Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

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Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by BurnleyPaul » Wed Apr 15, 2020 4:24 pm

A very long read- best done with plenty of time on your hands. Some very interesting stuff here which you hope our club are already working on...


“In the final throes of Memphis Depay’s ill-fated period at Manchester United, his agent Kees Ploegsma took a radical step to reignite the Dutchman’s career.

Signed by Louis van Gaal, Depay fell out of favour under new manager Jose Mourinho at Old Trafford. In the first half of the 2016-17 campaign, the Dutchman did not start a Premier League game. His form and confidence hit rock bottom. It was then that Ploegsma turned away from the wheeling-and-dealing stereotypes of agents and turned to data science.

The agent organised several meetings with SciSports, the analytics company. The company’s founder and chief innovation officer, Giels Brouwer, tells The Athletic: “Kees asked me to go to Manchester to talk to Memphis. We went to his home and watched Real Madrid play Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League on his couch. We needed to understand why he was not fitting the playing style of Manchester United. He explained it in his own words. He said he needed confidence and to be important for the team. Then he said, ‘I need to play with freedom’.”

SciSports, founded in 2013, performs several functions. The first is to act as an online scouting service for clubs through a database that covers 90,000 players and more than 3,600 clubs. This is available to clubs as a monthly subscription service, but also to those who represent footballers. Besides the database, SciSports also offers specialised reports for clubs and agents. In the case of Depay, the question was simple: can you analyse the data and tell me where I should go to salvage my career?

Brouwer continues: “We analysed his previous games at PSV and with the Holland national team. We could see how, at United, he was asked to do a lot more on the defensive side of the game. He was not able to use his attacking freedom. Then there were other aspects he outlined: ‘I want to be able to dribble in from the left, I want a fast-paced game, I want space in front of me.’ We put that into the algorithm and developed a model. We found five clubs we felt were suited to him and also specific coaches where he would fit. Lyon was the club that came out on top.”

Ploegsma approached Lyon with the report, explaining how the data demonstrated Depay’s suitability to the team, while the business of the deal became feasible due to his drop in valuation amid his poor form at United. Depay had approaches from Everton, Fenerbahce, plus leading teams in Germany, Italy and Spain, but the data convinced all parties that Lyon would be the perfect fit. Depay has since scored 43 goals and registered 32 assists in 102 Ligue 1 appearances for the French club, while also returning to prominence with the Dutch national team.

Such collaborations between agents and data analysts are increasingly commonplace. Take, for example, the case of a young Manchester United player whose agent requested a personalised report from an independent data scientist, comparing his current level and his potential, then set against similar players in Europe, before taking the case study along to aid negotiations in a lucrative contract deal.

SciSports alone works with 10 separate agencies, including the Belgian A-Group that represent Jan Vertonghen and Mousa Dembele, the Dutch SEG agency that manage Depay and previously Robin van Persie, and Stirr Associates, who work with Toby Alderweireld and Dries Mertens.

Brouwer explains: “We help agencies in several ways: to scout the right players for their portfolio, allowing agents to use those reports to convince those players they have done proper research. The secondary relationship is to find the right club for those players. An agency may also use us if they expand. For example, if they are opening an office in Slovakia and want to know the 10 biggest young talents in Slovakia, we can develop a specialised algorithm for their needs.”

SciSports is not alone. In England, Analytics FC offer a rival platform. The founder Jeremy Steele explains that his close relationship with the First Access Sports agency led him to provide personalised analytics to support contract negotiations for Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi, while Steele has previously performed the same service for Jeremie Boga and Yannick Bolasie.

Some conversations with agents become more complicated. What if the data analysis suggests the agent, or indeed his client, is deluded over the player’s true worth?

Steele says: “We need a fine line, as we don’t want to go back and say he’s a terrible player. But we cannot lie. Numbers cannot lie. If you ask for a projection against the best young players in Europe and he does not stack up, then I am sorry but it is best not to use that data in this particular case.”

SciSports Brouwer agrees: “We had a player recently and we simply said, ‘We can’t find a club for you.’ If you pretend and present five clubs, but none are interested, the agent won’t buy another report from you. Sometimes I just say to the agents, ‘Don’t go for a report because you won’t like the outcome.’ Some don’t like it, but you have two types of agent: one is a big money-maker in it for a short run; the other one wants to get the most out of a career for the player. It is also hard to manage some players because they all think they are the best. The agents can use our data-driven reports to bring home that a step is needed before Real Madrid, or maybe go to Atalanta before you go to Juventus. It helps present in an objective way the best career planning.”

In truth, agents are simply now catching up with the rest of the sport. The rise of data analysis has been swift and exponential over the past two decades. It is essential to every aspect of football — player performance, player conditioning, tactics, set-plays and player recruitment. The success of Liverpool, perceived as market leaders, reinforces the growth. The club’s sporting director Michael Edwards is backed up by data scientists including Dr Ian Graham, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, and Will Spearman, a former Harvard graduate student who spent time working for CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

Football is, at long last, in thrall to data. But this has not always been the case. Here is the story of football’s data explosion.

In the social media era, the battleground has taken shape. “Think of it this way,” one top-four Premier League scout explains. “There are two schools of working and two schools of scouting in football. Is it best summed up by two films. Do you want to be Clint Eastwood in the ‘Trouble with the Curve’? Or Brad Pitt in ‘Moneyball’?”

For the uninitiated, Eastwood’s character, Gus Lobel, is the archetypal ageing scout, set in his ways, the lone man on the park playing fields, defiantly resisting the soulless number-crunching of modern life. Then there is Pitt, playing Billy Beane, applying a sharp statistical model to recruit undervalued players on the cheap. For a long time, there has, undoubtedly, been tension between these two schools of thought as data analysts sought to disrupt football.

At the turn of the Millennium, the first movers and shakers made their presence felt. Prozone launched in 1996 and Steve McClaren, as assistant manager at Derby County, was the first coach to take the player-tracking software truly seriously. Prozone introduced eight cameras around the Derby pitch, which would cumulatively collect different angles and the potential for data. When McClaren joined Alex Ferguson as Manchester United’s assistant manager, the club became the first paying customer, committing to a £50,000 fee if United won a trophy in the 1998-99 season (United lifted their famous treble). By late 2000, six more Premier League clubs signed up. Elsewhere, a different form of data emerged. The statistics firm Opta took off.

Aidan Cooney, the founder of Opta, recently talked about the early days on the “Unofficial Partner”: “It was quite a slow burn. Most media companies were not ready for performance data. I felt that if you educate people as to what happens on the pitch and give them quantitative analysis, you bring them closer to the game and grow the audience.”

When he presented to the “Daily Mirror”, Cooney was accused of “Americanising” sport. He said: “The word Americanisation… it referred to this perception that we were trying to shamelessly create the bus timetable — i.e. count lots of stuff and put it out on tables. That is how some people think American sports present themselves. Our clever bit was to disguise that we were delivering statistics. We started referring to the water-cooler moments — that thing you have read or heard about at the water cooler that could really hit home. We wanted to visualise data by telling the story. When ‘Moneyball’ (the 2003 book by Michael Lewis) came out, I bought 20 copies and sent one to every Premier League manager and said we would love to chat. I got a fairly significant doughnut in terms of a response. This was the early phase. There was hyperbole around video analysis, as opposed to using data more effectively.”

The sell was not obvious. Cooney said: “Remember, football is low-scoring, high on luck and a lot of things happen. In other sports, there are stronger correlations and the cut-through is easier. Baseball and cricket are examples of those. In those early days, there were a few outliers. Daniel Finkelstein, with the Fink Tank column in The Times, saw value in it. There were other editors who saw the value but were not prepared to pay what we believed it was worth.”

Towards the start of the 2002 World Cup, Finkelstein, a politics columnist with The Times, tuned into the radio, and he heard Dr Henry Stott explaining an academic model he had developed to predict outcomes of football matches.

Finkelstein tells The Athletic: “I listened back and thought, ‘Of course this is how you would work out the outcome of a football match, of course you would use runs of data and create models.’ I brought it into The Times the next day and said we should use some of his data in our World Cup supplement. While everyone thought it was an impossible outcome, we used a piece of his data and had it down as a 25 per cent chance of Senegal beating the World Cup holders France. They did it, 1-0. If that hadn’t happened, possibly nobody would have been interested in our data after that. It turned into a column.”

As most broadcasters, journalists and many clubs held back from data analysis, the Fink Tank became a weekly staple. Finkelstein continues: “This sounds really pompous, but I felt we were involved in a pioneering bit of sports journalism. The only person in football we encountered early on who understood the concept of an average was Arsene Wenger. He would say, ‘I am not interested in winning my next game.’ You should be interested in winning a run of games. Along with our predictions, I wrote a column about some football quirk or myth. My favourite was, ‘Is the worst time to concede just before half-time?’ To which the answer is no, statistically. I remember a fantastic conversation with Ian Wright, when he said, ‘No, conceding before half-time was the worst time because George Graham would shout at us in the dressing room.’ Sam Allardyce was interested, too. Some people would blank you and Sam would say, “Ooh, it is the Fink Tank!”

“It was regarded by many as an amusing, eccentric thing. There would be an element for bet makers. Somebody did a paper for the University of Lancaster’s economics department and they showed how we had defeated the bookies during a period. The paper ran our probabilities for every Premier League, Champions League or major international game. But we actually had a model that produced probabilities for every game in Europe. At its steely core, we absolutely believed in it. I am a Chelsea fan and I remember going to see Chelsea win the Premier League at Bolton in 2005. I said to my friend there’s a 63 per cent chance we win the game that day, so we should go to Bolton. I didn’t have any other view than that. I grew to understand football through data. You would not analyse anything else without data, so why not for football, too?”

Finkelstein also posed hypotheses for the mathematicians to investigate. Stott, previously a director at Oliver Wyman, hired Dr Ian Graham for his company Decision Technology, which carried out the investigations. Graham is now Liverpool’s director of research. According to the New York Times, Graham won the trust of Liverpool head coach Jurgen Klopp during the German’s third week in the job.

Graham arrived in his office with printouts from a match Klopp’s former side Borussia Dortmund had lost 2-0 against Mainz the previous year. Graham, who holds a Cambridge doctorate in theoretical physics, had not seen the game himself. Yet his mathematical model showed how, by many metrics — plays into the opposition area and chances created in particular — Klopp’s side had deserved to win the game. Originally, Graham’s algorithms had been requested by Liverpool’s owners to help make a decision on whom to appoint as manager. He demonstrated how, through data analysis of Dortmund’s performances, Klopp’s team ought to have finished second in the Bundesliga, rather than their actual position of seventh.

There was a time when clubs shuddered at the thought of pinning their hopes on individuals who do not watch the action, yet it is increasingly the norm. One Liverpool source explains Graham’s work: “He and his team process these algorithms to identify trends and find players to fit into the system. This is presented to senior scouts, and Klopp has the final say. These guys are phenomenal. I wouldn’t like to play chess against them. One of the impressive things: they can work out the speed at which the opponent moves and controls the ball. From there, we can identify pressing ‘victims’ and tell our players to apply pressure to specific opponents.”

Finkelstein recalls his time collaborating with Liverpool’s Graham: “Ian became the driver of much of our work at the Fink Tank. Ian, Henry and I took it very seriously. We were using a language to talk about football that was profoundly important for football itself, and understanding things the game did not understand. We understood rapidly that goalkeepers were undervalued financially and it is no surprise to me to see £60 million goalkeepers now. Or, for example, how corners were overvalued when you see their low success rate. Passing was actually undervalued.

“Clubs started to catch on. Ian and Henry got a contract with Spurs to help them recruit players and they were one of the reasons why Spurs bought Rafael van der Vaart. Ian then came to work with Liverpool and this was a remarkable story. Ian is a Liverpool fan. When John W Henry of Fenway Sports bought Liverpool, he came to the offices of Decision Technology. These were the people who do the Fink Tank. John wanted to hire Decision Technology for Liverpool, partly because he had read the Fink Tank in The Times. He could not do that as they had a contract with Tottenham. Ian, as a fan of Liverpool, took the job himself with everyone’s blessing. Ian had been working on modelling for 10 years before he joined Liverpool and they secured an amazing talent.”

Ben Stevens is Crystal Palace’s head of performance and recruitment analysis, one of many admiring Liverpool’s work since then. He says: “When Liverpool hired a data scientist, there was a backlash. But some clubs realised that they could do this in-house. We use the platforms, of course, but we have a data scientist, Bobby Shojai, who is a top graduate from the London School of Economics. He is so intelligent. He won’t watch any videos or analyse football itself. He is purely on the data. Bobby’s background is finance and there was no football in that. These roles did not exist, but Bobby blows my mind every day.”

There is, to be clear, a distinction between data science and data analysis. The data scientist incorporates artificial intelligence, computer science and predictive outcomes to extract insights before the data analyst, in tandem with a video analyst, seeks to study and present the data. As such, the scientist might create the mathematical model, but the analyst will then translate this to a sporting director or coaching staff. In recent times, analysts have risen to more senior roles.

Crystal Palace’s Stevens explains: “Michael Edwards was an old-school analyst with Portsmouth a decade ago. He has done brilliantly and he is now Liverpool’s sporting director. Andy Scoulding (former analyst at Fulham) is now leading recruitment at Rangers. Lawrence Stewart, from a performance analysis background, is now Red Bull’s head of recruitment. I have moved into recruitment at Palace. There has been a shift. Chris Davies, Brendan Rodgers’ assistant at Leicester, was Swansea’s analyst when I first met him.”

What was it like, in the early days as an analyst? Stevens smiles: “All those old analysts had to endure some hardship. It is not that I want those days back, but it was a rite of passage. To be questioned, ‘Why are you talking to me? What do you know about football?’ It was a good learning curve for students who came out of university and thought they knew football. It killed a number of analysts because they had neither the mentality nor the backbone. Now you join the club and you are are part of the department. It can be a cushy role. When certain analysts pipe up, I wonder about the old days.

“It was a daunting task for me. I did it straight from uni. I worked as an intern at Southampton’s academy and then went up to the first team in 2008-09. It has changed hugely. We still had VHS tapes when I started. You would go to an away game and they’d give you a tape. I had to recapture it to get it onto a DVD. We had these things called Scuzzy (SCSI) drives. At the end of the game, you had to get these drives, wait for a courier on a moped, who would drive it up to Prozone in Leeds. Then they would sort it out and send it back within 24 hours. It was not an instant world then. There were some terrible times at away games when the courier wouldn’t be there. Everyone, all the players, were on the coach, waiting for you.

“I was part of a two-man band at Southampton. If the computer breaks, it is your fault. If the stats are wrong, it is your fault. Now all of a sudden we have teams of people and analysts. We have all the angles, everything is live. We can send our info down to the bench during games.”

The sight of analysts wearing headsets to communicate with coaching staff is now common. Stevens recalls: “I used to be mic’d up to Sam Allardyce. It used to be hilarious. I had my earpiece in, sat quite happily watching the game, then all of a sudden the gaffer’s annoyed and he’d just shout down your ear. Then I’m thinking, ‘The manager has just said something to me, but I haven’t got a ******* clue what he has said.’ Then you politely ask: “Gaffer, what did you say?” He then shouts the order again and that’s it. I have to write something down. He has clearly been annoyed by something!”

It is easy to play up the age-old tension between evidence and instinct, but the consensus offered by many interviewees suggests relations have thawed. At Liverpool, for example, there may be a Harvard nuclear physicist beavering away, but there are also plenty of more traditional scouts putting in the hard yards around the world. These are people whose job it is to develop relationships, connect with agents and ensure they are tipped off before rival clubs.

While Liverpool’s data analysts and scientists will cut clips and create models, in-person scouting remains prevalent. Liverpool, for example, have a scout who is tasked with watching an upcoming opponent up to 23 times to prepare the basis of a report, which is then fed into the analytics. It was the naked eye, rather than an algorithm, that first spotted Brighton’s tendency to always jump at a direct free-kick. This information moved down the chain to Philippe Coutinho, who stroked a free-kick under the wall and into the goal during a victory in December 2017. Increasingly, the clubs that perform best are those that marry up their departments harmoniously. Nobody interviewed for this report suggested data science alone should be used for recruitment.

Simon Banoub, Opta’s former head of marketing, told the “Unofficial Partner”: “It is not like it used to be when there was a big brick wall between the two rivals: laptop nerds versus ‘real’ football men.”

He joked: “I still have a slight inkling everything leads back to telling people not to shoot from miles out. But it is an artificial row now. The top analysts are brilliant translators. They don’t go heavy on algorithms when talking to coaches: they pull out the insight and take it to the coach or head of recruitment and translate it up the chain. I don’t think there is a cultural problem anymore. Before you had multi-million-pound deals done on an agent’s say-so or instinct, but this adds due diligence to that process. Data analysis and traditional scouting go hand-in-hand.”

There are basic reasons for this. Clubs have realised they can save money by minimising scouting expenditure (the world is simply too big for the majority of clubs to cover the globe), and they can reduce risk through sustained analysis. Manchester United are one of the more extreme cases, with scouts positioned in more than 30 countries and 45 extra scouts on the payroll since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. Yet most clubs need to think differently. They subscribe to a series of websites and applications that specialise in video analysis: Wyscout, Scout7 and InStat are examples of platforms clubs can use to access footage from over 200,000 games across the world. Clubs may then tap into analytics software, such as SciSports or Analytics FC. These two companies are rivals, yet they also regularly speak to share ideas.

Analytics FC provide services for clubs competing in the Champions League (who cannot be revealed for confidentiality reasons) in addition to Leeds United, West Ham United and West Bromwich Albion. Analytics FC founder Steele put a call into Leeds’ sporting director Victor Orta before the 2019 January transfer window. He had identified the “star player of the Championship”.

Steele recalls: “The best example for us was Daniel James. It was not successful for Leeds as it fell through at the last minute, but he has gone on to star for Manchester United. We recommended him after eight or nine games in the Championship and said he is a player Leeds had to sign immediately. Victor came back to us and was like, ‘******* hell, are you sure?’ and we said ‘Yes, 100 per cent’. They moved on it very quickly. Victor trusts data science.”

