LONG READ Could Leicester replace colossus Jasper Wiese with ‘Moneyball’ approach?

It probably won’t surprise you to know that I am a fan of Moneyball, both the book and the film.

If you are also a fan, you will remember the scene where Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) explains to his scouts that they are wrong to look for ways of replacing a highly productive player when they didn’t have the financial resources to do it. Instead, he asks them to think laterally and replace the aggregate production of that player through multiple less expensive signings.

For our purposes, you can replace Beane with Michael Cheika and that highly productive, but departing, player is Jasper Wiese. How can Leicester replace the Springboks No.8?

Let’s first talk about the problem of replacing players. In the market, clubs agree how much to pay a player before that player has featured in a single match for them. For that reason, you can end up paying a very small amount for someone who ends up being exceptional, or a very large amount for someone who flops.

Even with Wiese’s salary off the books, it’s clear that Leicester don’t have that kind of money floating about for a replacement.

That also means that you can sign someone on the cheap who massively outperforms expectations and then is unaffordable when their contract comes up for renewal, as happened with Wiese.

In football, you can sell that player on and at least get some financial reward. In rugby, all you get are the years they were around which means virtually every club in the Premiership is in a situation where they need to replace a player but don’t have the financial means to make a like-for-like replacement.

With that in mind, what are Leicester actually replacing? Last season, Wiese made 264 carries (the most in the Premiership), more metres after contact than anyone else, won the third most turnovers, beat the second most defenders – and most by a forward – and had the second best gainline success. He also hit the second most rucks of any Tigers player.

I polled some people in the know and asked them what a player like Wiese would cost to a team in the Premiership and the answers ranged somewhere from £300,000-£550,000. That would put them in the top 25 highest-paid players in the Premiership. Even with Wiese’s salary off the books, it’s clear that Leicester don’t have that kind of money floating about for a replacement.

They are going to have to go down the Moneyball route. Here are three ways they might do that.

1. Add unseen work

We often think of carrying as an individual skill. The kind of thing a player either has or doesn’t have, and will follow them to whichever team they play for. Carrying is of course a skill, but it’s definitely not independent of the team. Teams can make the job easier by creating space for you to carry, but they can also do it by removing some other tasks from your to-do list. The most obvious is hitting rucks. If you’re hitting rucks, you’re not carrying.

In the Premiership last season, only five of the top 25 carriers were also ranked in the top 25 for rucks hit. They were Wiese, Alex Dombrandt (Harlequins), Callum Chick (Newcastle), Ethan Roots and Jacques Vermeulen (both Exeter). That is an exceptional bunch.

One option you do have is to pick up a more limited carrier but someone who can do the unseen work. Wales took this approach a few years back where Tomas Francis, and the rest of the front row, took on the bulk of ruck hitting which freed up the likes of Ross Moriarty, Taine Basham and Ryan Elias to be fresh for their carries.

The good news from a financial perspective is that a very good ruck-hitter is significantly cheaper than a very good carrier. Take the likes of Ernst van Rhyn with Sale Sharks. He has been exceptional at doing the unseen work and freeing up the better carriers at Sale to go to work. You don’t need to sign a hard-rucking number eight either. You could get the same benefit signing any forward who can do this for you.

2. Be positionally agnostic

Among fans, there remains an insistence that the outdated positions should be respected, even though teams have long since done away with that thinking. That thought process led to the suggestion that Ben Earl should play in the midfield. People saw him charging through contact and outpacing defenders and thought he looked more like a centre than a number eight.

In reality though, he was playing like a modern back-row, who can charge around the pitch like a back. Why shift him to centre when you could have him at eight AND a centre doing something similar?

Where this applies to Leicester is how they cover the carries, and productivity of those carries, lost with Wiese’s departure. For this, they can look to the likes of Bundee Aki, Nick Tompkins and Mark Tele’a. All are backs who carry in creative ways and support the carrying of their forwards. That doesn’t mean you have to always play wide. Instead you can use your backs running hard off the fly-half and targeting those soft shoulders that your forwards might be too slow to get through.

Leicester are already well placed to do this with Solomone Kata and new signing Izaia Perese. Freddie Steward also does a great job carrying and his size lends itself to this role, especially if he is brought into the fray more with a greater number of starts on the wing.

3. Compensate in defence

 The Bristol Bears scored 25 tries more than Sale Sharks last year, yet they conceded 10 more and finished outside the play-offs. Sale and Leicester both conceded 51 tries and scored 55, but Sale finished with 11 more points and reached the play-offs. Rugby isn’t always fair and Leicester could have made it into the play-offs last season with a following breeze. What this does suggest however, is that a stout defence will at least keep you in the majority of games.

Budgets are stretched and very few clubs can compete with the greater finances of teams in Ireland or France. In that case, smart recruitment is the only way to try and bridge the gap.

In this area, there is potential to upgrade on Wiese. While he was a very busy defender and great at the breakdown, he wasn’t Leicester’s best tackler. Again, like hitting rucks, sure-shouldered defence is cheaper to acquire than defence-busting carrying. The other benefit of defence is that it will improve your attack. Winning the ball higher up the pitch and gifting yourself more attacking penalty kicks to touch come from defence, but benefit attack.

We’ll see this season whether Leicester have managed to replace Wiese, in one way or another. But this is also important for every team in the Premiership.

Budgets are stretched and very few clubs can compete with the greater finances of teams in Ireland or France. In that case, smart recruitment is the only way to try and bridge the gap. Do that, and you might Moneyball your way to success.