Ayre said he, Rodgers, Edwards and Fallows effectively created the director of football model between them.
“We have a head of analysis, a head of recruitment, a first-team manager, myself,” Ayre said. “All of those people are all inputting into a process that delivers what a director of football would deliver.
“What we believe, and we continue to follow, is you need many people involved in the process. That doesn’t mean somebody else is picking the team for Brendan but Brendan needs to set out with his team of people which positions we want to fill and what the key targets would be for that.
"He has a team of people that go out and do an inordinate amount of analysis work to establish who are the best players in that position.
“Despite what people think and read, it’s not a whole bunch of guys sitting behind a computer working out who we should buy. It’s a combination of old-school scouting and watching players – and that’s Brendan, his assistants, our scouts – with statistical analysis of players across Europe and the rest of the world.
"By bringing those two processes together you get a much more educated view of who you should and shouldn’t be buying and, perhaps as fundamentally, how much you should be paying and the structure to those contracts.
“I think we’ve had relatively good success since we deployed that *methodology. We’re getting better all the time. We were very pleased with the most recent window in January with Philippe Coutinho and Daniel Sturridge.”