Stop bunching

How clever do you need to be to work in football analytics? Some recent twitter threads discussed the fact Liverpool employ numerous Harvard and Oxbridge educated people within their analytics department. Most advertised jobs now want at least a first class degree in data science (but don't expect more than £18k a year) and the Opta Pro lineup features some of the brightest young minds doing incredibly complex things. Don't worry, my learned reader, this won't be an anti-intellectual rant. I love football data and I think it can be useful, though most is just fun. Fun is good though, this isn't a criticism. I also think we are already at or near the limits as to what can be usefully done with the publicly available data. Decontextualised numbers - like how many tackles a midfielder makes, or pass completion rates - are nice to discuss but ultimately irrelevant. If Gana is winning the ball back a massive amount it tells me both that he is very good at it, but al...

This might be a crazy thought - but it seems logical to me. Why don't clubs just advertise jobs like everyone else? For example Stoke City want a new left back. In the current system they'd draw up a list of players they think they could get. Put the feelers out with some agents about players who may be interested in joining them. Contact the selling club and hope to agree financial terms with both them and the player. This is the way football works, and has always worked. However every stage seems flawed to me. In the current system they'd draw up a list of players they think they could get. In itself this limits the ambitions of the club. Yes there is no point approaching Marcelo or Jordi Alba. But how do you know you aren't missing out on a player you could get? Maybe a player you have deemed as ungettable, or hadn't even considered, would jump at the chance of joining you. Put the feelers out with some agents about players who may be interest...

4 promotion strategies for Championship clubs. Just be sensible Even if you have a rich owner prepared to splash the cash in a promotion push the key is to think sensibly. As a club buy into a style of play. Find a coach who believes in that style and signs up to the values you have as a club and back them. Have someone with a level head at boardroom level who understands and can communicate variance. Sometimes the process can be perfect but the outcome can be poor, and sometimes that can just be luck. For signings that might just mean doing a quick sanity test through a simple checklist. What is the style of play you want to play? What are your expectations in data output from a player in that position? Explain how the potential signing fits in with that style? Who are they replacing and why is this player better suited? What happens to the players this new signing will move further from first team action? Do we have players already in the squad who have the skills...

After my weekend access to Wyscout I found a number of players from a quick data search, confirmed with a video view, who look to be worthy of further investigation. I looked for players I thought would be good for ambitious championship clubs, or those in the middle to lower half of the Premier league. The players I've found are from the second tier in France, Italy and Spain. One thing that is good and bad about data scouting is that the players identified are often the players who already have a good reputation. So in some cases I may be talking about players beyond the recruiting powers of the Championship, however I think 2 of the players from France and 1 from Italy are ready for Premier League clubs. In terms of how I used the data I just looked for single stats these players did well, like ball progression or through balls. If a name cropped up a few times I watched some video. Not the most scientific method but I only had a few hours. Wyscout does provide some rada...

I signed up for Wyscout on Friday and was given full access for 48 hours. Inbetween the busy bits of family life over a weekend in the run up to Christmas I thought I'd do a quick review of it and reveal some of the players I liked the look of. For those who have never used Wyscout it actually looks a lot like Football Manager (or at least Football Manager about 10 years ago) The home page allows you to select a league to scout. The package I was trialing allowed me full access to 5 leagues (I chose the big 5) and partial access to all the others. To be honest I really couldn't see that much difference between full/partial access for player scouting purposes. I decided to use the trial time to see if I could use their stats and video clips to find some promising players in obscure leagues. So I looked in the French 3rd division, my thoughts being that France is producing so much talent that their third level must have some potential top quality players in it - with a t...

Common sense There have been a few really good articles on those "laptop nerds who have never kicked a football" who seem to be rebuilding clubs. Norwich  and  Liverpool (unfortunately ) fit this bill.  Steve Clarke   also seems to be following a similar template with Kilmarnock albeit in a more old school way. That template seems to be common sense. I keep reading these articles expecting to find some holy grail breakthrough but it all seems to come down to: Picking a style. Finding a coach who can coach in that style and agrees with your direction of travel. Creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and professionalism. When recruiting buy players who fit the style you want to play in. Use your youth system and trust in the younger players. Don't chop and change when things get rough, look at the direction of travel not the short term results (Klopp was 7th in his first season and Farke bottom half). You mean calling players useless f'ing c**£s...

This is more a thought experiment than a serious proposition but...... Excluding the recently relegated teams with their gargantuan payrolls the promotion chasing Championship clubs seem to operate with wage bills in the £25-40m per annum range. The non-elite teams in La Liga have wage bills in the £25m-£40m a year range. To pick random pairings Celta Vigo and Derby County both spend around £36m a year on wages. Don't mention we get paid more than Fiorentina please. Celta Vigo are better than Derby County though aren't they? I don't think many would disagree. OK, for another example Eibar are better than Blackburn Rovers with around a £27m spend. So we agree the Spanish La Liga midtable team would almost certainly be better than a Championship team? I'd hope at this stage everyone would still be agreeing. Certainly English performances in the Europa League seem to indicate that mid table Premier League clubs seem to struggle against European oppositi...