What is it, exactly, that the algorithm had seen? The call came to Leeds before James had terrified Manchester City’s defence during an FA Cup tie for Swansea. Steele says: “Our platform is about predictive analytics. I explain it to CEOs in this way: statistics are historical. They tell you what happened in the past. We want to predict which players will perform well in the future. Our algorithms show information that says if this player continues to do X, the probabilistic outcome is Y. Our algorithm is actually very similar to Liverpool. We have an overarching framework that takes into account every single action. The data could show, ‘A player has the ball on the half-way line, he has a 0.0001% chance of scoring. He plays a long pass into the penalty area and the striker controls the ball. The team has gone from 0.0001 per cent chance to 2 per cent’. Whatever the difference is between the start point chance of scoring and the end point, that will be attributed as an increase in probability to score. Every action within a game will have a positive or negative effect on the chance of scoring.”

Steele’s personal background is curious. He started out as a coach at Chelsea, where he trained Mason Mount and Tammy Abraham as teenagers. He later became a scout at Brentford before founding his own data company. On the recommendation of Leeds’ Orta, Steele was appointed as sporting director of three clubs under the same ownership last summer, and he now works for Pafos FC, Riga FC and Rodina Moscow. Thanks to a past in coaching, he is able to blend intuition for the game with numerical modelling.

Steele says: “Data is not a silver bullet. It is not suddenly that you take on board analytics and you sign top players every time. But it allows you to gain a competitive advantage by reducing risk. Most clubs use the service as a first filter. With TransferLab on Analytics FC, you can, using one software package, analyse 90 leagues and filter down to whatever criteria you want on the platform. It is one of those where you say: could I do that with a scouting team? Probably not. This gives you worldwide coverage. But, to be clear, this does not mean we should dismiss our knowledge of players and contacts just because we have the potential to scout as many leagues as we want.”

In Christoph Biermann’s book “Football Hackers”, he describes the success of Sven Mislintat as a chief scout at Borussia Dortmund, where he was instrumental in the recruitment of Robert Lewandowski, Shinji Kagawa and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Dortmund had only 10 scouts, a far smaller pool than most regular Champions League quarter-finalists, yet he regularly recruited more effectively. His success was such that Arsenal paid more than £1 million to secure him as head of recruitment in 2017. Biermann writes that Dortmund tend to be offered 2,500 players per season and as such, there is a need to filter rapidly. Some leading clubs develop their own data banks and algorithms, but many turn to Analytics FC or SciSports.

In a hotel lobby in Madrid, a young, mid-twenties German is loitering. He is highly engaging, holds several Masters degrees in economics and management, and is, to put it bluntly, a bloody good seller. He is SciSports’ country manager for Austria, Germany and Switzerland. He is hovering outside an event organised by Transfer Room, an online tool that allows clubs to negotiate transfers directly and minimise the involvement of agents. Aware that more than 150 club representatives are present, Simon Rodder is catching them, one by one, to pitch his own company to some of Europe’s biggest names.

We sit down and the laptop comes out. He demonstrates the software; this is “Football Manager” made real. Rodder explains: “We work with more than 50 teams, including Lyon, Ajax and the Belgian national team. I personally work with Basel, Frankfurt, Wolfsburg and Paderborn.

“The general manager of Paderborn said a significant proportion of their success is down to SciSports. They hired us in the third league, they barely have a budget, but it is how they outsmarted competitors (they are now in the top flight). Look at their business and there’s a lot of signings from unusual countries. They have a small scouting department and would never be able to identify talent from those places usually.”

So, how does it work? “We pool data from, for example, the first six leagues in England, the first four in Germany, the first four in Brazil. We follow every player in a league that is data-tracked. The overarching, simple algorithm is to track the impact of a player’s performance on his team, when he is on the pitch. We work with WyScout to take the video. We process the data to simplify the process for a club. Say, for example, If you want to find a player like Robert Lewandowski, but you are a second-division German team. Our algorithm offers an indicator for current quality but also predictive maximum capability, and a track for the development over the previous six months.

“Think of it as a pre-screening of the world to your desk. Then you can visually scout the players who are interesting, rather than flying aimlessly from game to game. Let’s outsmart people using data.”

As a trial, I ask him to find some players on his algorithm with a similar profile to Lewandowski. The search is fast and we could have inputted more specific criteria, but the results are intriguing. “Arkadiusz Milik, Kasper Dolberg, Olivier Giroud and Callum Wilson all offer up similar characteristics,” he says, pointing to the screen. Wilson is particularly noticeable. Some in England are surprised that the Bournemouth forward is often linked with Chelsea and Manchester United, but the analytics show him to share skillsets with a rarefied pool of talent.

If the idea is to search a database, why would a club not simply use the game Football Manager? SciSport founder Brouwer says some clubs do still use the game. Brewer explains: “A lot of clubs already do this. But the Football Manager and FIFA input comes from amateur scouts filling in what the numbers are. There is also bias because the local scout loves local players too much. We only use objective data.”

Rodder adds: “On the game itself, how they do the values, it is not based on real-time data. They have a task force for each league, and then they decide ratings. We have artificial intelligence. We have all information on video recorded at games worldwide. The algorithm has seen it 1,000 times. It means the algorithm learns the situation and inputs fair numerical values.”

The similarity model is used at elite level, too. For example, Arsenal signed Lucas Torreira from Sampdoria after searching for players who shared N’Golo Kante’s attributes.

Arsenal have their own internal statistics system after they spent £2.1 million on the American data firm StatDNA in December 2012. Biermann explains in his book: “The deal was shrouded in extraordinary secrecy. The firm’s name wasn’t even mentioned in the club’s annual accounts. It only appeared as an acronym: AOH-USA LLC.”

Soon, Hendrik Almstadt, officially working in the club’s “football operations”, rose to prominence. He had studied at the London School of Economics, spent three years in investment banking for Goldman Sachs and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. He told the club’s CEO Ivan Gazidis to “look at a squad like a portfolio, containing 30 assets with different profiles”. Almstadt’s job was to make transfer and wage costs more efficient. He demonstrated how StatDNA would have prevented Arsenal from making costly mistakes on renowned flops Marouane Chamakh and Park Chu-young. Biermann writes: “The numbers showed that Chamakh had a low expected goals rating at Bordeaux, as he had been taking shots from improbable positions. The system’s evaluation also suggested serious technical limitations which led to him not contributing much in open play.” Wenger was persuaded and sanctioned the buyout of StatDNA.

At the top level, therefore, we should expect more clubs to develop their in-house modelling. SciSport’s Rodder explains: “There are clubs trying to do it themselves. If you have your own algorithms, it can fit your actual needs. We can define a typical left-back, but RB Leipzig has a very clear idea of what their left-back must do. The really big clubs may say no to us because the amount of players interesting to them is so small, so they just use their eyes. I met with Juventus at this conference in Madrid, and while they invited us to go there, they raised scepticism as to whether it is necessary. They buy players who are ready.”

At every level now, clubs appear to be merging instinct with insight. Brouwer says: “Data has proved it can save people money. It is true, also, that computer scientists in the past have maybe enforced an us-against-them mentality. You never win that way. Now we have people building cool projects together, rather than sitting in the basement building great stuff that nobody uses. It needs to be a two-sided game.”

Steele is a little more defensive. He says: “Data is still not the lead voice in every recruitment department. It is always funny, at conferences, how one guy always stands up and says the most important thing about data analysis is communication. It happens every time. He will say analysts need to be able to communicate with the football people at the club, whether it is sporting director, manager or CEO. Strangely, that is never flipped on its head. Nobody ever says, ‘Football people need to learn about data and learn quickly’.”

The reality of life in football, however, is that those who work with footballers and coaches must adapt to their whims. The job of video analysts is to translate the numerical conclusion of data scientists into language that is accessible to the front of house football team.

Stevens explains: “Performance analysts are chameleons. We are the civil servants of football. Everything we do changes based on what a manager wants. Palace go from Sam Allardyce to Frank De Boer to Roy Hodgson, but we remain.

“We work in visual aids. We want to show everything as a presentation. Sometimes new managers ask for 80 written pages printed out, but I ask, ‘Why? Will you read it?’ We do some written work, as that is due diligence. But our booklet for the manager pre-game is 13 pages. One is a front cover. Then 12 pages: predicted team line-up and squad information, a page of written information on what the team does in possession, a page on what the team does out of possession, a page of set-pieces, game-management statistics (such as how they respond to going a goal down), a paragraph on every player. That sort of thing.”

In the case of Roy Hodgson, the emphasis is on identifying solutions for his players. Stevens continues: “What the gaffer is very good at, is when we say they do X in possession, he will say this is fine, but it needs the story of ‘They do X but we are going to do Y’. Otherwise it is pointless. Similarly, it is easy to identify a weakness, but then you need to show how to exploit the weakness. How will we defend when the ball is with the opponent’s goalkeeper? If we play 4-3-3, are we pressing with the front three high, or are we dropping off? They’ve got a deep midfielder. OK, so is it the No 9’s job to drop in or does a No 8 push up? We will make those recommendations.”

If managers are mostly receptive, how do players respond to analysis becoming more prominent? At Arsenal, few players enjoyed Unai Emery’s rigorous video sessions. At Manchester United, players complained during Van Gaal’s reign of drawn-out, often blistering feedback sessions which stripped players of their confidence. Individual players received emails highlighting faults. Towards the end, some players simply deleted the emails without reading. When Van Gaal inserted a technological tracker to see whether players had opened them, the team clocked on, leaving the file open for a period of time while getting on with other things. It is clear, therefore, that any analytic approach also requires good man-management skills. Some Premier League clubs used an app called Pushfor, which is mostly used in legal circles, that includes a feature that could tell the sender whether the client (in this case, the player) had read every page. Allardyce also encouraged his analysis teams at several clubs to show material to players, which was perceived as good fun for the video analysts but could become awkward when players bounced back with their own opinions.

Stevens says: “You don’t want players sitting there going, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’. You want them to say ‘I don’t agree with that’, ‘I don’t understand’, or ‘What happens if I go there?’ You don’t want zombies. If they come back at you, though, it puts analysts in a tough position, because you don’t want to speak out of turn.

“We use the Hudl platform now. Everything is online and on the players’ phones. Everything is there pre-match, post-match, their own clips, clips on prospective direct opponents, goalkeepers, set-plays, penalties. We get a record of what players are watching and how long they are watching for. But I don’t think you can force-feed players the information. You know which players want to know more. For others, it is information overload. Some won’t be effective participants in a team meeting, so it might be better to have unit meetings, or an individual meeting. We must adapt to enhance their performance.”

As clubs engage in a turf war for the most innovative analysts and scientists, the many annual conferences devoted to analytics focus on the next revelation.

“Tracking” data is the buzz phrase on the analytics scene and it refers to the movement of players and monitoring of off-the-ball events. Platforms such as Opta, Statsbomb and Wyscout do an excellent job in telling analysts what happened in possession. This is known as “event” data — events that happen on the ball.

Tracking data completes the picture on player movement. Yet what it does not do is provide context of the types of actions to which a player is reacting.

As a real-life example, imagine Chelsea midfielder Jorginho is on the ball. We can measure his pass-completion rate or key passes, while we can also measure things such as distance covered and the number of sprints by his team-mates. However, the game-changing challenge is to create a model that shows, in real-time, whether Jorginho missed out on better passing options when he moved the ball on. It may be that a different player is playing a number of line-breaking passes against a high-pressing team that progresses his team up the pitch. Yet currently we cannot distinguish between this pass and a similar pass of length and distance against a team that sits back in a low block (which makes the pass easier to complete) compared to an opponent that presses ferociously.

The challenge is to merge the event data and the tracking data and provide new coaches with new models by which to judge their players or potential recruits.

Opta’s former marketing man Banoub said: “This is a big wave coming: tracking data introduces filters for things such as decision making, options on the ball and the opportunity cost of decisions. Issues such as bravery on the ball will be editorialised and make its way into the mainstream. As soon as people connect tracking data to event data, that’s when you see the next thing.”

This season, the Premier League has provided top-flight clubs with this information, but it is yet to go across Europe and has not been perfect in England. Industry insiders expect that Liverpool’s in-house model and Arsenal’s StatDNA algorithms are developing their own formulas.

The combination of data will also provide a greater reflection of a defender’s value. Until recently, we have often heard defenders lauded for the number of tackles they made in a game, yet many within football dismiss this. In his book, Biermann quotes an interview with the former midfielder Xabi Alonso.

“If I have to make a tackle, I have already made a mistake,” Alonso said. “At Liverpool I used to read the match-day programme and you’d read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They’d ask: age, heroes, strong points. He’d reply: ‘Shooting and tackling’. I can’t get into my head that football development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play. How can that be a way of seeing the game? Tackling is a last resort, and you will need it, but it isn’t a quality to aspire to.”

Palace’s Stevens explains: “Defending is not what you do, it is what you don’t do. If I make a tackle, is that good? The old coaching method was always, ‘Don’t make a tackle, stay on your feet and intercept.’ If my positioning is perfect, and that means they never pass to the striker because your positioning is so good it blocks supply to him, that defending is never given any weight or any ‘well done’. This is where tracking data comes in.”

Efforts are afoot to bring a product to the mass market. Sportlogiq are said to be closest but there have been examples elsewhere of snake oil approaches, whereby platforms offer services beyond their capabilities. The Athletic previously revealed, for example, that one club wrote off a six-figure sum they had paid to a performance data firm that they discovered, through an independent investigation, to be riddled with errors.

At Analytics FC, they offer one way around the issue of analysing defenders, although it remains imperfect. Steele says: “Our model can use tracking data but not across 90 leagues. For a scouting proposition, when we give algorithms to clubs, it is more useful to have consistent breadth across the world. We can incorporate tracking data when it becomes more readily available across more leagues. Our algorithm does measure defending to an extent, whereas 99.9 per cent of models do not. In this sense, we flip the models. For all those times when you are showing the probability of scoring from position X at that time, if the defender makes a block in that situation, then the risk or probability of conceding is attributed to that block. If a defender is tackling or intercepting in high value areas, it shows in his metrics. It is not the number of tackles, it is the probability the opposition had of scoring and how he is preventing them from doing it.”

As mathematicians and economists struggle for supremacy, there is a sense that clubs are now financially buying into data science. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a financial threat to data platforms, while some clubs have already put recruitment staff on furlough.

Brouwer, the CIO of SciSports, explains: “We signed three new clubs up in the past week, but three other clubs are refusing to pay us. There is no football being played and we help with opponent analysis, so that will decrease for now. The European Championships have been postponed and that is a tough moment for the analytics companies. Everyone will have been building new models to launch during the Euros. We expect to still launch but without the exposure, while the money you get from national teams is substantial. So, yes, there will be a knock-on effect.”

Yet the financial outlook for data scientists is optimistic. While some top-flight clubs still offer less than £30,000 as an annual salary, the higher end of the scale is now challenging investment banks and the Big Four consulting firms. Steele says: “Now most clubs are looking for data scientists. It is very similar to the sports science revolution from 15 years ago. We used to have badly paid sports science graduates from Loughborough or Bath University. They would come in, do some gym work and on-pitch stuff and be ignored by coaches. People would say, ‘He’s not doing any harm, so let him get on with it.’

“Now football clubs have 10 members of staff in the sports science department. They have people solely there to put GPS data on players and analyse the results. That has blown up. I am sure the same thing will happen with data science. Most clubs already have a video analyst and many have a guy they put on data. A lot of those are not from a data science background: they are not mathematicians, economists or scientists. But the elite clubs now want physicists, computer engineers and data engineers. High-level people cost money because they would walk into jobs in banking. Look at Will Spearman at Liverpool, a Harvard nuclear physicist, he could ask for whatever he wants because how many people have his qualifications?”

Could we see clubs going into leading universities and placing scientists on graduate schemes? Steele says: “It is a fair point. In other departments, they are only in competition with other sporting institutions. Here they are in direct competition with high-level data modelling companies, the government, the Big Four. One thing will always be true: clubs can get those people on a slightly lower wage because it is football. People like to feel involved.”

Finkelstein believes his bold outlook from 17 years ago has been vindicated. He concludes: “I had a recent correspondence with Ian at Liverpool and he feels strongly that the work with Henry on Fink Tank was very basic to the growth of analytics in the game. I will take that, thank you very much!” ”
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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Conroy92 » Thu Apr 16, 2020 9:33 am

Had a flick through. Love the film moneyball and I get why the stats/data is so important. It increases your chances of having an "informed" decision but they still don't always work out.
Theres a lot of naming of successful players in there but how many duds have they also drafted in?

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 17, 2020 1:01 pm

Following the transcription of that excellent article (thank you BurnleyPaul) I am hoping that this can be another long running serious thread with a focus on a particular topic (there have been a couple of false starts previously). From experience It only takes a couple of interested posters to make it so.

With that in mind this in today's Independent is a good read

The lessons Manchester United can learn from football analytics leaders Liverpool and Barcelona
The Old Trafford side are building an analytics department and have two strong templates to follow,
writes Senior Football Correspondent Melissa Reddy

As winter was morphing into spring in 2017, Luke Bornn was not surprised by Liverpool’s escalation of interest in Mohamed Salah.
He was, however, perplexed as to why no other elite team was attentively circling the Egypt international.

Operating as AS Roma’s head of analytics at the time, he noted that Salah’s efficiency in creating and scoring goals was supreme, but it was only a snapshot of his potential.

Bornn was convinced that the player still had a few levels to hit before getting close to his ceiling and believed his explosiveness would be unleashed through the rapid transitions demanded by Jurgen Klopp.

He also knew Liverpool’s homework on Salah was exhaustive.

They were painfully close to signing the attacker from Basel in January 2014 before a phone call from Jose Mourinho persuaded him to join Chelsea instead, but moreover, the Reds could rely on a respected analytics arm.

While Salah's reputation in England was summarised as “flop at Stamford Bridge,” his career numbers indicated he was misused in a league where his pace, strength, movement and decisive actions in the find third could be potent weaponry.

Ian Graham, Liverpool’s director of research who holds a doctorate in theoretical physics, took a deep dive into the speedster's data from Basel, Fiorentina and Roma to conclude that he would thrive in attack alongside Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino.

The club had initially wanted Julian Brandt, but he was set on continuing his development in Germany. Graham, Liverpool’s scouting team and Michael Edwards, the sporting director, convinced Klopp that Salah was the wide forward to go all in for.

Fenway Sports Group president, Mike Gordon, sanctioned a total package of £43.9 million for him - a fee analysts on both sides of the deal were confident would be considered cheap against his contributions.

