Jackson Hastings, Brodie Croft & 'the team of misfits’: How one Super League club is creating real-life rugby league Moneyball

On the outskirts of Manchester, on the edge of a highway flyover, largely ignored by the world, a quiet rugby league revolution has been taking place.

Salford’s AJ Bell Stadium, perched between the central ring road of Manchester and the cavernous Trafford Centre shopping mall, is an unlikely place for a revolution – it doesn’t even have a bus stop – but if there’s anything close to Moneyball in rugby league, then Salford Red Devils are the Oakland Athletics, and Ian Blease, the Director of Rugby and Operations, is Billy Beane.

The result speak for themselves. Salford made the Super League Grand Final in 2019, the Challenge Cup Final in 2020 and were one referee’s decision away from making the Grand Final again in 2022, losing a Preliminary Final to eventual champions St Helens, who would go on to pick up their fourth consecutive championship.

They did it all this while spending well below the salary cap, regularly over-performing teams that spend up to it and beyond – there is a marquee player rule in Super League – and paying, in some cases, almost a million dollars less on their team.

Salford have done it their own way, too, though well in keeping with the spirit of the book and its protagonists.

Many have taken baseball’s focus on data and extrapolated that to suggest that data was the key point, the actual main message was about market inefficiencies, who was under-valued and who was over-valued, and where smarts could overcome spending power.

Data was the medium that Oakland used to parse that, but it was not the method. The method was much more wide-ranging.

Salford are proof-positive of this, because they don’t have access to recruitment data in the way that NRL clubs, and rich Super League clubs, do. And yet, their ability to find and exploit inefficiencies has been demonstrably superb.

According to Blease, the secret lies not in the numbers, but in the humans.

“If you look at our list going back to 2018, there’s probably 15 to 20 players where they all had an individual reason why they weren’t making it,” he said.

“Either cast aside by their clubs, problems off the field, not wanted, fell out with someone – a whole host of reasons.

“But we do due diligence on their background. (Former Great Britain, Wigan and Sydney Roosters star turned TV pundit) Phil Clarke called us ‘the team of misfits’ when we got to the Grand Final, which some of our fans took exception to, but without disrespecting the team, he was probably right. Three-quarters of them were players that other clubs didn’t want.”

Jackson Hastings is a crucial signing for the Tigers. (Photo by Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images)

The misfits have included some major NRL names. Jackson Hastings is the most prominent, having gone from reserve grade at Manly to winning the Man of Steel, the Super League equivalent of the Dally M.

Brodie Croft was bounced from Melbourne to Brisbane and widely written off in Australia, but picked up a Man of Steel at Salford in 2022.

Tim Lafai went from part-time footy in Sydney to the Super League team of the year and a World Cup Final appearance with Samoa, as well as being named in the team of the tournament.

These were players with talent that nobody else would touch, but that Salford were able to give a chance because they knew that they could create an environment that would help players thrive, and because they built relationships with agents that would alert them to deals when they were available.

It is a triumph for soft skills, allied to hard data when available. Blease didn’t have the best data at hand, but used what he had and then took his own previous history as a player, and as a player’s agent, allied to a clear vision from his coaching staff – first Ian Watson, now Paul Rowley in the head coach role – to turn rocks into diamonds.

“I visited NRL clubs and one of my interests was: how do they do it over there?” explained Blease, who completed a university dissertation on sports directorship, involving work on Premier League club Newcastle United’s recruitment data.

“They’ve all got fantastic databases that churn out a lot of information, and there’s clubs in Super League who have that too – however, we don’t.

“What we do is nothing fancy: it’s thorough due diligence on the player, his background and his stats from all the key platforms that every Super League club uses. We watch hours and hours of video.

“Ours is borne out by good relationships with agents that I’ve built, hoping that if you treat them right, they’ll give you a heads up when the right player becomes available to you.

“That’s happened with the likes of Jackson, Brodie, Joey Lussick and others. If use Brodie as an example: there was a couple of clubs in for him but at that time, he had a huge question mark. Nobody even knew what his best position would be.

“But he was quick, he had good skill and he’s a rugby nerd, so I knew that if we put the right people around him, he’d fly just like Jackson did.

Brodie Croft. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

“I think we’ve built a pretty solid platform that assesses players that will fit into our culture and club. When I chat to players, I always tell them what a small but hard-working club we are.

“We muck in, we help and it’s not always for everybody. I tell them: if they think they’re coming to Wigan, Saints or Warrington, they’re not.”

It’s worth going back to see how far the club has come. It’s hard to describe how close Salford were to oblivion. Their 2016 escape makes Johnathan Thurston’s Grand Final drop goal in 2015 look positively prosaic.

Away at Hull KR in a straight knockout playoff for survival in Super League, they trailed by two tries with 100 seconds to play.

They were all set for relegation to the part-time second tier, the Championship, a move that could have been curtains for the club and unemployment for the players.

