Sir Alex Ferguson and Martin O’Neill travelled to London to hear him speak. Adrian Boothroyd bought him dinner and Alan Curbishley picked his brains over a croissant. Oh, and Jürgen Klinsmann has e-mailed to arrange lunch whenever it is convenient.

For a general manager of a baseball team, Billy Beane has a lot of friends in football; but then he is no ordinary club administrator. To those in the know, and particularly to those gripped by the book Moneyball, he is one of the smartest men in sport. He transformed not only the Oakland A’s, but also a whole way of thinking about baseball. The intriguing question is whether he can do something similar in football.

We are about to find out. Beane is overseeing operations at the San Jose Earthquakes, the franchise that will rejoin Major League Soccer next season after being bought by the owners of the A’s. Beane is on a voyage of discovery to find out how much of his methodology, described in forensic detail in Moneyball, is transferable.

The book tells how the A’s have managed to be consistently competitive against teams with many times their wage bill. In particular, it shows how century-old subjective analysis of players and reliance on a coach’s instincts can be replaced with objective statistics. It was a sports book with a business brain and a bible for underdogs everywhere.

Perhaps it is no surprise to learn that Beane’s biggest fan in England is Boothroyd, the manager at Watford, the Coca-Cola Championship club. A voracious reader of coaching manuals from the United States and a self-confessed “thief of other people's ideas”, Boothroyd has directed his own numbers man to see how Beane’s ideas can be developed. If they can help a club of Watford’s limited means to buy low and sell high in the transfer market and to do so on a more scientific basis, perhaps the smallest of clubs can begin to compete in the Barclays Premier League.

And if professional baseball spent decades ignoring statistics that had been under everyone’s noses could the same be true in football? That was one of the topics thrown across the dinner table between Beane and Boothroyd in midweek.

“To be honest, I don’t want to go into too much detail because I don’t want people to know what we’re doing,” Boothroyd said. “But yes, we are putting a lot of work, a lot of hours into examining whether there are better ways to scout players, to analyse their output, to make more subjective judgments. Are there more scientific ways to decide when to buy and sell a player which is very important at clubs of our size? It is about eking out every little advantage.”

Thousands of statistics are available from companies such as Opta and Pro-Zone, but a small example, Boothroyd said, may be attaching a far more specific value to each goal. If Marlon King, the Watford striker, scores 20 times in a season, he takes credit for all of them. But should some not be devalued if they were from the penalty spot, required a lucky deflection or came against already beaten opposition?

Beane was invited to talk at the Future of Football conference in London this week, but his address was not a moment of enlightenment for everyone. “If there was anything in it, do you not think we would have thought about it before?” one Premier League manager said.

Beane does not presume that he can tell Ferguson or Arsène Wenger that they have been doing it wrong all these years. “I’m too respectful of the sport to say I have the formula for success,” Beane said. “But it’s something we’d like to explore. The statistics are a tool. Saying you don’t believe in them is like saying you don’t believe in a hammer.” On top of the interest from Boothroyd, Klinsmann and more inquisitive coaches, at least one chief executive was fascinated by what he heard. He believes that, even if football does not lend itself to statistics in the same way that baseball does, clubs need to be far more analytical in their transfer policy.

“Too many players are bought and sold purely on the hunch of a manager,” he said. “And far too often those transfers are done because the manager’s favourite agent has made a recommendation. It is all about bringing a far more pragmatic approach – a businesslike approach – to dealings. Just because Ferguson and Wenger run their clubs from top to bottom, other managers think they should be entitled to do the same. Directors should be demanding to know far more.”

At Oakland, Beane tells his coaches which players he is signing, without any debate. He is very much in charge of the roster, even though, as we learn in Moneyball, he gets so agitated at the high-pressure points of the season that he cannot even bring himself to watch his team.

Yet English football appears to be allergic to the role of director of football. Most experiments with a two-tier system have ended in failure or acrimony. Tottenham Hotspur are one of the few clubs committed to that structure and, intriguingly, Damien Comolli, the director of football at White Hart Lane, speaks to Beane most weeks. Indeed, Beane went to the Tottenham training ground on his brief visit to London and he could scarcely hide his excitement, having fallen in love with football on a trip to Britain in 2003.

Like many Americans, even those who have engaged in top-level sport in their own country, he was blown away by the sound and fury of crowds in Europe. So much so that Beane dragged his bosses from Oakland to the World Cup finals in Germany last summer, even though it was in the middle of the baseball season. “I told them that if we were going to buy San Jose Earthquakes, they had to see football at the very top level,” he said. “And they also had to see the passion, the emotion. Where there’s emotion, there is an opportunity.”

Beane’s conversation is like that, flicking between the language of a fan and that of a sharp businessman. It is hard to think of a comparable figure in English football; someone who has played the game but can just as happily talk about regression models.

Perhaps the nearest we have seen is Sir Clive Woodward, another man who sought to discover if skills were transferable between sports and yet did not stay a year at Southampton before heading off to the British Olympic Association. Perhaps Beane’s involvement in football will be similarly short-lived and not everyone can learn from him. But there is something, surely, in his central tenet of taking out the emotion when making key decisions.

The English game is not in a position to ignore bright ideas, as Beane discovered when he watched England’s miserable defeat by Croatia at Wembley on Wednesday. He has seen first-hand that, when it comes to coaching, playing and administration, our national sport is not blessed with rigorous thinkers.

Brought to book

Moneyball is the best-selling book by Michael Lewis that centred on how the Oakland A’s baseball team consistently reached the play-offs ahead of rivals with far greater budgets

Its central character is Billy Beane, the general manager, who challenged orthodox, century-old thinking. Beane did not invent sabermetrics - an updated way of analysing players through statistics – but he was the first to apply it to a professional team. He used it to buy players other clubs ignored and to sell his own stars for maximum value, sometimes before they had peaked.

In effect, Oakland were being run by Harvard statisticians more than coaches schooled in the sport. The revelations in Lewis’s book led other clubs to copy the same methods. Beane, who remains close friends with Lewis, has had to cope with a brain drain.

If Moneyball sounds dry, it is anything but. Beane is a fascinating central character, a talented former player who failed because of his temperament. “I told Michael he made me look like a maniac,” he said.

It was hailed as one of the most influential books in the history of sport and yet, as Beane admitted, “we thought Michael was just going to do a newspaper article. People ask if he gave away all our secrets, but anyone could have eventually discovered what we did.”

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