Salah has 91 goals for the club in 144 appearances and has been a core figure to Liverpool's restoration as a continental and domestic superpower.

Bornn would knowingly smile the summer after too. The Merseysiders returned to Roma with £65m for Alisson, the second-most expensive goalkeeper in the world, who has become the best in his position.

Again, the cost was seen as less than the impact the Brazil international could make in performances and the psychology of the squad.

Such calculations are not a result of fortune. Liverpool’s actions in the transfer market are deliberate, a product of leading analytical insight that is trusted and has been empowered.

“In terms of using analytics in the transfer market, they are some distance ahead of their competitors,” David Sumpter, a Professor of Applied Maths and author of Soccermatics, tells The Independent.

He believes Liverpool’s success rate with recruitment during Klopp’s reconstruction of the club, from mining ignored gems like Andy Robertson and being single-minded in the pursuit of Virgil van Dijk, is a result of collaboration and giving authority to analytics.

“What you need and what they have is a team with a full understanding the club, working towards the same goal through use of a variety of data and knowledge to make informed decisions,” Sumpter says.

“Liverpool are well run, properly structured and have a clear identity. Without this, it wouldn’t matter how brilliant Ian Graham's work is.

“Not only do they have the right platform for their data scientists to work, but they’ve empowered them and have great synergy in decision-making.
“There is no sole genius at Liverpool. It is not Graham or Klopp or Edwards - it is collection of all these superb minds coming together to meet objectives and generate success.”

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, a professor at the London School of Economics who doubles up as a director of the football club Athletic Bilbao, has labelled Liverpool “clear leaders” in this regard.

Fierce rivals Manchester United, better late than never, have designs on developing an analytics department to inform their recruitment decisions and long-term identity on the pitch.

Sumpter has welcomed the club's belated move to embrace the use of data, given they lag not just behind Liverpool and Manchester City, but the likes of Brighton and Brentford too.

The latter, owned by Oxford physics graduate Matthew Benham, began their data revolution in 2012.

“Brentford have accepted and used analytics better than most big teams,” Sumpter says.

“Their transfer business - like buying Neal Maupay for £1.6m and selling to Brighton for £19.8m - has been consistently excellent. They haven’t been promoted yet, but their metrics are solid and they are punching well above their weight.”

Brentford have one of the lowest commercial revenues in the Championship and are fourth from bottom in terms of wage budget yet are fourth in the standings.

When Brighton decided to sack Chris Hughton last season despite achieving promotion, there was an outcry. In the analytics world, however, it was painted as a measured move.

“Statistically, they should have gone down,” Sumpter says. Their expected goals and every other underlying stat was poor. It wasn't sustainable for another season and the club were in need of a fresh approach.

“Working with Hammarby in Sweden, I was interested in their appointment of Graham Potter, who did remarkable things at Östersund. He took them from the fourth tier to the top-flight and given his degree in social science, was open to analytics. He was impressive at Swansea and I’m keen to see how things take shape longer term at Brighton.”

While Sumpter is enthused by United’s decision to invest in analytics, he has two major concerns. “It was reported that they want to hire a team of eight experts,” he begins, bluntly adding: “the idea they can hire that many minds in an analytics department is somewhat ridiculous.

“There are very few candidates in the world qualified to make a difference in football data, who have the experience and understanding to really be sure in decision making. It’s hard enough to find one to drive a project, let alone eight.

“There’s Ian Graham, Javier Fernandez and the team from Barcelona, Sarah Rudd from Arsenal, the FA have a great guy… Even trying to do a long list is hard, so imagine trying to hire so many experts.”

Sumpter, who is part of the Friends of Tracking network on Youtube that educates and inspires those interested in football analytics, also hopes United are not just buying into analytics for aesthetic purposes as so many others have.

“There are clubs who have hired analytics staff to show they are in tune with modern developments, but they haven’t empowered them,” Sumpter says.

“They do not get involved in major decisions or even minor decisions sometimes.

“A lot of teams have people in who crunch the numbers, but they aren’t actually maximising the talents of those people or willing to do so.
“There’s still some distrust and also problems around the kind of people who have an influence, like agents exerting too much control at clubs.”

While Liverpool are the example United should look to regarding analytics in recruitment, Barcelona are the template for developing research.

The European champions have also focused on the game itself with metrics like goal probability added and pitch control, which lead data analyst William Spearman - PhD in Physics from Harvard - has provided a masterclass on, but La Liga’s giants are in a league of their own.

To little fuss, Barca launched the Innovation Hub in 2017. It shares their knowledge on analytics, health, nutrition, high athletic performance and all other topics related to sports and its impact on society.

In terms of their data research, Javier Fernandez summarises it as "trying to get closer to understanding the game better."

As the club’s head of sport analytics, he is interested in concepts like how the team behaves in each situation, general patterns of their play, understanding space, if they’re spending too much time in zones that have no impact on their game…

Event data - every pass, every defensive action, every shot, everything that happens on the ball - is of no use to Barca because it is decontextualised.

They use the positional data of the 22 players instead. This allows them to gain insights like Lionel Messi creates more space by standing still, walking or jogging than any of his teammates do by running.

Fernandez and his team of six often reference a famous Johan Cruyff observation. “When you play a match, it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball three minutes on average,” said the Barca and Dutch legend.

“So, the most important thing is: what do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball?”

It is off-the-ball actions and off-the-ball performance in context that the club seek to understand and bend to their will.

“Barca are the benchmark in analytics research,” Sumpter says. “And they share their findings through the Innovation Hub so anyone interested can get a better grasp of how analytics is involving in football. They want the sport to be better off with this knowledge.”

United can use that resource as they map their analytics pathway in an effort to catch up with clubs they detest being in the shadow of.
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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 24, 2020 12:59 pm

Another article to keep this thread tick over - The future of data analytics in football from Training Ground Guru

https://trainingground.guru/articles/ri ... n-football

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by BurnleyPaul » Fri Apr 24, 2020 2:39 pm

You would hope that this is part of the role given to Mike Rigg.

Building, and then continually developing, this side of our scouting network has to be one of the “tricks” that we can use to consistently punch above our weight. We’ll never be a massive club- but we can still be an important and influential one.

There are gems out there- and we certainly have a manager and coaching team who can polish them up...

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Dyched » Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:00 pm

I got as far as Memphis Depay and that was it, I’ll read the rest later.

That guy is ****. Absolute ****. I hate the *******.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Apr 28, 2020 1:25 am

I know Sean likes these GPS vests - he talked about the players using them in lockdown only last week - more data and stats - though I am not sure I would want my players gifting this data to other clubs/scouts

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foo ... 85676.html

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Fretters » Tue Apr 28, 2020 11:59 am

Dyched wrote:
Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:00 pm
I got as far as Memphis Depay and that was it, I’ll read the rest later.

That guy is ****. Absolute ****. I hate the *******.
I know it's only in France but his record at Lyon is fantastic.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Dyched » Thu Apr 30, 2020 12:51 pm

Fretters wrote:
Tue Apr 28, 2020 11:59 am
I know it's only in France but his record at Lyon is fantastic.
Not about his football. What **** keeps a Liger as a pet? What shits support the making of Ligers? There’s a fantastic informative comment of his Instagram about the trouble those “animals” suffer as the consequence for scumbag humans.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon May 11, 2020 8:44 pm

I really want subject matter of this thread to take off - so here is another contribution

This is a very good podcast from Sport Inc - Is sport a numbers game? - we get a very positive mention (even though there is - infuriatingly - the now contractually obliged Brexit club reference)

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/5 ... 0437426647

Not mentioned here but just to underline our credentials - I saw somewhere recently that Liverpool (regarded as the best in analytics in the country, have nicked a couple of our analysts in the last couple of years

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 12, 2020 1:56 pm

This guy is fascinating- the Throw in coach - there are lots of good clips on his channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf_BYraDeI8

- much has been written about what he has contributed to Liverpool, I personally think it is an area we could improve in

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon May 18, 2020 11:54 pm

Article on What numbers are 'good' numbers when it comes to statistics? - not totally convinced that all of these are the right statistics but useful base information nonetheless

https://www.footballcritic.com/features ... sticsc/851

Paulo Maldini used to say "If I have to make a tackle I have already made a mistake"

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by superdimitri » Tue May 19, 2020 4:31 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue May 12, 2020 1:56 pm
This guy is fascinating- the Throw in coach - there are lots of good clips on his channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf_BYraDeI8

- much has been written about what he has contributed to Liverpool, I personally think it is an area we could improve in
Our throw ins are awful compared to our other set pieces.

Regarding data analysis I'm sure we are on board with it. Just doubt we are a paying customer of this agency in particular. I reckon we use our own in house method manually scouting existing databases. Of course that doesn't stop a players agent seeing someone suitable to us.. But when you think of the kind of profile of player represented by similar agents of Depay I'm not so sure anyone is going to approach Burnley after consulting this firm.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 19, 2020 11:15 am

superdimitri wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 4:31 am
Our throw ins are awful compared to our other set pieces.

Regarding data analysis I'm sure we are on board with it. Just doubt we are a paying customer of this agency in particular. I reckon we use our own in house method manually scouting existing databases. Of course that doesn't stop a players agent seeing someone suitable to us.. But when you think of the kind of profile of player represented by similar agents of Depay I'm not so sure anyone is going to approach Burnley after consulting this firm.
I believe we are far more into it than you imagine

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by superdimitri » Wed May 20, 2020 5:01 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 11:15 am
I believe we are far more into it than you imagine
Perhaps we are, but if we are we'll have a considerably smaller pool of players.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Burnley Ace » Wed May 20, 2020 7:54 am

Is there an element of “double edged sword” in that there will be fewer and fewer hidden gems or players making the move from non league as they will already have been identified? All these teams having access to fantastic data makes it easier for the big clubs to hoover up the talent - mind you we are one of the big clubs now!!

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Wed May 20, 2020 11:04 am

Burnley Ace wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 7:54 am
Is there an element of “double edged sword” in that there will be fewer and fewer hidden gems or players making the move from non league as they will already have been identified? All these teams having access to fantastic data makes it easier for the big clubs to hoover up the talent - mind you we are one of the big clubs now!!
there is, but it will also help identify those players who:
- have kicked on later than is the norm,
- come to football specialisation late
- have utilised the skill they always had with new found endeavour as a result of being ditched in their late teens

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Sun May 24, 2020 7:37 pm

This is interesting - The Athletic approached a Data Analysis organisation to see what they would advise Everton for its transfer plans this summer

https://theathletic.com/1822754/2020/05 ... haes-tete/

this podcast gives more detail on the thinking

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m ... 0475360936

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon May 25, 2020 2:43 pm

Not really data analytics, but Monchi is regarded as a bit of a master for how he developed Sevilla - here he offers a masterclass in a series of videos of how he did it

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... pp=desktop

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon May 25, 2020 5:00 pm

I read that many articles that I cannot remember if this has been posted before - it is from Forbes.com features Mike Rigg and I suspect that a few will take a pop once they have read it - but that is not why I am posting it, it is illustrative of the theme of the thread and begins to throw some light (not much) on what our club is up to.

How Soccer Scouting Has Changed, And Why It’s Never Going Back

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertkidd ... oing-back/

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Jun 18, 2020 7:39 pm

I really would like to see this subject matter take off - to keep it ticking over this from the Times

How analysts have used lockdown to unearth football’s next hidden gems
Dan Clark speaks to data experts and performance analysts to see how they have used the time afforded them by the break in play
Daniel Clark
Wednesday June 17 2020, 5.00pm, The Times

When the Premier League restarts it will be exactly 100 days since its last action. Clubs have been waiting patiently for the green light to return and have been in full-contact training in preparation for the flurry of games to finally end the season.

When the league was suspended in March we highlighted how clubs could concentrate their efforts on video and data analysis in an attempt to gain a competitive edge during the lockdown. So have clubs been using this time wisely? According to Ted Knutson, the chief executive of football analytics company StatsBomb, the answer is a resounding yes.

“We work with some big clubs that have just lived on our data platform the last couple of months,” Knutson explains. “That is obviously a result of not being able to go and watch players — coaches and managers have had to watch videos, look at the data and work on something else.”

“We’ve had a huge influx of requests from clubs looking to get started with our services, but also from several national teams. They should have been preparing for the Euros but the extra year has given them time to reassess and investigate ways of improving for next summer. I’ve been impressed and even a little surprised by that, but whether you’re interested in player analysis or recruitment, it’s a great time to learn.”

As well its extensive data platform, StatsBomb offers specialised online courses on a variety of subjects.

“We recently hosted a course on set pieces which around 100 people signed up for — 70 who worked in professional football. At least half the teams in the Premier League were represented. Our introductory courses have also been heavily utilised by coaches. They’re using this extra time to learn more about analytics and potentially enhance their coaching career,” Knutson added.

Lee Dunn, head of performance and recruitment analysis at Norwich City, thinks that this time in lockdown has been useful in helping streamline existing processes and a chance to look at new technologies that may assist with analysis in the future.

“It’s obviously been quite a challenging time. We integrate both data and video analysis in our processes but it’s become far more prevalent. An area we’ve explored in more depth is player tracking through machine learning and computer vision as a way to enhance the physical data we have on a number of leagues. This, coupled with our existing video, data and live scouting, could really benefit us with recruitment in the future”.

Computer vision, at its most basic, is technology that aims to automate tasks that your eyes can do. Its main use in sport is player tracking. In theory, if you can automatically detect actions by players you would have a rich stream of data that is much more efficient to collect than manual data recording.

“I think there’s a desperate need for physical data on a larger scale to help identify players with the required physical capacity to perform on the level we are competing at,” Dunn explains. “The Premier League is one of the most physically demanding leagues in the world. This extra layer of data can be a really useful tool for us in filtering down the pool of players we are looking at but also open up possibilities for us to utilise some advanced contextual metrics within our recruitment analysis work”.

From speaking to those that work in recruitment it’s obvious that there’s a clear focus on unearthing the next “hidden gem”. This has always been a goal but the uncertainty around finances, timeframes and when the next transfer window will take place has increased its importance.

Using this extra time effectively is even more important lower down the leagues where budgets are tighter and analytical teams are smaller. Liam Sweeting, head of recruitment and analysis at League one side MK Dons, explains how his team have adapted.

“We have a relatively small team of myself, an analyst and three to four scouts. Our normal process is a hybrid approach of the data leading us to ‘unknown players’ or ‘overlooked players’ and our scouts reporting on all 22 players in any assigned game — live or on video – constantly adding to our qualitative report database.”

“When the games stopped the data became the absolute focus of the department and we were able to use the time to choose games we thought were the most relevant to be watched via video. Prior to the furlough scheme starting, we ended up covering some teams in a lot more focus than we ever have before, so it created some really interesting possibilities,” Sweeting adds.

The financial implications of coronavirus are still uncertain but clubs below the Premier League are likely to be the worst-hit. The chairman of Wycombe Wanderers — who play at the same level as MK Dons — wrote to supporters last week, saying that the club “anticipate our loss of revenue will continue at the rate of £350,000 a month.”

At MK Dons, it was announced in April that the playing squad had “unanimously agreed” to be placed on furlough as well as take a 25 per cent wage deferral. In this new environment smart recruitment is going to become even more important.

“The live games are great — there’s still no substitute for them — but the video allows us to cross reference and follow up what someone has seen. It’s extremely efficient as we can pause, rewind and best of all it’s much more cost effective for the club compared to sending out physical scouts,” Sweeting says.

“Overall I’m delighted our scouts buy into and see the value of our video scouting. It also represents how we make our next step into scouting Europe and further afield. Even with all that said, I am strangely looking forward to that first trip back to a cold, wet evening of under 23 football!”

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Jun 22, 2020 3:48 pm

The FT with a detailed look at why Liverpool are on the cusp of their first Premier League title - their are lots of graphs and charts so eaier to ling especially as it is not behind a paywall

https://www.ft.com/content/4640e9d7-58e ... f3bdef51ce

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Adeola Friday » Mon Aug 10, 2020 6:32 pm

Couldn't see a link to this article on here (apologies if posted elsewhere) but very interesting on how using data differs from traditional scouting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/maga ... rpool.html

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Adeola Friday » Mon Aug 10, 2020 6:33 pm

Only remembered that I'd read the above last year after seeing this article in the Guardian analysing how the xG stat is useful but also still has flaws to be worked out:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... rgen-klopp

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 10, 2020 7:57 pm

Adeola Friday wrote:
Mon Aug 10, 2020 6:33 pm
Only remembered that I'd read the above last year after seeing this article in the Guardian analysing how the xG stat is useful but also still has flaws to be worked out:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... rgen-klopp
Cheers saved me posting that here

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by NRC » Mon Aug 10, 2020 9:28 pm

good thread

so same topic, different application, but still with players at the center, the team I work with exercised an IT digital transformation with Ajax. Why across the entirety of IT you might ask? That's because the insights from the vests on the training pitch created a ton of data for analysis, which in itself is only one part of the equestion - internal systems need to be capable of handling it, which means the IT platform, the people to run it/apply governance, and the developers to develop.

This is all because Ajax's business is NOT football, it is players with ability that are sold as commodities https://tinyurl.com/yxa7a4po

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by CharlieinNewMexico » Tue Aug 11, 2020 9:51 am

Great topic for scientists and data analysts would be the rejection of physicality in the appreciation of younger players. A model or algorithm could work out that if your dad was 6’2 and your mum 5’4 you could stop clubs rejecting you as “too small” when you’re only 15

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Aug 11, 2020 6:03 pm

CharlieinNewMexico wrote:
Tue Aug 11, 2020 9:51 am
Great topic for scientists and data analysts would be the rejection of physicality in the appreciation of younger players. A model or algorithm could work out that if your dad was 6’2 and your mum 5’4 you could stop clubs rejecting you as “too small” when you’re only 15
Clubs were doing that in 90's - top Ballet schools even longer

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by benstone12 » Thu Aug 13, 2020 8:30 pm

I think SD is quite open minded to the use of analytics.
There are some good podcasts where he talks about modern methods (and good old fashioned ones)

I always remember this quote;

"Statistics are like mini-skirts - they give you good ideas but hide the important things."

- Aberdeen manager Ebbe Skovdahl

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Aug 13, 2020 8:33 pm

benstone12 wrote:
Thu Aug 13, 2020 8:30 pm
I think SD is quite open minded to the use of analytics.
There are some good podcasts where he talks about modern methods (and good old fashioned ones)

I always remember this quote;

"Statistics are like mini-skirts - they give you good ideas but hide the important things."