Yet they staged a miracle, scoring once to bring back the deficit, then again after the siren, then winning the game in Golden Point thanks to a Gareth O’Brien field goal. They stayed up.

It was the wake-up call that they needed. Not just for the future of one of the most famous names in rugby league – with a nickname so famous that Manchester United nicked it for theirs – but for the whole methodology of running a rugby league club.

Blease came aboard after the dust had settled on that season. He had made close to 200 appearances for Salford across a ten year period in the 1980s and 1990s, and had been working as a player agent prior to joining.

His role is unique in rugby league: as Director of Rugby and Operations, he has a foot in both the on-field and off-field camps, working with the footy team and on the commercial side of the business.

He was there to pick up the pieces from the previous owner, colourful businessman Marwan Koukash, who had operated a policy of signing big-names in search of success.

That had involved the likes of Manu Vatuvei, Daniel Vidot, Tony Puletua and Reni Maitua joining the club but largely underwhelming on the field. Blease set out to change the way that Salford went about business.

“Being an ex-agent, I know how both sides work,” he said. “I don’t get everyone I want but if I set a target, I back myself to give the player what they want contractually and then sell the team.

“It’s good to have that overview. Being at the club previously, I knew exactly what we’d done wrong in the past, even when I was playing.

“I was really determined not to make the same mistakes. We don’t get it everything right – even the great Alex Ferguson made mistakes – but the ones that have come good have really shone.”

The dual role means having the business hat on, but also sitting alongside coaches and working out a composition of the roster that can work and a strategy to get the best out of them. Often, that has involved identifying players to bring to the club, but also the opportune moment to let them go.

“I remember chatting to Jackson with Ian Watson,” recalled Blease. “Watto said ‘just go out there and play. Run. He came in, loved it and ended up running too much! We thought he was going to get hurt.

“We had to sell Ben Murdoch-Masila and Gareth O’Brien to balance the books, which really hurt me. I cried in my office when we sold Ben, I couldn’t believe he was going and it really upset me.

“But we had to do it at certain times. I hope it doesn’t happen again but you never know with Salford. We have to make tough decisions.”

The policy of signing older players is often where the data comes in, because Salford will identify where the age and the body clock are out of sync, and swoop.

“I’m not ageist,” said Blease. “For me, if you look at the player’s body and the physical records that are available, you can make a judgement.

“Tim Lafai is a great example. He’s 32 but hasn’t played in the NRL for a couple of years so his body was still good.

“Some clubs don’t want certain players over a certain age, but I’ve never been like that. You’ve got to do your background work and get your physio involved.

“Age is not a main driver.  I have an eye on it, of course I do, and more people have mentioned it this year. But I’m comfortable with it.”

“Sometimes, you have to swallow the age to get class. Sometimes we don’t have a choice because lots of young players don’t want to come to us. They’ll go to the bigger clubs.”

(Photo by Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images)

One of the crucial, oft-overlooked aspects of Moneyball, however, is the arc of the Oakland Athletics and their results. The team went from rubbish to more than competitive, but never cracked the upper echelons of the league.

The book’s subtitle – The Art of Winning an Unfair Game – spoke to how the A’s were disadvantaged financially and faced a structural ceiling that would always see them fall, eventually, to a wealthier team.

In Super League, where less than half of the teams actually pay up to the full amount allowed – just shy of $4m – it is nigh-on miraculous that Salford have finished above Hull and Warrington, two of the teams that do pay the full amount, on a fraction of their budget, twice in Blease’s tenure.

“We pay hundreds of thousands of pounds of salary cap lower,’ he said. “There’s only a couple in the league who are near us, the rest are probably paying much more than us, so we have to be very selective.

“Even if we had a backer I wouldn’t change what we do now. I’d love an all-singing, all-dancing recruitment system and database – I’ve heard from the Melbourne Storm about theirs and it sounds fantastic – but at this moment, it’s not what we have. I wouldn’t change what we do due diligence-wise on players. That’s what we’ve had the success that we have.

“I don’t know what happens at richer clubs – I’m sure other clubs must do that, they have to. It is difficult to say what others do compared to us, but I wouldn’t change the philosophy.

“The players have got to be a great human, and obviously, a great rugby player. They might have had some issues but we can straighten them out because we’re good people and we’ll help them out.

Blease is realistic when asked if there is a natural limit to where Salford can go.

“I find myself asking that question,” he said. “I can smell a trophy. This year more than any time, I’m quite chilled out about winning. It’ll come when you’ve done the right work. If you work hard as an individual and as a group, you get your rewards. This group is a hard-working group and I can smell it.

“We might have a limit, but that doesn’t stop us trying. We were close last year and with the brand of rugby that Paul (Rowley) has them playing, we’ll continue next year.

“God bless us, we like to take a risk but we like to be intelligent.”