy these apparent duds and then sell them on for great financial gain some years later, getting more than good value out of them on the diamond in the meantime.

Critics of the book have described it as a paean to Beane, placing him on a pedestal that he scarcely warrants, claiming that the contribution of Art Howe, the baseball manager (and, from the start of this year, the manager of the Mets) to Oakland’s recent success has been sorely overlooked. One of the best headlines appeared recently in Sports Illustrated: “The Unbearable Brightness of Beane”. There have also been suggestions that the application of statistical analysis towards identifying a player’s latent talent is nothing new, that Branch Rickey’s tenure with the St Louis Cardinals in the 1920s was marked by similar methods. Yet whether baseball fans agree or disagree with the way that Beane works, they cannot deny that his approach is gaining currency.

There remains one key question that will strike all readers of the book: why haven’t Oakland won a World Series under Beane’s stewardship, if he is so clever an operator? An explanation is to be found tucked away towards the end of the book. “The post-season partially explained why baseball was so uniquely resistant to the fruits of scientific research: to any purely rational idea about how to run a baseball team,” Lewis writes. “It wasn’t just that the game was run by old baseball men who insisted on doing things as they had always been done. It was that the season ended in a giant crapshoot. The play-offs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long, regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem.”

The truth that Moneyball demonstrates will not stop the rich sports clubs, such as Real Madrid, from spending in carefree fashion to buy success, but it may just give them pause for thought about how much longer that strategy can be viable.