- Aberdeen manager Ebbe Skovdahl
you would hope so, we are well into double figures of them employed at the club

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by benstone12 » Fri Aug 14, 2020 11:55 am

Analyst is quite a broad term.
What exactly are the team of 12 plus analysts doing? I am genuinely interested to know.

Its clearly an area where lots of team are prospering as per your links above. Brentford, Augsberg, RB teams etc all doing extremely well and developing year on year.

On the flip side, it will be interesting to see how clubs like Arsenal fare. They've ditched the analytical approach which Sven Misintlat favoured for a now "agent" led approach. Surely an agent as a business person will only ever have his own clients (and money) interests at the fore?

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Aug 14, 2020 5:45 pm

benstone12 wrote:
Fri Aug 14, 2020 11:55 am
Analyst is quite a broad term.
What exactly are the team of 12 plus analysts doing? I am genuinely interested to know.

Its clearly an area where lots of team are prospering as per your links above. Brentford, Augsberg, RB teams etc all doing extremely well and developing year on year.

On the flip side, it will be interesting to see how clubs like Arsenal fare. They've ditched the analytical approach which Sven Misintlat favoured for a now "agent" led approach. Surely an agent as a business person will only ever have his own clients (and money) interests at the fore?
From various articles. interviews and reports I have seen we have analysts working on:
- scouting for players (both for the first team squad and the academy - could be different teams)
- scouting the opposition
- analysing training data (first team squad and academy) - this feeds into match preparation, player fatigue assessment, physical stress points, medical recovery
- I believe we have psychological analysis available too

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 1:27 pm

The Guardian with an article of Throw-in coach Thomas Grønnemark - he has featured in this thread before

'I work on the long, fast and clever': meet Liverpool's throw-in coach
Liverpool
Thomas Grønnemark on ignoring Jürgen Klopp’s initial call, the key to throw-ins and the two Liverpool players who are the world’s best at the art

Kasper Steenbach - Wed 23 Sep 2020 12.00 BST

During the scorching summer of 2018, Thomas Grønnemark received a call while touring the Danish countryside with his wife and their two children. He noticed the caller ID on the screen was a +44 number but he was preoccupied with driving and, as the sole proprietor of a registered business, he was quite used to receiving calls from people selling everything from accounting programmes to pension schemes. So Grønnemark let the call die out. When the family stopped at the organic chocolate shop in Knebel, he listened to his voicemail.

The person behind the British phone number was none other than Jürgen Klopp, and Liverpool’s manager asked him to call back. Grønnemark wasted no time in doing so but couldn’t get through, and so he continued his journey home to Skive. His phone rang not long after.

“My wife looked at the display, because I was driving the car, and she said: ‘It’s Jürgen!’ I pulled the car over in the nearest grass field to speak to Jürgen Klopp. He told me that Liverpool had had a fantastic 17-18 season, coming in fourth in the Premier League and reaching the Champions League final. But they had lost the ball almost every time they had had a throw-in. He invited me to Melwood, Liverpool’s training ground, the following week, and naturally I agreed. It was actually just meant to be a meeting, but he was so convinced I could help them they had me coaching the Premier League players the following day. I’ve coached Liverpool FC ever since.”

Grønnemark is a throw-in coach, possibly the only one of his kind, and Klopp had read about his expertise in the German magazine Sport Bild. The Dane had given an interview, in which he spoke of how the Borussia Mönchengladbach left-back Andreas Poulsen had improved his long throw by 14 metres under his supervision. Grønnemark has a varied background in sport: he was a sprinter for Denmark and a brakeman on the bobsleigh team that met the international requirements for the 2006 Winter Olympics but wasn’t selected to compete. He is probably best known, though, for setting a world-record long throw.

The record was achieved in 2010 when he used a front flip to propel the ball 51.33 metres across some pitches in Horsens. The long throw is what people want to talk about when they ask about his work, but coaching throw-ins is about so much more, he points out. “I work with the long, the fast and the clever throw-in. And that goes for the entire field. I’ve coached some teams that only wanted to practise long throws close to the opponent’s goal, but my philosophy is to practice across the entire field. And Liverpool is the first team to really enjoy the benefits of this philosophy.

“You could say that I coach intelligence when it comes to throw-ins. And I’m not afraid to say that most professional players possess very little intelligence in this respect – and among amateurs and young players it tends to be even worse; 99% of the professional players and coaches I’m in contact with have never practised throw-ins, and those that have, have not practised at a particularly high level.”

Players need to learn the technique required to throw long and with precision, but also to create space to receive the ball. The aim is to create chances and ultimately goals, which is why the throw-in coach involves every player in his training. “If you watch a Liverpool match, there are usually six or seven different players who do the throw-ins,” Grønnemark says. “If [Mohamed] Salah is closest to the ball, he should go ahead and do the throw-in, but only if it makes sense. However, it can be a disadvantage to take the throw-in too fast. The worst thing you can do is to take the throw-in fast in a pressure zone. When I analyse throw-ins, I look at whether we’re able to play our way out of the pressure from our opponent. We might do something amazing based on a throw-in, but that isn’t good enough for me if we lose the ball.”

Klopp contacted Grønnemark after a season in which Liverpool’s statistics on throw-ins under pressure were the third-worst in the Premier League with a success rate of 45.4%, according to Tifo Football. After Grønnemark had worked with the team for a season, Liverpool ranked as the second-best team in Europe within the same parameters, on 68.4%. They were second only to FC Midtjylland, who also work with Grønnemark.

Apart from Liverpool and several Danish teams, Grønnemark has been employed by clubs such as RB Leipzig, Ajax and Gent. Last season he coached throw-ins at eight clubs. He usually visits each team six or seven times a year, with two to four days of training per visit. In addition, he conducts a video analysis of all their matches. He singles out Liverpool’s Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold as the best throwers in modern football.

“I’ve coached a lot of players who have improved the length of their throws with the help of technical training. When I started working with Kian Hansen [now of Nordsjælland], he could throw 30 metres, which is pretty far, but the throw was very high and easy to defend against. He ultimately reached 36.7 metres but throwing at incredible speed. I believe he assisted every one of the 35 goals that FC Midtjylland scored after throw-ins in the next four seasons.

“A completely different case is Andy Robertson from Liverpool, who couldn’t throw past 19 metres when I met him. That is very, very short, and when you throw that short, it’s very, very easy to put that throw under pressure. He managed to extend his throw by nearly eight metres. And although he’ll never have the longest throw, with training we’ve managed to improve the radius of his throw-in by more than 500 square metres.

I’ve had several offers from top Premier League teams I’ve turned down. Liverpool isn’t holding me back. My own ethics are
“This means he can throw to more players. He improved incredibly fast – tactically, too, in terms of when to take the throw fast and when to hold on to the ball. When is the space created? He’s very good at precision. Trent has reached just about the same level, but it took him a little longer. In my eyes, they are the best all-round throwers in the world.”

Grønnemark is reluctant to highlight specifics from matches where his teams have excelled at a thrown-in they have practised. “I’m the only one in the world with such in-depth knowledge of throw-ins. Which is actually a pretty big deal, when you think about it, because football is a 140-year-old sport … Until I release the book I’m working on, I’ll keep my secrets to myself.”

Grønnemark has extended his contract for another season with Liverpool and selects his clients carefully. “I don’t want to coach teams that compete with Liverpool at the top, and I don’t want to coach teams that have a historical rivalry. For instance, coaching Liverpool and Manchester United in the same season wouldn’t work. I’ve had several offers from top teams in the Premier League that I’ve turned down – including in this season. Liverpool isn’t holding me back. My own ethics are.”

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Oct 19, 2020 10:37 am

just to keep this thread ticking over - Brentford owner Mathew Benham's FC Midtjylland are about to start their first ever Champions League group stage - they are amongst the leafing pioneers of data driven football - from the Associated Press

Data-driven approach taking Midtjylland to heady heights
By STEVE DOUGLAS
31 minutes ago


FC Midtjylland's Pione Sisto, second right, celebrates scoring with teammates in the 3F Superliga match FC Midtjylland against OB at the MCH Arena in Herning, Denmark, Saturday Oct. 17, 2020. FC Midtjylland has been one of the poster teams for analytics in European soccer. Now the Danish club is about to find out how its data-driven and statistical approach fares in the Champions League after qualifying for the competition’s group stage for the first time. (Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)
They are among the poster boys for analytics in European soccer, a team that scores nearly half of its goals from set pieces and operates a “justice league” that has nothing to do with superheroes.

Now, FC Midtjylland — an upstart that has already upended the Danish game in its 21-year existence — is about to find out how its data-driven and statistical approach fares in the Champions League after qualifying for the competition’s group stage for the first time.

Getting drawn in a group containing six-time champion Liverpool, storied Dutch team Ajax and ascendant Italian club Atalanta is holding no fear for Midtjylland, whose outlook on soccer could easily be termed an experiment.

“For us,” captain Erik Sviatchenko said, “it’s about looking underneath the surface.”

In 2014, Matthew Benham, a former professional gambler who owns a company that uses mathematical models to predict the results of sports matches, took a controlling interest in Midtjylland — a club from central Denmark formed 15 years earlier as a result of a merger between two rival teams.

The arrival of Benham, who already owned second-tier English club Brentford, meant Midtjylland had access — via his company, Smartodds — to a database of players across all teams and leagues in Europe, and even beyond. The deep analysis of the players’ performances, using metrics such as chances created and quality of crosses, helped Midtjylland pinpoint prospects who may have been undervalued because their underlying statistics suggested they were better than they appeared.

“For instance, take a player in the third division in Germany,” Sviatchenko told The Associated Press. “All the statistics they have, you put into the formula and you see this player would actually be able to cope at Bundesliga level.

“At the moment, he is only playing in the third division but we might take this guy because we know his potential is greater than other clubs will see, and he is maybe not as expensive as a player would be in the Bundesliga.”

An example? Luca Pfeiffer, a striker who was with Würzburger Kickers in Germany’s third tier last season, joined Midtjylland this month for a reported 1.5 million euros ($1.75 million).

To Svend Graversen, Midtjylland’s sporting director, the club’s approach is a case of “taking the data from Smartodds and combining it with our eyes (of scouts) who know which players can fit into Midtjylland.”

“The best of both worlds,” was how Graversen described it.

The analysis doesn’t stop there. The team’s performances are judged on players meeting certain underlying indicators that are as important as the results themselves.

Click on the profile of star midfielder Pione Sisto on Midtjylland’s official website, for example. Along with getting typical data such as games played, goals scored, red and yellow cards and his height and weight, one can also see his expected goals for the season, the success rate of his long passes and the percentage of passes to his right or left, backward or forward.

Midtjylland’s players work so hard on set pieces, which are regarded by the club’s analysts as a potentially huge difference maker, that the team scored 49% of its goals last season from that source, according to Sviatchenko.

“We have playbooks almost like you see in American football,” Sviatchenko said.

Analysts even feed in-game stats to coaches so they can be used in halftime team talks.

“You can have a feeling on the pitch, or at halftime, that isn’t corresponding to what the facts actually are,” said Sviatchenko, who added that the club has a “justice” league table where one can see where a team would be in the standings based on its stats.

The results of this analytical drive under Benham have been stunning. At the end of his first full season as owner in 2015, Midtjylland won the Danish league for the first time. It did so again in 2018, and again this year in a season disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

There have been impressive results in Europe over the years — a 2-1 win over Manchester United in the Europa League’s last 32 in 2016 stands out — but reaching the lucrative group stage of the Champions League had been beyond Midtjylland until this summer, when the team beat the champions of Bulgaria (Ludogorets), Switzerland (Young Boys) and the Czech Republic (Slavia Prague) in qualifying to advance.

A home match against Atalanta, at Midtjylland’s 12,000-seater MCH Arena awaits on Wednesday in the first round of matches. Then, the following week, a trip to Anfield.

Graversen said the club’s statistical modelling no longer just compares Midtjylland to its rivals in Denmark but also now to teams it wants to soon be competing with on the continent. He name-checked Ajax, Lazio and Salzburg.

“We have created our own league to try to hit higher targets,” Graversen said. “We can measure these targets and evaluate if we are on the right track.”

Midtjylland, created as the result of a merger between Ikast FS and Herning Fremad, will be the fifth Danish team to play in the Champions League group stage, and the first since FC Copenhagen in 2016-17.

Sviatchenko said his team has yet to be fully embraced by the Danish nation — “In general, people are skeptical to Midtjylland because they think it’s a new club,” he said, “and there’s not the romantic feeling of a football club” — but is sure that would change should it qualify for the knockout stage.

Should that happen, Midtjylland’s reliance on stats really would be regarded as a game-changer.

“There’s a lot of data out there that is available, but I think the main challenge is how to break it down and use it in your way of playing. And that’s the difficult part,” Graversen said.

“We’re not there yet. At Midtjylland, we have a lot of work still to be done but I’m sure football in general will take this statistical approach even further.”

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:54 am

Today it is the Observers turn to do a piece on FC Midtjylland

'What we do isn't rocket science': how FC Midtjylland started football's data revolution
Since 2014, the Danish champions have been the poster child for using metrics to gain an advantage on the competition

Sean Ingle Sun 25 Oct 2020 08.00 GMT

Think of it as the Moneyball derby. Not so long ago, the idea a club could gain a vital edge using mathematical models – let alone employ a theoretical physicist or track key performance indicators (KPI) – would have left real football men choking on their meat pies and Bovril. But when Liverpool host Midtjylland in the Champions League on Tuesday, it will not only be a meeting between the champions of England and Denmark, but one between the twin vanguards of the sport’s analytics revolution.

Midtjylland became the movement’s poster child in 2014 when they started using deeper metrics – such as expected goals and pre-assists to an assist – to better evaluate player performances, find undervalued bargains and to shatter myths and easy narratives.

Many sneered when the unfashionable club from the centre of the Danish mainland – literally the middle of Jutland – also hired dedicated ball-striking and throw-in coaches and when their chairman, Rasmus Ankersen, promised to exploit inefficiencies in football. Winning three Danish Superliga titles in six years and qualifying for the Champions League for the first time this autumn have proved an effective riposte.

More recently, Liverpool have become Midtjylland’s big-budget half-brother. Their highly regarded research department, which includes an analyst with a doctorate in high-energy physics from Harvard, has earned significant credit for its recruitment of a string of top-quality players.

The bonds between the teams go further still, however. Two years ago, Jürgen Klopp headhunted Midtjylland’s throwing coach, Thomas Grønnemark. Since then, Liverpool’s statistics for retaining possession from throw-ins under pressure has shot up from 45.4% to 68.4% – taking them from one of the worst in the Premier League to the second-best in Europe. The team ahead of them? Midtjylland. “We also scored a lot of goals on long throws, then he went to Liverpool,” says Ankersen.

Midtjylland were thrashed 4-0 at home to Atalanta in their opening Champions League game and the bookies make them huge underdogs against Liverpool. But if they have a chance of making their hosts uncomfortable, it will probably come at set pieces, where they consistently ranked among the most successful teams in Europe.

It is the result – the club’s amiable captain, Erik Sviatchenko, explains – of analysts scrutinising thousands of free-kicks and corners and distilling them into an American football-style set-piece playbook of 20-25 routines. “Other clubs do this,” he says. “But when you see the data, 49% of all our goals last season were scored on set pieces. They are something our club and our owner, Matthew Benham, sees as a clear point for winning or changing games.”

Benham is the key figure in the Midtjylland story. Since taking a controlling stake in 2014 – two years after he did so in England at Brentford – he has used similar methods and models to those that helped him win millions as a professional gambler. His company, Smartodds, which analyses matches and players in dozens of leagues around the world, is also used by the club. It all amounts, says Ankersen, to a different way of thinking.

“A professional gambler seeks an edge over the market. He is not getting it right all the time. He’s looking for value. However, in football there are a lot of emotional mechanics that lead to people not making rational decisions – that sets them back.”

Ankersen says data is key because it helps Midtjylland get closer to the truth. “In football the stories we tell ourselves are often wrong,” he says. “Look what happens when a team goes through a bad set of results. The fans and the media search for a narrative to explain it. It’s the same when a team does well.

“Last season, for instance, we won the league by 14 points. People were saying we were doing fantastically well. But when you looked at the underlying data, we didn’t actually improve. Our closest competitors got worse. And once you’ve seen regression to the mean, again and again, you build up a big belief that this is the right way of doing things.”

The club even have a league table that shows where each team would be in the standings based on its underlying numbers, calculated by Benham’s team at Smartodds.

“Even if I were allowed, I couldn’t tell you the precise algorithm involved,” says the head performance analyst, Søren Bjerg. “But expected goals is in there, as well as how opponents have been doing and whether a team has changed its coach and so on. There are a lot of variables.”

These days almost every club has an analytics department. So how does a club stay ahead in a world where expected goals is now on Match of the Day and the easiest analytical advantages have already been exploited? Ankersen, understandably, does not want to give every secret away. But he says there are still inefficiencies – if a club knows where to find them.

“The Brazilian transfer market is really chaotic, for instance,” he says. “The value of a player can change by a few hundred percent over a couple of months. It’s a highly irrational and emotional market. If you can pick up players when they are on a low, there’s a lot of value.”

The signings of Paulinho, “an outstanding left back”, as well as Evander, who “on his day is the best player in the Danish league” after he lost his way at Vasco De Gama, shows Midtjylland practice what they preach.

Ankersen also believes that some clubs are still doing “simple things” wrong, like taking too many shots from locations where the probability of scoring is too low - and points to the growth of three-point shooting in basketball as an example of a sport that’s become more efficient. Meanwhile Sviatchenko says another edge comes through using sports psychologist BS Christiansen, a former elite soldier from the Danish Huntsmen Corps, who is “especially good when we need to get together and talk through things”.

“I don’t think a lot of what we do is rocket science,” says Ankersen. “But where we may be ahead still is that this is driven from the top. It’s not two interns in the basement working with data. The belief system comes from Matthew, from me and it filters down.”

Ankersen says one KPI coaches have been given this season is to increase the team’s Smartodds rating up by 0.5 goals. “So between us we are asking: ‘Where’s that improvement going to come from? Is it going to come from set pieces? Where are the low-hanging fruits defensively and offensively? In which phases of the game?’”