Ask anyone who the best player outside the top 6 is and it won't be long before the name Gylfi Sigurdsson is mentioned. He seems to score or assist, or at least go close, in most games. And if you only watch the highlights you'll see him either setting up or getting on the end of chances. Whenever Sky Sports do a graphic of top scoring midfielders over the last few years Gyfi will always be in there, near the top of the list. Most Everton fans enjoy watching him play, he has a classy touch and scores some absolutely brilliant goals. There is no doubt that he is far better this year than last. Ask neutrals where he plays, or indeed most fans of his club,  and they'll say he is a classic number 10, or an attacking midfielder. At the risk of attracting the wrath of some particularly vociferous Gylfi fans this article is not about him being a bad player. Far from it he has a very good range of skills. This isn't even about whether Everton overpaid for him. It is...

So you want to work in football? A few people have been in touch to ask what my intentions are from writing a football blog. Is my intention to work with a professional club? No, certainly on the football side of things, I think there are vastly more knowledgeable and dedicated people. I love reading and learning from other people's blogs, and watching a wide variety of games but I'm old enough to know my strengths and weaknesses and know that there are people better at it than me. Professionally my background is in business consultancy (and a 6 week gap in my schedule is why I'm now blogging) and I work with large organisations to help them apply analytical thinking to what they do. This involves making better use of things like the data they hold, their assets, and the skills they have in house. I think football clubs are places that, from an outside point of view, make relatively inefficient use of their assets. I also agree that there is nothing more annoying t...

I'm aware (because I've remember reading it but can't find it) that some people have already developed models for finding similar playing styles across teams. This is my attempt to sketch out how you might do something similar with free resources and basic maths. In yesterdays blog I suggested that teams should research very carefully where they send their players on loan. My initial theory is that attacking players should only be sent on loan to attacking teams if you want to increase their value. This is the Ademola Lookman  / Serge Gnarby situation where a year in WBA reserves decreased the value of Gnarby whereas 4 months in Leipzig doubled Lookman's market value. But also that if you are sending a player on loan with a view to bringing them into your first team then the best thing would be to send them to a team who play a similar style of football to you. There are two ways of doing this; my preferred method would be forming a lose organisation of collabor...

As a former Economics student I can't help but look for inefficient markets. The loan market looks to me like an unexploited inefficiency, where smartly run clubs could prosper; by increasing the market value of underused players. There are 3 categories of players to consider; young players under contract but not playing, young players of obvious high potential but not first team ready, and senior professionals not under first team consideration. Underused yougsters Premier League squads are big - really big - in terms of paid professionals on the books most clubs average between 50-70. This is made up of up to 25 senior professionals and up to 50 players between 17-21. Why so many players between 17-21? It is incredibly difficult to judge talent and final physical form. The difference between being in the top 0.001% of ability and the top 0.0001% can be the difference between being a multi millionaire footballer and not being paid to play football at all. A late growt...

Football is a strange industry. It is often said in the analytics world that the single most valuable person in running a football club would be a logical outsider to just look at what was being suggested and have the power to say "No". No, you can't spend £30m on that 27 year old player from the Russian or Turkish league because he has had a good 3 months of form. No, you shouldn't give your manager a new 5 year £20m deal because you've had an unsustainable amount of luck in the last 6 weeks. In short someone to just act like a board should in a normal company. No irrational exuberance, nor irrational despair. Some of the crazy decisions (Everton 16-18 being my personal, painful example) made in the industry lead us outsiders to look at it and arrogantly assume we'd be that rational person making the correct decisions all the time. Is this classic Dunning-Kruger behaviour of illusionary superiority? Maybe but the thing I like about footbal...

Ted Knutson of Statsbomb tweeted an interesting thread yesterday: Football clubs seem to have the mentality that if they are using the same data as everybody else they won't gain a competitive advantage from it. There is perhaps a kernel of truth in this for scouting data, but only a kernel. Firstly not everybody is operating in the same market, and secondly not all clubs have the same requirements for a player. But yes if the new Messi pops up it will very clearly and very obviously be viewable by everyone. But for a club looking to use analytics this view seems very short sighted. To me it seems to miss the point of gathering the data in the first place. Whilst player and opposition scouting and post-match analysis are arguably the most fun parts of the rise of analytics the main day to day competitive advantage is surely through analytics informed coaching. And if you are going to be informing your coaching through analytics you surely want to make sure your data set...