A knock-on effect is that Midtjylland keep chasing a second and third goal when they are 1-0 up, says Bjerg. Is that because your experts have worked out it is better not to sit on a lead? “Exactly,” he says. “But it also suits our style of play. Our mindset isn’t to sit back. The whole club DNA is about achieving things rather than protecting the stuff you have already got.”

Those watching on Tuesday will see Midtjylland play a 4-2-3-1 formation and like to press – much like Liverpool. “We also have a little bit of X-Factor on our day, especially with Pione Sisto and Evander,” says Ankersen.

Four years ago, Sisto was also a scorer when Midtjylland stunned Manchester United in the first leg of a Europa League last-32 tie. Toppling Liverpool, Ankersen says, would be another level again, but he is not entirely ruling it out. “It’s going to be very difficult,” he says. “We will need to play to our best, and have a bit of luck. But bigger miracles have happened in football.”

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Oct 27, 2020 9:16 pm

Slightly off tangent but still tactic orientated - a look at the importance and development of pressing by Miguel Delaney in the Independent - you can actually recognise a lot here about when our teams performances are good and bad

‘Klopp won’t let anyone watch sessions’: Understanding pressing, the biggest trade secret in football
A huge improvement in pressing is widely seen as the major reason Bayern Munich won the Champions League and could now, in quite a literal sense, be the secret to success at the very top end of the game

Miguel Delaney Chief Football Writer @MiguelDelaney 9 hours ago

As open as Jurgen Klopp is, and as enthusiastically as he will talk about the principles of his football idea, there is one area the German remains completely guarded on. That is about the specifics of Liverpool’s supreme pressing: how it is co-ordinated, how it is drilled.

“Klopp won’t let anyone watch the sessions,” one source close to the club says. This may, in quite a literal sense, be the secret to success at the very top end of the game.

A huge improvement in pressing is widely seen by figures around Bayern Munich as the major reason the German club won the Champions League. A drastic drop-off is meanwhile viewed as one of the major reasons that Manchester City again failed in the competition.

Pep Guardiola is all the more relevant to this because pressing has evolved several times over since his 2008 re-interpretation of the approach totally revolutionised football. It has become more focused, more specific and more co-ordinated, with its effect enhanced by wider improvements in sports science and fitness. This has in turn contributed to its use. The game is much more athletic than it was even a decade ago. More players can run faster for longer. You only have to look at the endurance of "full-backs" like Trent Alexander-Arnold, and the number of wide players in the list of fastest sprinters from Uefa’s technical report for last season.

You might also notice the number of German or German-based players there, from Leipzig’s Lukas Klostermann to Chelsea’s Timo Werner.

That does not feel a coincidence, since the area has really become the preserve of pressing. It is where coaches pore over its principles most, and where most of its innovations and evolutions have come from. That can be seen in the impact a figure like Ralph Hasenhuttl has had at Southampton, and the influence on the Championship of managers like Thomas Frank and Gerhard Struber. One prominent figure in Spanish football last week lamented to The Independent how stale Real Madrid and Barcelona look in contrast.

Many in Germany credit one man with much of this. They call it the Ralph Rangnick revolution, for the way he put the idea in place at Hoffenheim, and then developed it at Leipzig. Klopp has credited a 4-1 Borussia Dortmund defeat to Hoffenheim in 2009 as an epiphany moment for his own view on pressing.

The effects of all this - and Julian Nagelsmann’s own interpretation - will be encountered by Manchester United this week. It is going to be an instructive challenge for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to solve.

Alex Zorniger directly worked under Rangnick at Leipzig as one of their first managers, and explains the principles of the approach now, and its more modern interpretations.

“Against the ball, players need to know what it means for their space when an opposition player is in a specific position - like if one striker appears in one area. So, in a 4-3-1-2, you try to close the wings, so they have to pass into the centre where you have the majority of your players.

“It is like the pieces of a really good watch. Everything has to fit. Everyone has to know their function. That needs to be trained.”

This is where the trade secrets come in, and where the sophistication of any specific approach can have a superior effect.

It can be seen in the near uniqueness of Liverpool’s approach, and how the full-backs are essentially attacking players, while the only true “defensive” players are the centre-halves and two number-eights.

It can be seen in the utter assurance Bayern had in playing so high last season, and how infrequently they were caught out. It should be no surprise the assistant responsible for this, Danny Rohl, previously worked at Leipzig.

“Bayern’s work in chasing the ball, and the organisation, was on a completely different level to before,” Zorniger argues. “Completely.”

While the technical and tactical coaching is the foundation, Zorniger says the real difference comes in the psychological coaching.

“In training, you try and stress the players as much as possible, so that actual matches feel slower. Then it’s much easier to do anything and make decisions. It’s like Pavlov’s dog. In the perfect situation, pressing is second nature, and everything works like an orchestra.”

It is for this reason that one Premier League coach - who has been viewed as one of the high priests of pressing - sees the discussion as much more holistic, and feels you can’t quite isolate pressing in that way.

“It is about player commitment, and the outlook you create in the squad,” the figure, speaking off the record, says. “Any approach is subject to the willingness of the players.”

This is something that Zorniger agrees with, and says it is why Leipzig have specifically gone for players under a certain age, and with relatively limited experience.

“Their mental hard disk is kind of empty, and the intensity they can play at is higher. You can implement the principles much faster.

“The more experienced players, they know there are a number of options. They’ve often played in a number of systems. Football players in general don’t want to look like fools, and playing high or running high can create a lot of risk. They might look at easier solutions, like dropping behind the ball.”

Fundamentally, this kind of modern pressing involves an intensity of work that the most indulged senior players might now feel they are beyond. There are many stories of how Neymar was completely resistant to any kind of drills at Paris Saint-Germain, although Thomas Tuchel is said to have recently done a better job of coaxing him around.

Some of this rationale might also help explain bigger theories about football, like how sustainable a manager’s approach is.

While there are now arguments within the game that Guardiola’s idea of defensive pressing is no longer at the top level, it’s also possible that it’s just difficult for players to be put in as much after four years of the Catalan’s unique intensity; that they need a mental break.

Zorniger points to similar with Germany 2018, who many felt were too sated by victory

“They had bad organisation when they lost the ball, and bad responses afterwards. That is a question of mentality.”

The approach requires the highest commitment, which is why it currently represents the highest level of the game. The circumstances, however, may also distort the future of it.

In the short term, the Covid-congested calendar means coaches won’t have the same time to work on these systems. Such pressing may temporarily become the victim of its own intensity.

Bayern manager Hansi Flick had exactly this thought when watching Liverpool lost 7-2 to Aston Villa. “This is what happens when the press doesn’t fire,” he remarked to a colleague. That intensity requires such a level of integration, and to be so finely tuned, that the drop-off can be stark when even one component is missing. A hole in one area will create a chain reaction.

The same happens if any single player doesn’t buy in. The system breaks down. It doesn't go like clockwork. This is sometimes why managers appear to inexplicably drop some individuals.

It also reflects Zorniger’s point about players not wanting to look like fools. That cuts to the debate Roy Keane and Klopp had about “sloppiness”. A collective’s risk can bring individual mistakes, and the two can be confused.

The situation therefore may bring some surprise results.

In the long term, then, some in Germany have been worried that the focus on pressing has increasingly led to a reductiveness in the country’s youth production.

Sven Mislintat has been complaining that the academies are now just producing a series of energetic pressing drones, rather than difference-making players. Matches where it’s just pressing systems crashing against each other, with no discernible differences in individual quality, aren't too hard to imagine.

That in itself reflects the evolution and next step of a cycle Guardiola touched upon at the end of his own playing career in the mid-2000s. The Catalan found that his technical game was being overrun by tenacity.

“I haven’t changed,” Guardiola argued. “My skills haven’t declined. It’s just that football now is different. It’s played at a higher pace and it’s a lot more physical. The tactics are different now, you have to be ball-winner, a tackler, like Patrick Vieira or Edgar Davids… players like me have become extinct.”

It sounds familiar. It’s also why Jack Grealish is so distinctive a player, because he has that rare ability to beat the press and escape with a dribble in quite an old-fashioned way.

That’s the thing about any given tactical trend. It will provoke unexpected responses, that prompt further evolution.

For the moment, the reality seems clear.

“The way top teams handle their defensive organisation to win the ball back has been decisive in every major title for the past few years,” Zorniger argues. “Even France looked for organisation in transition. I deeply believe that a team that is 100% perfect playing with the ball will lose to a team that is 100% perfect organised against the ball.”

The latter is what Klopp so works on. We have seen the effects on the pitch. It’s why he won’t let anyone see the work behind it on the training pitch.

It is tantamount to one of the game’s decisive trade secrets.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Woodleyclaret » Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:57 am

This is all very well but it doesnt explain how we fail to gamble on lower league talent
When someone is knocking 20+ goals in at a Div1 or 2 club or consistently providing goal assists for fun, we have been reluctant to take a punt at them
Watkins a case in point a rising star at Exeter that was ignored by many

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by claretonthecoast1882 » Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:28 am

Woodleyclaret wrote:
Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:57 am
This is all very well but it doesnt explain how we fail to gamble on lower league talent
When someone is knocking 20+ goals in at a Div1 or 2 club or consistently providing goal assists for fun, we have been reluctant to take a punt at them
Watkins a case in point a rising star at Exeter that was ignored by many
Watkins first 2 seasons for Brentford saw him score 10 at a lower level than we were playing at.

Do you think he would have been playing in our 1st team had we signed him, he went to Brentford and spent 2 years learning, a bit different to judging him 3 seasons later

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Oct 29, 2020 10:04 am

Woodleyclaret wrote:
Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:57 am
This is all very well but it doesnt explain how we fail to gamble on lower league talent
When someone is knocking 20+ goals in at a Div1 or 2 club or consistently providing goal assists for fun, we have been reluctant to take a punt at them
Watkins a case in point a rising star at Exeter that was ignored by many
A lot of people forget about all the in between stuff, The budgets, the overheads, the path of development, getting people to come to the club (it is why we recruit so many with northern roots - there is so so much more than just recognising and speculating on talent

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Nov 06, 2020 12:16 pm

Not purely data but this is an interesting interview from Training Ground Guru with Norwich City Sporting Director Stuart Webber - it is an old article, from the promotion season, of course they got relegated last season, but they are still pursuing the same plan and looking reasonably strong for it - I look at the comments re Sunderland and worry what a new owner will be like for our club.

Stuart Webber: Climb of the Canaries

WRITTEN BY CONNOR SOUTHWELL — FEBRUARY 7, 2019

WHEN Stuart Webber was appointed as Norwich City's first Sporting Director in April 2017, he arrived at a club with a massive wage bill that had failed to bounce back to the promised land of the Premier League at its first attempt.

What followed was a ruthless restructuring, both on and off the pitch. The squad was completely revamped, while almost every head of department was replaced.

Now, with former Borussia Dortmund reserve coach Daniel Farke at the helm, the Canaries are top of the Championship with 16 games remaining. In an exclusive interview with the My Football Writer website, Webber explained his philosophy and beliefs.

DEVELOPING A PHILOSOPHY
Stuart Webber: What we did when I came in was to look at our model and establish what was important for us. We couldn’t buy our way out of the league.

If your philosophy is just to win, then spend £60m and appoint a Champions League level coach like Wolves did. We couldn’t do that.

The group we had had been relegated out of the Premier League and had then underachieved in the Championship - with the second highest budget ever in the division.

It was, unfortunately, a failing group of players. So we came back to three things - employ someone who can implement a certain style of play, be open-minded in the transfer market and promote young players from within.

In appointing the head coach, that person had to fit in with those three things. Daniel (Farke) has been brave enough to play homegrown players and make them better and as a club we have given him support in doing that because it’s one of our criteria for success.

Our criteria wasn’t just win, win, win. If that was the case, Daniel wouldn’t still be here after last season (when Norwich finished 14th). If you set the objective of win and also for the average age to be 23, then those two things don’t usually go hand in hand.

BRINGING THROUGH HOMEGROWN PLAYERS
We’ve got top young players in this country, probably the best in the world. Just look at the England age group teams - the Under-17s won the World Cup, as did the Under-20s.

You don’t win World Cups if you don’t have top players. Look at Angus Gunn and James Maddison, who were here at Norwich - they’ve both got in the England squad in the last 18 months.

But someone has to give these players an opportunity and then put trust in them. As a club, you have to support the coach in that.

You have to live through inconsistencies and, like the sign I have up here in my office - ignore the noise. Don’t read Twitter, because they don’t know. You have to support people through it.

Every single club in this country has young players who are good enough, genuinely. But what you have to do is provide the bridge for them, which is where we go wrong in this country.

As a club, we have to accept that young players make mistakes. A big part of my job is to understand the football business. ‘He messed up, that’s what can happen with young players’ and then communicate that up to the board and to the media.

Let’s be honest, is the way to win playing an 18-year-old or a 28-year-old? Most people would say the 28-year-old - it’s the same in any industry. So it’s about understanding the journey of a young player.

As long as the young players don’t keep making mistakes, that’s fine. And on the other hand you can get someone like James Maddison, who kept performing every week, and jumped above our club. He was ready for the Premier League and at that stage, as a club, we weren’t.

YOUNG ENGLISH MANAGERS
I feel sorry for our managers. We’re so uneducated still in our country that we have a manager and the board puts the weight of the world on his shoulders, making him feel he has to win, win, win, and then criticises him for not playing young players or a certain style.

You’re contradicting yourself. I think we stitch our young coaches up. I think we have some top young coaches but they get a first team opportunity and are under pressure after three or four games, because maybe the club don’t understand what they’re doing.

You have people in charge of clubs who were really successful in their own industry who just don’t understand this industry.

BENEFITS OF A SPORTING DIRECTOR
You probably watched the Sunderland documentary on Netflix. When you watch that, it’s no surprise that they suffered a double relegation, it really isn’t. They put all their faith in one man, the manager, and as soon as it went wrong, said, ‘it must be his fault’.

Why not look a bit deeper? Maybe that group of players wasn’t good enough, maybe the culture wasn’t right, maybe the head coach needed some support. Instead, you put him on a pedestal and said, ‘go and sort this out will you?’

Ah, brilliant - on my own, with 20 departments and 25 players, half of whom are overpaid and don’t want to be here and don’t care.

That’s where the Sporting Director comes in and that model is really ingrained in Germany, which helps their coaches a lot. As a Sporting Director, you need owners who allow you to do your work.

In my last two jobs I’ve worked for two of the best owners around. They let you get on with it, so long as you keep them up to date with what you’re doing.

I look at some of my friends in the game who have owners who interfere and overrule them and think ‘how can you do your job?’

TOP PLAYERS DON’T AUTOMATICALLY MAKE TOP COACHES
The coach education system in our country has improved a lot. I still think we hand out badges a bit easy though, and that if you’ve got a certain number of caps then people are in awe of you.

‘He must know what he’s talking about, he’s got 50 caps for his country’. In fact, he might not have a clue. I was fortunate to visit Red Bull recently and their Team Principal, Christian Horner, said most of their drivers don’t have a clue and you couldn’t put them in charge of a team.

But in football, everyone thinks, ‘he played, he was a top footballer, let’s put him in charge of 25 players, 30 staff - and he can deal with the media and the board.’ It’s actually a pretty tough job.

If you immediately put Max Verstappen in charge of a Formula One team, with 300 staff, people would think you were crazy.

GERMAN COACH EDUCATION v ENGLISH COACH EDUCATION
I genuinely believe that Germany are the best at preparing coaches for their careers. I think their courses are the most regimented, the toughest to pass, and that the DFB take it really seriously in terms of delivering them.

Anything we talk about in terms of youth and coach development, they were doing it 20 years ago.
When I speak to my colleagues out there, they almost laugh when I tell them what’s going on here in those areas. ‘Are you only just doing that?!’

But there are areas where we’re way ahead of them, in terms of sports science protocols or having a loan manager, for example. They don’t have that role over there.

Culturally, too, our players tend to work hard, are tough and have a great mentality. Then again, there are areas where we can learn from them, such as when you see Moritz Leitner in the canteen and the way he picks his food so carefully for his lunch. That rubs off on our players, so now I see Jamal Lewis doing the same things, because he’s learning from a top professional.

With different football cultures, you have to take the best from each and then you develop a powerful mix. It’s not the case that one football culture is best.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Dyched » Fri Nov 06, 2020 12:45 pm

That Max Verstappen similarity is nonsense. No football club has employed a 23 year old as manager.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by jojomk1 » Fri Nov 06, 2020 1:33 pm

Could someone please enlighten me as to which analytical stats were used by Dianna Rigg and Co when we decided to blow all of our transfer budget this summer on Dale Stephens ?

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Dec 31, 2020 6:38 pm

It has been a while - but this piece from Rory Smith in the New York Times on FC Midtjylland - yes them again

Numbers, Knowledge and Better Set Pieces: a View Into Soccer’s Future
RORY SMITH DECEMBER 30, 2020

Everything that happens at F.C. Midtjylland is quantified. Well, almost everything. Every game played by every one of the Danish soccer club’s teams produces data points in the thousands. Each training session, from the first team to the preteens in the academy, is recorded and codified and analyzed.

The only exception is a game that happens on Fridays at lunchtime, pitting two teams of staff members — coaches and analysts and communications officers and sports scientists — against each other. It is a chance for everyone to let off steam at the end of the week, a reminder of the importance of having fun, said Soren Berg, Midtjylland’s head of analysis.

“We joke about doing video and data analysis on it,” he said, though perhaps it is best left unexamined. “The players probably do not need to see it,” he joked as he watched the game earlier this month. “You know, we tell them a lot about press intensity. And I do not see a lot of press intensity out there.”

Midtjylland has numbers on everything else. The club knows how much its players have run and what they have done in the gym and what they have eaten and where they shoot from and how well they have slept. It is attempting to know even the most intimate parts of their minds: how they think, how they feel, how they learn.

Midtjylland, founded in 1999, has what its sporting director, Svend Graversen, regards as a “growth mind-set.”

“We are a new club,” he explained. “We are not dragged down by history because we don’t have any. So we have to make our own.” It is willing to try new things, to seek competitive edges wherever it can find them.

The approach has worked. This young, ambitious club from Herning — a quiet city in the middle of Jutland, “a long way from Copenhagen,” according to Rasmus Ankersen, the team’s chairman — now sits not only at the pinnacle of Danish soccer, a three-time national champion and a regular in continental competitions, but at the very cutting edge of the sport.

Midtjylland’s search for competitive advantage has made it a place where ideas emerge. It was the first team in Denmark to make its young prospects train every day. It was one of the first teams to embrace the use of data in recruitment, training and playing style. It employed a full-time coach just for throw-ins.

Now, of course, all those ideas have been adopted at clubs of far greater scale, of far richer history. Where Midtjylland has gone, Europe has generally followed. Danish academies train every day. The vast majority of teams across Europe are committing vast resources to building teams of analysts and statisticians and physicists. Thomas Gronnemark, the throw-in coach, now works for Liverpool.

That is the fate of the pioneer, of course: Once the trail has been blazed, everyone and anyone is free to follow it. Ideas forged in Herning have been adopted and adapted and occasionally lifted wholesale. All Midtjylland can do is what it has always done: try, once again, to see what the future looks like, so that everyone else might, once again, follow.

Low-Hanging Fruit
In the days after the death of Diego Maradona, Ankersen found himself — like so many others — trawling through grainy footage of the maestro at work. He would not have been alone in noticing that Maradona seemed to be a Technicolor player in a black-and-white world. “In those clips from the ’80s and ’90s, the game seems so slow,” he said.

What is important, though, is that it did not seem that way at the time. “The coaches would have said that they could not train more, that they could not make the players get thinner or more athletic,” he said. It is a reminder, to him, of a kind of end-of-history illusion: how easily the current version of something — soccer, in this case — is assumed to be final, complete.

Awareness of that illusion is baked into everything Midtjylland does. “The first thing you have to remember is that success now does not mean success in the future,” said Berg, the head of analysis. “We try to be innovative, but it is fundamental that you have to stay curious.”

Looking back, Ankersen regards the first few edges his club found to be “simple” ones: coaching academy players every day, rather than three times a week, was an easy win. But while he accepts that the search is now a little more complex, he does not believe soccer has yet cleared away all of the low-hanging fruit.

“There are a lot of areas on the physical side,” he said, improvements that can be made in conditioning and strength and, particularly, in the individualization of training programs, understanding what types of fitness are required by players in specific positions. Soccer’s interest in fields like nutrition, recovery and sleep, too, is still young.

He is eager to explore whether structured coaching from earlier ages might help the technical development of young players — “the next edge is starting earlier” — and turn generating talent into less of an exercise in panning for gold. “At the moment, it is a little like investing in a start-up,” he said of player development. “The upside is potentially great, but there is a lot of risk, because most of the investments will not work out.”

And Ankersen is convinced that even Midtjylland, the great data evangelist, has only scratched the surface in terms of what analytics can do. “The quality and collection of data is still poor,” he said. “Most of it is event data, but most of football happens without the ball.” Artificial intelligence, he believes, will help to improve that considerable blind spot, as tracking data grows more sophisticated.

Those technologies, of course, will eventually be available to everyone, just as performance data is sold now. The next great battleground will not, then, be which teams use data and which do not. It will not be who has the most data or, to some extent, who has the best data. Soccer’s next leap forward hinges on who uses that data best.

Speaking Football
There is one area in which there is clearly no competitive edge for Midtjylland: telling journalists, in depth, about its work. Graversen, Berg and Ankersen are all amiable, thoughtful, helpful sorts, happy to talk about principles and philosophies and approaches. As is often the case when writing about the use of data in soccer, precise examples are thin on the ground. Knowledge is power, after all, but it is also proprietary.

A single question, though, underpins much of what analysts do, of what they ask their data to show: How can the game be played more effectively?

Midtjylland, for example, is better at set pieces than any team in Europe. “Over the last five years, we have scored more goals than anyone else that way,” Ankersen said. “The gap between us and the team in second is the same as the gap between the team in second and the team in 73rd.”

That is no accident. Ralf Rangnick, the German coach, technical director and all-purpose visionary, is confident that soccer as a whole will place greater emphasis on set pieces in the years to come. Teams will develop specialized routines and updated training methods to maximize what is, across the world, a reliable source of goals.

Midtjylland is there already. The club maintains an extensive set-piece playbook, continually updated with new routines and ideas. “A quarter of all goals come from set pieces,” Graversen said. “But the culture in football is defined, and it is very hard to shift.”

There is a measure of preoccupation, too, with shot location. Over the last decade, the N.B.A. has undergone a seismic shift in where and how its teams score their points. To the minds of those at Midtjylland, the same effect may be felt in soccer by discouraging players from taking shots from low-percentage positions, and encouraging them instead to work the ball into higher probability areas.

“And if shot locations are changing, then why not optimal passes?” Ankersen said. “You can model the right decision to make in each moment because football is a controlled environment: You have data going back 50 years, when the game was still inherently the same, to feed into it.”

The challenge, Berg said, is not finding out this information. It is conveying it to players, incorporating it into the way a team plays, taking it off the screen and onto the field. “Doing it on Excel is one thing,” he said. “What matters is, who can deliver that data in a way that suits the style of play?”

Ankersen puts it another way: To get the most out of the information at their fingertips, clubs need to be able to get through to their players. “You have to make it relevant,” he said. “You have to speak football.” It is why this club that can turn everything into numbers now thinks, more than anything, about people.

The Person Behind the Player
Often, Bjorn Mannsverk’s sessions get deeply, intensely personal. He encourages the players who meet in his office every few weeks to share their innermost thoughts with him, and with their teammates. They talk not only about their professional worries, but their domestic ones. Sometimes, there are tears.

Mannsverk, a former fighter pilot in the Norwegian air force, now serves — in a part-time capacity — as the team psychologist to Bodo/Glimt, the team from the Far North of the country that in November claimed its first national championship, breaking a host of records along the way.

To Bodo’s players, Mannsverk and the environment he has created — one that focuses on performance, not results — has been vital to their success. He has, in the words of the team captain Ulrik Saltnes, emboldened them to play the “kamikaze” style that allows them to confront their fears.

It is no surprise that Ankersen, at Midtjylland, is fascinated by Bodo’s story. Midtjylland, too, has a psychologist with a military background: B.S. Christiansen, a former member of the Danish huntsmen corps. Midtjylland, too, spends as much time thinking about the personalities of its players as their technical abilities.

“We have to take care of the person behind the player,” Graversen said. “We have to be his or her family.”

That paternal approach applies, he said, to all employees, whether they are on the field or not. But it is also another attempt to find a competitive advantage. By making the players feel more valued, the club feels it is better placed to draw out their best performances.

Understanding the psychology and the personality of players is still fresh ground for soccer, but Midtjylland — as the success of Mannsverk and Bodo suggests — sees it not as uncharted territory but as a frontier to be claimed.

The club is currently running one study, alongside one of Denmark’s largest data firms, to identify which traits are shared by players who have thrived there in the past. At the same time, they are working with educational consultants to work out how players absorb information, how they think, how they learn. In an era when soccer is saturated by data, Graversen sees that knowledge as crucial.

“The next key thing is getting data into the playing style,” he said. “By finding out the way they learn, we can accelerate getting those principles into the way we play. We can design virtual reality tools to help them train. We can give them more useful feedback. In the next few years, the team that accelerates that process as much as possible will have the edge.”

That, ultimately, is what Midtjylland has always done: search for an edge, wherever one might be found. And where it has blazed the trail, the rest of European soccer has followed. If Midtjylland, the game’s great laboratory, is thinking not just about what players do with their feet but what they do with their minds, then it is reasonable to assume, sooner or later, everyone else will, too.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Feb 05, 2021 1:11 pm

It has been a while since I have added anything to this thread - a slight deviation in in theme but highly relevant and interesting nevertheless - from ESPN.com

Soccer looks to AI for an edge: Could an algorithm really predict injuries?

4:35 PM GMT
Mark Ogden Senior Writer, ESPN FC

Artificial intelligence can drive a car, curate the films and documentaries that you watch, develop chess programmes capable of beating grandmasters and use your face to access your phone. And, one company claims, it can also predict when footballers are about to suffer an injury.

Off the field, football has gone through a huge transformation in the 21st century, with the emergence of GPS-driven player performance data in the early 2000s, followed in the 2010s by the advanced analytics that now form a major part of every top club's player recruitment strategy. Just last month, Manchester City announced the appointment of Laurie Shaw to a new post of lead AI scientist at the Etihad Stadium, taking him from his role as research scientist and lecturer at Harvard University.

Football has always searched out innovations to make small, but crucial, differences. Many have become staples of the game, including TechnoGym to improve biomechanics, IntelliGym to improve cognitive processing and cryogenic gym sessions to ease the strain on muscles. Others have fallen by the wayside. Anyone remember nasal strips or the ball-bending properties of Predator boots?

The use of AI to predict when players are on the brink of suffering an injury could prove to be the next game-changing innovation that becomes a key component at the elite end of the game.

In a game dominated by clubs wanting to discover the extra 1% in marginal gains, keeping a player fit is arguably the most important challenge facing any coach. A depleted squad can lead to negative results and, if a team suffers too many, the manager or coach is generally the one who pays the price. This season has been more challenging than most, with the COVID-19 pandemic leading to fixtures being crammed into a reduced time frame, and players being forced to play 2-3 games a week on a regular basis.

The toll on players' fitness is borne out by the injury lists. Crystal Palace and Southampton fulfilled their midweek Premier League fixtures with 10 first-team squad members sidelined. Champions Liverpool lost to Brighton on Wednesday with eight absentees, including long-term injury victims Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Research by premierinjuries.com shows that up to and including match-week 21 of the Premier League this season, there has been a five percent increase in time lost to injuries this season. At the same stage last season, there were 356 "time-loss absences" (a player missing at least one league game), but the number has jumped to 374 this time around. With COVID-related absences, the number is 435.

Liverpool had suffered 14 time-loss absences at this stage of last season, but they're now up to 29 in 2020-21. Their league position -- fourth place, seven points adrift of top spot -- suggests they are paying a price for their sharp increase in players lost to injury.

Liverpool's title defense is struggling thanks to their increase in injuries, with Joel Matip joining Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez on the sidelines for the foreseeable future. Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
But finding reliable injury prevention technology is the holy grail of sports scientists and fitness coaches. By November, ESPN reported a 16% rise in muscle injuries in the Premier League compared to the same stage last season. So can AI successfully predict when players are about to be injured?

Since the start of the 2017-18 season, La Liga side Getafe have partnered with the California-based AI company Zone7 to break down performance data and predict when players are at risk of injury. In simple terms, clubs like Getafe in Spain, Scottish Premiership leaders Rangers and MLS sides Real Salt Lake and Toronto FC send their training and match data to Zone7, who analyze it using their algorithm and send back daily emails with information about players who may be straying close to the so-called "danger zone."

Between the start of the 2017-18 season and March 2020, when La Liga was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Getafe recorded a substantial reduction in injuries.

"Three seasons ago, during the first year with Zone7, we saw a reduction of 40% in injury volume," Javier Vidal, the Getafe's Head of Performance, said. "As the Zone7 engine became more reliable and we had access to more data in the second year, we saw a reduction of 66 percent in the volume of injuries.

"This means that of every three injuries we had two seasons ago, we now have only one."

Jordi Cruyff, the former Barcelona and Manchester United midfielder, told ESPN that he has become a "minor, minor investor" in Zone7 after trialling the AI tool during his time as sporting director at Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2017. But he admits that he was only convinced by the AI technology after monitoring the data, even though Maccabi's then-coach declined to use it.

"I presented the tool to our then-coach and he wasn't too interested." Cruyff told ESPN. "So for the four to five months the coach was in charge, he would follow his own plan, but we would still give our performance data to the company, which they would run through their algorithm. I would then receive an email before training each day with which players were at risk and it actually predicted five of seven injuries.

"I thought 'wow.' Once or twice could be a coincidence, but catching five out of seven muscular injuries is a different thing. I would wait until after training to be told if a player had been injured. I would then go back to look at my email and there was the name. We were lucky in some ways that the coach wasn't interested in it because it gave us the chance to test it.

"It was the perfect test, although I wish the coach would have listened, because then we would have avoided some injuries."

Tal Brown, who founded Zone7 with Eyal Eliakim in 2017 having worked together in the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps, spoke to ESPN to explain how AI can be used to detect injury risk.

"Every single player is now using a GPS vest, they are being tested for strength and flexibility at their clubs, many teams distribute watches to their players to measure sleep, so the reality is that somebody working for a club needs to look at two dozen dashboards every day -- multiplied by 20 players, multiplied by six days a week," Brown said via Zoom. "It is becoming a puzzle that a human brain wasn't really meant to solve.

"We can use a chess metaphor. Chess programmes used to be pretty simplistic and the experts could beat them, but today, a Google chess programme is unbeatable. It's not because Google has taught that chess programme 10,000 equations manually, it is because the programme has automatically studied every recorded chess game played in the history of mankind and, using AI, has developed its own understanding and interpretation.

"We are not there yet as a company. We don't have access to every single football injury that ever occurred, but we are getting much better and there will be a point where a programme focused on injury risk will out-perform humans in interpreting data."

More than 50 clubs across the world now use Zone7's AI programme. Many wish to remain anonymous, in an effort to protect any competitive advantage that the tool may provide -- football clubs are notoriously protective of such proprietary data -- while others simply do not wish to discuss any pros or cons they have discovered while using it. Despite repeated attempts by ESPN to speak to Real Salt Lake and Toronto, neither MLS team responded to enquiries.

Rangers, 23 points clear at the top of the Scottish Premiership and on course for a first domestic title since 2011, adopted Zone7's AI tool last summer and, while keen to make a broader assessment after a full season of use, they believe it's been a valuable addition to their injury prevention strategy.

"I believe AI, coupled with the experience levels of those using it, will eventually become a bedrock within clubs' decision-making as data and technology advances," Jordan Milsom, Rangers' head of performance told ESPN. "Given our players had been exposed to one of the longest lockdowns of all [93 days] and the unknowns associated with such prolonged layoffs, we felt investing in such a system may well provide another layer of support for how we managed the players on what would clearly be a challenging season.

"We haven't used the system long enough compare season-to-season analysis, and it's important to understand we are a department that is data-informed and not data-driven. But it is my opinion that if such systems are used in this way, it can have many positive benefits."

Rangers are dominating the Scottish Premiership this season and have been encouraged by the early returns of Zone7 when used in conjunction with other existing sports science tools within the club. Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images
Rangers manager Steven Gerrard has praised the club's fitness and sports science department, saying in December that the team were enabling his players to "hit top numbers," and Milson says that the AI data is helping to inform player rotation, even to the extent of highlighting which players should be substituted during games.

"All of our GPS and heart rate training load data from sessions and games is uploaded automatically into the Zone7 system," Milsom said. "The platform digests this, performs its modelling and provides us with risk alerts each day for players.

"Generally, there would be 1-2 players who may be flagged [for further monitoring]. Sometimes, these flags relate to overload -- other times it's under-load. This allows us to have a deeper dive into why specifically they are at risk. This information will feed into our general staff discussions to determine if any further areas support this information. As we typically compete every 3-4 days, if risk is associated with overload, I can often use that information to help support in-game substitutions as a means of maximising player availability, whilst potentially reducing risk through reduced minutes if and when possible."

The key to the success of the AI tool is the amount of data Zone7 are able to upload and analyse. While Brown stresses that "nobody ever sees your data. We don't own it and we're not allowed to retain a copy of it, post-relationship, so it's very strict," the volume of information provided by each client club is used to create a huge database that then enables the programme to predict injury risk.

"We can use 200 million hours of football data because we are working with 50-60 clients," Brown said. "As a result, we have 50-60 times more data than a typical team has, so the data set is very large. But what is important is that it's not just the injury in the sense of the date it occurred and what happened, it is every single day of training and games and medical data leading to the injury, going back as much as a year prior.

"That amount of information gives us the ability to look at the daily data leading to an incident and, using AI and deep learning, to find patterns that repeat themselves before hamstring injuries or groin injuries or knee injuries happen. That's how it works.

"If you are trying to forecast an event, which is an injury, you need to have a big database of incidents. A typical team would have something like 30-40 incidents a year for a squad, so multiply that by several years of historical data."

ESPN has spoken to people in sports science who believe that AI is a positive innovation if used alongside existing methods. "Their results are impressive," said one sports scientist, who has worked with several Premier League clubs in the past and spoke on condition of not being named. "The issue is the level of individualisation with injury results is high, so lots of variant data only gives you a small answer. Therefore, it definitely has to be a blended approach."

Zone7's AI tool is not restricted to sports. In tandem with Garmin wearable devices and Zone7, medical staff in Israel are having their health and well-being monitored during the COVID-19 pandemic and there is a similar project with a major hospital in New York City. There are also projects ongoing with military and special forces. In football, however, Getafe are the best example of AI being used successfully to improve the fitness record of a team, as explained by head of performance Vidal.

"It would take 200 people all day to analyse the data, but with this, I get the recommendations within minutes." Vidal said. "We use our own high-quality ultrasound to clinically to evaluate players that show predefined risk indications. After starting to use Zone7, some players would report feeling fine despite the engine identifying immediate risk for them.

"In many cases, our ultrasound tests confirmed muscular damage, allowing us to address this before the injury occurred. These players could have sustained injury but for the AI detection."

Cruyff, now coaching in China with Shenzhen FC, believes AI can become a key component for teams, but he makes clear that AI alone cannot be regarded as the silver bullet to prevent all injuries.

"It's not a deciding tool," he said. "You can see a risk of injury and decide to take the risk or not. It's part of the modernisation of sport. You have so many things -- video analysts, GPS tracking devices -- and I think this is a part that maybe we missed, but it is coming, little by little."

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:04 pm

throw ins appear to be a bit of a hobby-horse of mine - this report in the telegraph shows that we are not as bad as I though we were but still interesting anyhow and free to view at the time of posting

Throwing it away: Which Premier League teams are best at retaining possession from throw-ins?
Football Nerd: 30 per cent of one team's throws end up at the feet of an opposition player

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/20 ... ossession/

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:17 pm

This is something that has been building for a while and which the pandemic has exacerbated, the moving on of fringe, unwanted players on high wages at bloated Premier League squads has been getting more and more difficult. It affects clubs like ours too, if we want to refresh the squad we have to let others go, there is only a finite amount we can pay in wages, and if no one is willing to buy those players you have to wait for the contracts to end, whatever the manager may have to say. I find it surprising that there is no mention of Everton in this article, the work that Marcel Brands has done to shift out so many players has been incredible - from the Independent

‘A path of endless frustration’: The rising fears of fringe players in a shrinking transfer market
Transfer talk is always focused at the top end of the scale but clubs have been struggling to offload players and those on the outer reaches are facing uncertain futures, writes Melissa Reddy

2 hours ago

At the beginning of February, as the haze of a flat January window cleared up and analysis was carried out on possible success stories of another Covid-affected trading period, Arsenal were flagged as a club that could be quite content with their work.

Manager Mikel Arteta and technical director Edu’s overwhelming priority for the market was trimming the excess of an “unmanageable” squad and reducing the wage bill.

Mesut Özil, Arsenal’s highest-paid player, left for Fenerbahce without a transfer fee despite having six months remaining on his contract. Sokratis and Shkodran Mustafi had their deals terminated. Sead Kolasinac, William Saliba, Ainsley Maitland-Niles and Joe Willock exited on loan.

Where generating impressive funds from outgoings used to be the marker of great business, with Chelsea making close to half a billion in this way over the past six years and sparking Liverpool to maximise their sales too, just being able to get rid was seen as a triumph for Arsenal.

And this will be the new normal due to the financial implications of the global pandemic, which will have the biggest impact on fringe players.

(Twitter/@mesutozil1088)
“There is a lot of fascination over the huge deals as normal and some will still happen by the very few clubs with very rich owners that can ignore the amount of money we’ve lost,” a senior executive of a London side tells The Independent.

“But these are not normal times and the truth is being able to shift squad players is where we are seeing the most difficulty. A sale you could have made in previous years for £25m, for example, now has to be a loan - that’s if you can find a club willing and able to take on the wages.

“The contract terminations and the temporary agreements that we saw in January will be how it goes for a while. And if clubs aren’t generating income from sales, on top of all the other financial losses, there is not going to be much room to buy.”

Figures from Deloitte showed that Premier League clubs spent just £70m in the winter window, an eye-watering drop from £230m in January 2020.

It is the lowest outlay since 2012, in a window dominated by loans. The major buys were Manchester United’s move for Amad Diallo on an initial £18.7m deal, while West Ham turned their temporary hold on Said Benrahma into a permanent one for £25m.

Both of those agreements were made in the summer and the only other significant purchase in January was Aston Villa’s recruitment of Morgan Sanson from Marseille for around £14m.

Across the other major European leagues, the dip in combined spend was more staggering from £581m to £171m.

Deloitte has predicted the scale of lost revenue due to Covid will “act as the catalyst in creating a shift in how clubs approach the transfer market over the next few seasons” and all indications as well as expert opinions from within the game concur.

This is bad news for one of the core elements of trading. “Squad turnover is the base for all business,” says a recruitment specialist that consults for European clubs.

“You can’t increase the quality of a team without also cutting down the numbers, the processes work in harmony. And what we found in the last two windows since Covid is that second part is becoming very hard because the clubs who the bigger sides would usually sell to just do not have the financial power to take these players on anymore. It’s why we’ve seen so many loans and tearing up of contracts, but those also represent a loss of income for the sellers which affects purchasing. It’s a cycle.

“I know of many players that are surplus to requirements who it would have been easy to find a suitor for in normal circumstances, but they are stuck with limited to no options.”

An agent representing a top-flight forward in such a situation calls it a “path of endless frustration.” Clubs are interested, but are unable to be so concretely, leaving his client and so many others facing a similar fate in limbo.

“All the doors are only a little open to hear you out, the feedback is the player has the profile and experience they want, but money - which there is hardly any of - has to go on what they absolutely need. There is a lot of firefighting going on.

“Everything on the player’s side now has to be reconsidered: the kind of club, the location, whether a loan option instead of a permanent is acceptable, whether it’s worth moving the family temporarily, how much of a drop in wages can be ok.

“These are all very difficult to think though. So there is no career fulfilment at the club he is at because he hasn’t been playing, but the next move will be likely be based on so many compromises so how can you be sure there will be fulfilment then?”

Performance psychologist Tom Young agrees, stressing it’s beyond a professional issue and is one of wellbeing.

“Being a fringe player is tough at the best of times,” he tells The Independent. “You want to feel valued. You want to feel like you’re adding to an environment and you want to be getting something back as well. You want to feel like you’re belonging to this group, which is challenged.

“We want to work with routines and we want to know where we belong and suddenly these players don’t know where they’re going to be.

“Are they moving house? Do the kids need to come out of school, all these kind of thoughts come into it. And I think that’s where the relationships are really important at the club.

“So that manager has to keep that player for me informed as much as they can. Obviously, you can’t always tell a player everything. But one of the options, one of the routes, if this happens, is ‘what do we do next? What if this happens? What are all different perspectives?’

“The situation needs to be managed kind of really, really carefully and in a very authentic manner.”

Angelino, who was on the fringes at Manchester City, but was fortunate to have had a really successful loan spell with RB Leipizig and earn a permanent deal spoke about the turmoil of not being able to play regularly.

He said not having Pep Guardiola’s trust “killed me. For me, confidence is everything. When you don’t have the trust, like I do here [at Leipzig] with the coach, it affects everything.”

The 24-year-old detailed how having found stability at the Bundesliga club has not only uplifted his career but his life in general.

The sad reality is that will not be the norm for many players currently out of favour given their limited options and the kind of concessions they will have to make to secure a move.

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Bosscat » Fri Feb 26, 2021 7:31 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue Apr 28, 2020 1:25 am
I know Sean likes these GPS vests - he talked about the players using them in lockdown only last week - more data and stats - though I am not sure I would want my players gifting this data to other clubs/scouts

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foo ... 85676.html
If GPS vests are so brilliant why does our midfield keep getting lost 😉...

Perhaps we need TomTom to sponsor us 🤭🤭🤭

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Feb 27, 2021 1:34 pm

This is interesting from the Guardian

How data is pushing Twitter scouts and bloggers into football's big time
Increased use of analytics has opened club doors to a new and more diverse set of experts, including a teenager in Bengaluru who is working with Dundee United

Paul MacInnes - Sat 27 Feb 2021 08.00 GMT

Last week Jay Socik got a new job. As head of recruitment analysis at Luton Town, he will take responsibility for providing the manager, Nathan Jones, and his team with the data to sign the players to help continue the Championship club’s impressive, thrifty rise up the football pyramid. It has also meant a change to his Twitter account; a new, clean-shaven profile picture and the use of his real name.

It was through Twitter, as @blades_analytic, that the Sheffield United fan Socik made his name in football. It was also how he became a leading example of why the popularisation of analytics – the interpretation of data on every pass, shot and tackle on a football field – is transforming the game inside and out.

“I suppose I’m from this generation of Twitter scouts,” Socik says. “We came from having social media platforms where we voiced opinions or wrote scout reports or did statistical analysis. Everyone knows it’s been changing for years, from the stories of Brentford and Liverpool, but even at a lower level now there’s so much tactical writing, scouting reports, graphs. It’s just taken off on a whole new level.”

Socik’s tweets about United as they rose up the leagues gave an insight into a club whose success wasn’t covered much in the traditional media and certainly not with the depth and curiosity that Socik provided daily. Often led by data or video analysis, his work led him to be approached by Peterborough’s chairman, Darragh McAnthony, then later to join a recruitment consultancy, Market Insights. Two years on, he’s at Luton.

“There has been a massive influx of people doing public work, be it on social media or writing blogs who have now been swallowed up by clubs,” Socik says. “I’m one myself and I could reel off 10, 12 examples in the past 12 months. Right now club staff are educated to know about data but the level to which they understand it, because they’re so busy with everything else, is not the same. So I think we will continue to see more and more paid positions going to people who are out there doing the work on social media. It’s where the expertise lies right now.”

When it comes to signing players, clubs want data analysis because it works. That’s especially true in the time of Covid. “Even without the pandemic, we’d reached a point where the bulk of the work can be done prior to seeing players live,” Socik says. “I think clubs have learned there’s other ways of doing things to the traditional approach and when you add the pandemic into that – which means you can’t go to games – you need to look at football in a different way.”

Socik is a model for peers who hope to move into professional work but he’s also inspired others to add “analytic” to their user name and start publicly parsing football statistics for fun. The availability of data has attracted a new type of person to think, write and post about football.

Dan Altman is an economist who used to write columns in the New York Times on globalisation or wealth taxes. He says it was boredom with the cyclical nature of his profession that made him choose to “buy a bunch of data from Opta” and get into football analytics instead. He did so with striking success, his first consultancy role being with the City Group (the parent company of Manchester City), where he built a model for measuring the style of play they wanted to replicate across their network of clubs. Later he went in-house at Swansea and DC United, where his data convinced the owners to make a big transfer move.

“One of the last things that I did for those clubs was to make the case for Wayne Rooney’s transfer to DC United,” Altman says. “A big part of that was the ability to adjust his performance metrics for the Premier League to an MLS standard – to try and simulate how he might perform in that league. He came to DC United midway through the season when they were at the bottom of the table and just about to move into a new stadium, and he hit almost all the numbers exactly.”

Not surprisingly, Altman is proud of that calculation and the ability to compare performances of players across different leagues is a core part of smarterscout.com, an advanced analytics platform he created. There is a paid-for professional tier, where Altman notes a rise in interest from English clubs in South American leagues since the advent of Brexit (not just Brazil and Argentina but Colombia and Peru). But the site’s free tier is as important to Altman, he says, because of a wish to popularise analytics more broadly.

“I thought that the only way that they were really going to become part of the mainstream was to let fans, fantasy players, all the way to professionals at clubs and agencies really get their hands on them and see what they can do,” he says. “I’m really interested in breaking open the black boxes. I don’t think people will really trust and understand these tools until they’ve been able to see how they work.”

As a New Yorker, Altman has been familiar with an analytical approach to sports all his life. “Without the example of American sports, it would be more difficult to make the case for the integration of advanced analytics in football,” he says. (Socik notes that the rise in analytics in English football corresponds with a rise in American investment in its clubs.)

England plays a sport that is as statistic-heavy as anything from the US, and Ashwin Raman grew up in India first and foremost a cricket fan. Indeed he started watching football purely to apply an analytical eye to matches. But the 17-year-old from Bengaluru, who is a recruitment consultant at Dundee United, is the kind of diverse appointment that the popularisation of data in football has made possible.

Raman is enjoying a moment of fame, with his job at the Scottish Premiership club having attracted a burst of media attention, including a feature on Newsround. But the teenager – who is still studying for his exams – is disarmingly modest. “I think the fact I was a cricket fan, I had a head full of numbers,” he says of how he got into analytics writing. “I was that 13-year-old who spent his time on the internet looking at blogs by middle-aged men.”

Among the pieces Raman is proud of from his early years on the futebolist (subheading: “Ashwin Raman’s extremely nerdy blog on football”) include “A Look at Graham Potter and his exciting Ostersunds FK” and an analysis of how Lucien Favre’s Nice managed to outperform the analytic metric of expected goals. “I really enjoyed working on that and I think I did quite a decent job, except that I ended up being wrong,” he says. Both were written when he was 13.

What is striking about Raman is not just his prodigious, intercontinental success, but his enthusiasm. He is not evangelistic, he speaks clearly of the limits on data’s ability to tell you everything about the game. “The average footballer spends 58 seconds on the ball out of 90 minutes,” he says. “Most event data captures what’s happening on the ball, not a player’s movement off it, or their body positioning, which obviously affects the play. People talk about data being objective, but it’s not. Consistent is a better word.”

It has become commonplace to frame the advance of analytics as hastening the decline of the traditional scout, the triumph of data over judgment. Socik, Altman and Raman reject this zero-sum game. They are equally clear, however, that analytics are bringing a new audience to the game, a group of people likely to affect how it is watched and played. “It’s not just the data or the observation,” Raman says. “I think in general where football is going is towards diversity.”

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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by Adeola Friday » Tue Jun 15, 2021 12:17 pm

Not quite data in coaching etc (and happy for post to be removed if not on topic), but an interesting article on how far clubs now go to get a competitive advantage. Also probably part of the reason why Arteta doesn't like our pitch, although not suggesting we should change it!


‘The Silicon Valley of turf’: how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football


It was a big moment for English football talent when Real Madrid poached Paul Burgess from Arsenal in 2009. After starting his career at Blackpool FC, Burgess had arrived at the north London club in 1999, rising to prominence at the age of just 21. He excelled on the European stage during Arsenal’s Champions League campaigns in the early 2000s, and shone at Euro 2004 in Portugal. Four years later, he put in another commanding performance at the European Championships. Not long after that, Real Madrid, the most prestigious club in world football, made their sensational transfer swoop.

If you don’t remember any of this, it’s not because Burgess was a flop at Madrid. It’s because he was Arsenal’s head groundsman. Burgess’s transfer was the beginning of a Europe-wide spending spree on British turf talent. Real’s rivals Atlético snapped up Dan Gonzalez, who had impressed with his work for AFC Bournemouth. Tony Stones, who got his start looking after bowling greens in Barnsley before eventually becoming head groundsman at Wembley, was signed to oversee the French national stadium, the Stade de France. Fifa, meanwhile, signed Alan Ferguson, a Scot who had won seven Groundsman of the Year awards during 12 seasons at Ipswich Town, as their first in-house senior pitch manager.

The highest-profile acquisition of all was Jonathan Calderwood, who joined Paris Saint-Germain from Aston Villa in 2013. A two-time Groundsman of the Year, the Northern Irishman had been called the world’s best by Gérard Houllier, who managed Liverpool, Lyon and Villa. The move came at a time when PSG’s new Qatari owners were investing hundreds of millions to attract the world’s top players, including Zlatan Ibrahimović and David Beckham. When we spoke recently, Calderwood said the timing of his move was no coincidence.

“They had an injury list the length of your arm,” he recalled. A more stable pitch would start to solve that problem. But there was a more tactical reason for signing Calderwood: before his arrival, the pitch was too slow, too bobbly, too unpredictable for the kind of high-tempo passing game played by most of Europe’s elite teams. “The owners realised that it wasn’t about buying 11 world-class players,” said Calderwood. “They needed things behind them to allow them to work. One of the main things was the pitch.”

Since his arrival, Paris Saint-Germain has won Ligue 1 six out of eight seasons, and just as importantly, from Calderwood’s point of view, the Ligue de Football Professionnel’s best pitch award six times too. After winning the league in 2014, then-manager Laurent Blanc credited Calderwood with 16 of the club’s points, because this pitch had made the team’s attack so much sharper. The club has put him on billboards and he is featured in national TV adverts. Ibrahimović, once the club’s star striker, jokingly complained that Calderwood was receiving more media attention than he was.

When it comes to sports-turf management, the UK is a talent factory like no other. “We’re 10 years more advanced than anywhere else in the world,” Richard Hayden, author of Fifa’s official handbook on pitch maintenance, told me. “If you want to work in technology, you go to Silicon Valley. Well, the UK is the Silicon Valley of turf!”

The English grounds-management sector alone is valued at more than £1bn and employs more than 27,000 people, with specialists in every area, from seed enthusiasts who can breed grasses that grow in the shade to scientists who develop chemicals to make grass greener. In West Yorkshire, the Sports Turf Research Institute is an R&D powerhouse, studying everything from how quickly water passes through different types of sand to how the fineness of a stem of grass influences the roll of a golf ball. In hardware, too, the UK has no rival. Bernhard and Company in Warwickshire make the world’s best sharpening systems for mower blades; Allett, in Staffordshire, provides elite mowing and maintenance equipment, as does Dennis, based in Derbyshire. Dennis mowers are used across the world’s top sports arenas, from Wimbledon to Barcelona’s Camp Nou and Manchester United’s Old Trafford. Calderwood uses them at PSG, too.

The turf-care techniques developed in the UK have been applied in tennis, golf, rugby and just about any professional sport that takes place on grass. But it is football, with its vast wealth and global fanbase, that has powered the revolution. No groundskeeper would claim their work was the main reason for any team’s success, but, just as Olympic swimmers don’t compete in beach shorts and professional cyclists shave their legs, top football teams obsess over tiny details that can be the difference between winning or losing. When Pep Guardiola arrived at Manchester City in 2016, he asked for the grass to be cut to just 19mm, in line with the ultra-fast pitches he had demanded at his previous clubs, Barcelona and Bayern Munich. (In the end he had to settle with 23mm, because short grass is more vulnerable to wear and Manchester’s cold climate means it can’t recover quickly.) Similarly, after the 2016/17 season, Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp told the groundskeepers that the pitch at Anfield was too slow. Staff reconstructed the pitch over the summer, and Liverpool went the entire next season unbeaten at home in the league.

The dramatic improvements in playing surfaces since the early 1990s have transformed the way the game is played. “At Arsenal, we always had top pitches, but away from home it became better and better,” former manager Arsène Wenger told me via email. “It helped a lot with the quality of the game, and especially the speed of the game.”

Pitch quality is especially important for the top clubs, who want to maximise the talent of their technically gifted players. By contrast, a bad pitch is seen as a leveller, because it hampers the quick passing of the best teams; in football, an uneven playing field tends to level the playing field, so to speak.

This summer’s European Championship is taking place in 11 cities across the continent, but the pitches are largely in British hands. Uefa has assigned each stadium a “pitch expert”, working alongside the resident groundskeeper to deliver tournament-quality surfaces. Apart from Richard Hayden, who is Irish, all the pitch experts are from the UK. For Wembley stadium, the host of the semi-finals and final, the pitch expert is Dale Frith and the groundsman Karl Standley, a 36-year-old Englishman with a razor-sharp haircut and greying stubble, whose accolades include the Top Turf Influencer award.

Speaking four weeks before the opening match at Wembley, England v Croatia, Standley sounded focused but relaxed, like a formidably prepared star student on the eve of an exam. Yes, his work on the Euros would be viewed by around more than a billion viewers across the world, and yes, the tournament’s stars are relying on him to do their finest work, but he wasn’t fazed. “We’ve planned for this tournament for years,” Standley told me recently. “We plan to the point that we try to be unbreakable.”

For a long time, English pitches were abominable. When it rained, they would become quagmires. In the colder winter months, the quagmires would turn to ice. Then, a few months later, warm weather would turn them into dry and dusty plains. “People loved coming to Wembley because it was probably the only pitch in England that had grass on it,” said Calderwood.

Bad pitches meant cancelled matches, which meant lost revenue, which led some clubs towards synthetic alternatives. In 1981, Queens Park Rangers installed OmniTurf. A thin layer of synthetic grass set upon tarmac, the new surface was so hard that the former Oldham Athletic manager Joe Royle recalled once seeing a goal kick bounce so high that it went right over the opposite crossbar. But QPR started winning on their new turf, and a handful of other clubs followed suit. Amid unrest that so-called “plastic pitches” were giving home teams an unfair advantage, in 1995 the FA banned them. But by this time, groundskeeping’s new chapter had already begun.

As with most stories about modern football, the rise of elite turfcare is a story about money and television. In the 1990s, as TV revenue poured into the new Premier League, clubs started spending more on transfer fees and player wages. The more valuable the players became, the more essential it was to protect them from injury. One way to reduce injuries is to ensure a high-quality playing surface. And so groundskeepers, long overlooked, acquired a new importance. “Suddenly, the groundsmen were under a lot more pressure,” said Scott Brooks, head groundsman at Nice, who previously worked at Arsenal and Tottenham.

More than just protecting players, there were TV viewers to think about. If the Premier League was to market itself as a slick global brand, it needed a product that looked good on television. Muddy, bobbly, patchy pitches would not do. Broadcasters began to demand “snooker table-like pitches,” said Calderwood. According to Geoff Webb, CEO of the Grounds Management Association, which represents British groundskeepers, some broadcasters even stipulated in contracts that the pitches must be in pristine condition.

As pitches improved, the game itself began to evolve. “From where we were with the pitch at Old Trafford to the way it became was night and day,” Sir Alex Ferguson, who managed Manchester United from 1986 to 2013, told me via email. “Knowing you have a consistent, high-quality surface, particularly when you need to move the ball at pace, makes a huge difference.”

At the centre of this turfcare revolution was Steve Braddock. Since he joined Arsenal in 1987, Braddock has done more than anyone to bring about a world in which flawless pitches are the norm. Wenger described meeting Braddock as one of his greatest pieces of luck. “Finally I found someone who had a similar passion for the perfect pitch,” Wenger told me. Braddock was key to raising standards across the Premier League, he said.

On a blustery spring morning, Braddock picked me up from Radlett train station in Hertfordshire and we followed the winding country lanes to Arsenal’s Colney training base, where he oversees 11 pitches. It was his first week back at work for over a year, as he had shielded through the pandemic while undergoing treatment for skin cancer.

Upon arrival, he showed me around, stopping at one point to phone his trusted projects engineer to tell him that the fan belt of one of his tractors needed tightening – he could hear it squeaking from about 50 metres away – and at another to complain about an assistant groundskeeper who was moving a goalpost without lifting the wheels up. “It’ll leave a mark,” he explained. Braddock’s attention to detail is legendary: one former assistant told me he would cut the grass with scissors if he could.

When Braddock joined Arsenal as head groundsman, he was just 23. In the early days, faced with limited budgets and what he saw as a culture of low standards, he was forced to come up with his own methods. The most significant was the annual renovation – pulling up the pitch at the end of each season to remove unwanted weed grasses, which, because of their shallow roots, do not anchor the turf, making it more likely to fall apart. Until the arrival of improved technology in 2000, this required weeks of walking up and down the pitch with a machine called a scarifier.

In time, Braddock’s methods, including his liberal use of sand to encourage pitches to drain quicker, were adopted by other British groundsmen. “Steve changed the industry,” Paul Ashcroft, Arsenal’s current head groundsman, told me. Braddock’s renovation techniques “had never been considered or thought possible with the limited equipment available”. Braddock was also happy to share his accumulated wisdom with other clubs. Several groundskeepers I spoke to recalled contacting Braddock for tips on renovations.

Gradually, the role of the groundskeeper began to change. From the late 1990s, when the Premier League made it a requirement for them to be educated in plant science, the job became increasingly data-driven. New technology helped, too. A mower at a stadium like Wembley might be working 25-30 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. To go over the Wembley pitch just once, the mower needs to cover 10 miles, Standley told me. These machines begin at £11,000. When I took a tour of the Dennis factory in Derbyshire in April, they were assembling 12 mowers to be shipped to Qatar, ordered by Fifa for next year’s World Cup.

To British turfcare experts, European standards remain pitiful. “They just don’t understand what it takes to make it to play professional football,” said Stones, reflecting on his time as head groundsman at the Stade de France. Calderwood believes it comes down to education. Like many of the leading lights of turfcare, he studied turf science at Myerscough College in Preston. “Even doing something like a diploma or a Higher National Diploma, that’s not possible in France; there’s no such thing,” he said.

When he arrived at PSG, Calderwood was shocked by what he found. The grounds team didn’t even own the rotary mowers needed to vacuum up dead grass after a match. “Even something as simple as that, they didn’t know,” he told me, with all the shock of a man who had just discovered his neighbours didn’t realise they had to mow their lawn. When I spoke to Calderwood’s deputy, a Frenchman called Arnaud Meline, he told me that in his native country there simply isn’t the same “vision” for the grass. To the French, it’s still “just a place you go to BBQ with friends”.

Preparations for the Euro 2020 pitches began more than two years ago. In the early hours of 25 April 2019, Dale Frith set off down the M6 to Wembley, where Uefa was gathering together its team of pitch experts for a “kick off” meeting.

By 10am, many of the giants of turfcare were sitting around the conference table. Besides Frith, there was Richard Hayden, who claims to be the only turf expert to have successfully replaced a pitch mid-tournament – in Lille during Euro 2016. There was Dean Gilasbey, who has worked with Fifa to train aspiring groundskeepers across the world, from Macedonia to Ghana. There was Andy Cole, the longest-serving pitch expert in the room, who had worked on three European Championships and three World Cups. These men are not groundskeepers; they are turf consultants, specialists in agronomy who supervise multiple ongoing projects.

Uefa’s representatives laid out the schedule for the coming months, and their expectations for each pitch. According to Uefa guidelines, surface traction should be above 30 Newton metres (NM), a unit of torque that measures a player’s interaction with the surface. Too much traction puts strain on ligaments and risks injury; too little and players will lose their footing. Surface hardness should be between 70 and 90 gravities – a measurement of how quickly a hammer decelerates on impact. If it’s too soft, players will tire too quickly; if it’s too hard, the risk of injury increases, and the ball will bounce too high. The grass, which should be between 24mm and 28mm, must be cut in straight lines, across the pitch, perpendicular to the touchline. Even the dimensions of the penalty spot and the centre circle spot are specified (200mm and 240mm in diameter respectively).

As a consultant, Frith would be Uefa’s eyes on the ground, monitoring data from Standley, the groundsman, about the pitch, and occasionally conducting independent tests. The groundskeeper-consultant relationship is a delicate one. Whereas groundskeepers are responsible for the daily upkeep of a specific site, consultants flutter between projects, ranging from World Cups to grassroots sport. (Between Wembley visits, Frith was working with a primary school in St Helens whose playing fields weren’t draining properly.) Some compare the relationship to that between a builder and an architect. “I know what I want, but a skilled labourer will produce what I am looking for,” Andy Cole told me. For the modern British groundskeeper, educated in plant science, this attitude can be grating. Standley, who has won numerous awards during his 15 years as groundskeeper at Wembley and exudes passion for the job, initially declined to be interviewed for this story because he was concerned that it would focus too heavily on the work of turf consultants.

Standley likens his work to flying a plane. He hopes that thorough preparation will allow for a “soft landing” on match day, but when there are back-to-back matches, he will sleep in a hotel nearby, just in case of any unexpected developments. He is away from his family a lot, including most weekends, but it is a sacrifice he is willing to make. “It’s not a job for me; it’s a passion,” he says. He calls the Wembley pitch his second child because it “lives and breathes just like one”. (It’s common for groundskeepers to talk in this way, referring to moments when the pitch “wants a drink” or “when it’s hungry”.)

Elite groundskeeping depends on achieving near-total control over every component of the pitch. When I visited Dave Roberts, Liverpool’s senior manager of grounds, at Anfield in May, he showed me how he uses heat and moisture sensors in the soil to create the best environment to grow grass, and applies zeolite, a volcanic ash that acts as a magnet to hold moisture in the root zone. Anfield’s “permavoid” irrigation system, a series of interlocked plastic crates beneath a network of heating pipes, speeds up drainage and allows him to water the entire surface in less than three minutes.

With its plentiful rainfall and mild temperatures, Britain is a good place to grow grass. But even in this green and pleasant land, weather remains the groundsman’s greatest enemy. They live in fear of the unexpected. The week after my first visit, Wembley hosted the Non-League Finals Day. The night before, 6mm of rain, rather than the forecasted 2mm, had fallen, inciting panic among Standley’s team.

When I asked Standley what scares him, he recalled how a snowstorm had hit hours before Tottenham’s 2018 FA Cup replay at Wembley against Rochdale, making it almost impossible to see the pitch markings. (Late in the match, ground staff had to come on to the pitch with shovels to try to make the penalty boxes clearer.) “Mother Nature is the biggest challenge you’re up against,” Standley told me. Although Frith began his career as a groundsman, he switched to consultancy in 2008, partly because the “lack of control” was causing him anxiety.

The job can take its toll. Like goalkeepers, groundskeepers tend not to receive much credit when things go well, but are the first to be blamed if anything goes wrong. To Stones, it is a way of life rather than a job. “You don’t become a groundsman, you’re born a groundsman,” he said.

If you were looking for somewhere to place a world-class sports pitch, inside Wembley stadium would be a bad choice. Standley likens his job to cultivating grass in a shoebox. Between September and March, the 50-metre-high stands cast a shadow across the turf. In these months, light levels within the stadium rarely exceed 12 micromoles, well below the 20 micromoles that grass typically needs to grow. Airflow at Wembley is also poor, said Standley. Without a breeze passing over it, grass becomes “lazy”, as turf experts put it, and eventually it will keel over and die.

Standley has some pretty fancy tools to overcome these challenges. He uses a subsurface aeration system to increase moisture and oxygen levels in the the sand and composites that run 30cm below the surface, known as the “rootzone”. To encourage the grass seedlings to grow, he also runs hot water through underground pipes to bring the temperature in the upper rootzone up to 17°C. Once the seeds have put out shoots, he rolls out lighting rigs and six gargantuan fans to simulate summer conditions. What looks like a normal patch of grass is in reality a “giant chemistry set,” he told me.

For the Wembley surface to be in peak condition for the summer, major works have to be completed in winter. On 20 November 2019, in preparation for the Euros, it was time to begin reconstructing the pitch – replacing the top 6,000 tonnes of rootzone. London’s natural soil is clay-heavy, meaning it doesn’t drain well, so Standley brought in sand from Surrey to speed up drainage. Pitch reconstruction is an immense task, which only needs to be carried out about once every eight years. A team of 15 labourers worked in shifts 24 hours a day for three weeks, saving time and money by transporting materials to and from the stadium at night, when there is less traffic.

Once the new turf was laid, the grass took around 11 weeks to mature. (This also involves intertwining a small percentage of artificial grass into the surface, to help stabilise it.) Then, in March 2020, Uefa postponed the Euros to the following summer. It was a disappointment to Standley, but not a disaster. In November 2020, he renovated the pitch and began to test it, sending the results to Frith to interpret on behalf of Uefa. From February 2021, Frith began travelling to London to conduct his own tests.

Standley is expert at adjusting the Wembley pitch to make it work for other sports, such as rugby and American football. The latter is played in short bursts and requires “ultimate traction”, he said. To allow players to change direction as quickly as possible, the NFL demands a hard pitch, somewhere between 90 and 100 gravities. To increase the hardness of the pitch, Standley’s team will add around 30kg of extra weight to their mowers. With each cut, Standley can add roughly one gravity. To bring the pressure back down again, he’ll turn to the Verti-Drain, a tool made of six spikes that poke into the ground, relieving the pressure by breaking up the soil. To give the American football players extra padding when they fall, Standley lets the grass grow slightly longer, to around 32mm.

Seed breeders have cultivated thousands of different varieties to provide the ideal grass for each sport. They will spend sometimes as long as 15 years developing a new cultivar, and their strongest batches land on the desk of Dr Christian Spring at the Sports Turf Research Institute in West Yorkshire. STRI score the grasses on qualities such as “shoot density” (how thick the sward is) and “recovery’” (how quickly it recovers from wear). STRI carefully ranks each cultivar and publishes its findings in an annual booklet, which Standley calls his Bible.

Still, you couldn’t turn Wembley into a cricket pitch or a grass tennis court. The soil is too sandy, so the surface will never be quite hard enough. On an overcast afternoon, I headed to south London, where Neil Stubley, head of courts and horticulture at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, was preparing the courts for the Wimbledon tennis championships. When the first ball is hit at the end of June, the Wimbledon courts will be twice as hard as Wembley when the NFL is in town.

Like Calderwood, Stubley studied at Myerscough College, where he was taught that plants must always be healthy, well watered and well fed. “Then you come into tennis and you roll the bejeezus out of it, you stop feeding it and you stop watering it,” he told me. To produce the best grass court, Stubley must find the balance between life and death. “By the time you start the championships, the plant is on a slow keel to dying because you’re starving it,” he said. But the surface can’t be too dry at the start, “because otherwise the plant will be dead before you get to the second week”. The courts end the fortnight closer to 300 gravities, which has no more give than a tarmac road.

When I first visited Standley at Wembley on 12 May – four weeks before the Euros, three days before the FA Cup Final – the stadium was empty, apart from a handful of broadcasters and Standley’s team of five ground staff. With the Cup final approaching, the pitch was already at match length: 24mm. Between games, Standley allows the grass to grow out as much as possible. His team then trims it down by approximately 2mm each day for a week. (More severe cuts can shock the plant, turning it yellow.) When kick-off is four days away, they mow to maintain it at the same length, taking off just a tiny amount each day. This constant mowing makes the patterns on the pitch more pronounced, making it look like a green chequerboard.

Later that morning, I joined Frith as he tested the pitch. Armed with an assortment of equipment, a lot of which looked like futuristic torture devices, Frith dotted around the Wembley turf, careful not to get cut down by one of the eerily silent electric mowers. As expected, the pitch was in excellent condition. Later that week, he uploaded the scores to a portal for the bosses at Uefa to read.

It wasn’t until I returned two weeks later, on the day of the Championship playoff final, that I felt a sense of the magnitude of Standley’s job. When I arrived around an hour before kick-off, Standley was visibly agitated, with unkempt hair unlike his normally impeccable appearance. With the winners moving up to the Premier League, this is the most lucrative match in English football, and it marked the start of the trickiest weekend in Standley’s calendar, with three matches back-to-back from Saturday to Monday. After that, he would have two weeks to make the final adjustments for England’s opening Euros game.

At 2pm, Standley held a meeting with ground staff before heading pitchside to watch the game. “Despite all the data that we’re reading, I now need to see proof,” he told me. Standley watches football much as a set designer might watch a movie: the stuff that is just background to everyone else is the real focus of his attention.

“I am not watching the players; I am watching their boots touching the surface,” he said. He watches for slips like a normal fan might dread seeing their defenders give away a penalty. The equivalent of his team scoring is the sight of a player pivoting or turning or twisting in a way that could only be done on a perfectly maintained pitch. In November, when Phil Foden executed an astonishing flick, pirouetting down the south side sideline in the late stages of a match against Iceland at Wembley, Standley was satsfied. “He depended on that pitch being stable,” Standley said, grinning.

It is only after a match that Standley can breathe a little. After the Championship play-off final, he headed to his office to unwind with some music. He likes listening to artists he’s seen at Wembley: Coldplay, Adele, Springsteen. In 24 hours, he would need to do it all again, and then again the day after that. As he headed to his hotel, he allowed himself to think about the Euros; on Tuesday 1 June, the entire stadium would be revamped, with Euro 2020 branding introduced across the stands. “It has taken three years to get here,” Standley said. “We’ve been preparing for this and we want that soft landing.”

It was 6am when Standley arrived on site for England’s first match, on Sunday 13 June, but it was already warm. He followed the same routine as usual, beginning by walking over the playing surface. It calms his nerves and allows him to feel the surface. The forecast had anticipated the heat, so Standley knew that watering the pitch was paramount, especially on the north side, which was fully exposed to the sun. When Standley had finished his inspection, his team mowed it twice horizontally, to sharpen the patterns that appear on the pitch, and repainted the white lines twice. At midday, two hours before kick-off, they watered the pitch for a second time.

At 2pm, a year after initially planned, England’s Euro 2020 campaign finally got underway. During England’s national anthem, Standley felt his eyes filling with tears, but after kick-off, as he watched the ball fizz around the pitch, he could begin to relax. In the 33rd minute, Foden performed another dazzling move, leaping up to take the ball out of the air and landing, turning and passing it back. The pitch held up perfectly.

Towards the end of the match, Standley joined Frith in the tunnel, where they watched some of the final minutes together. They chatted about Raheem Sterling’s goal, proud of the role they had both played in it. “I grew up watching Euro 96, so to be standing on the turf at Wembley for Euro 2020 is something I could have only dreamed of,” Standley told me. “You work for days like these. But I wasn’t at work, I was living out a childhood dream.”

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... ball-pitch
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Re: Article from The Athletic- the rise of data in coaching, scouting and transfers...

Post by CrosspoolClarets » Tue Jun 15, 2021 3:31 pm

I’ve never worked in sports performance but I design a lot of dashboards and analytics in my work so have to give a lot of thought to what the end-user wants from it etc.

The bit I find intriguing in this thread (skimmed through sadly, I’d love to find time to fully read it) is the bit about player’s representatives arranging via 3rd party analytics companies to prepare evidence on their player to persuade clubs to sign them.

It feels a little bit like marking one’s own homework. The challenge to me would seem to be to persuade club’s of the merits of the package in the full knowledge that clubs would think it would be a biased one sided picture. On the flip side, the clubs could benefit from it - if a fair reflection.

Seems to be even more important for clubs to build a big analytics infrastructure themselves, partly to do their own work, and partly to do due diligence on what they get in from 3rd parties like these. Reading between the lines, Dyche seemed frustrated that the back office hadn’t been built up enough by the old owners - it wouldn’t surprise me if this was an area of concern despite past investment in it.

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