So you want to work in football? Piano carriers. Was I wrong?
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 then when people from outside your industry make lazy general assumptions about your competence so I fully accept I could be completely wrong on that! And I also acknowledge that football "assets" are people and it is more complex than moving a piece of machinery to a new site.
However, I hope to develop some ideas in the next week or so that focus on how clubs could potentially increase the value of their non-playing squad. If a club then thinks they want to work with me my DMs are open!
Piano carrier or player?
Bill Shankly "A football team is like a piano. You need 8 people to carry it and 3 who can play the damn thing."
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 then when people from outside your industry make lazy general assumptions about your competence so I fully accept I could be completely wrong on that! And I also acknowledge that football "assets" are people and it is more complex than moving a piece of machinery to a new site.
However, I hope to develop some ideas in the next week or so that focus on how clubs could potentially increase the value of their non-playing squad. If a club then thinks they want to work with me my DMs are open!
Piano carrier or player?
Bill Shankly "A football team is like a piano. You need 8 people to carry it and 3 who can play the damn thing."
Like a lot of Bill's quotes there is a bit of humour and bit of truth in it.
In the better half of Liverpool a similar tale from the era is told when Everton's 1970 title winning team is referred to as the "Holy Trinity"; Ball, Kendall and Harvey. As another player (I think it was Joe Royle who was top scorer that season) remarked it was the first time a 3 man team had ever won a Championship.
So what did Shankly mean by the quote and does it have any relevance today?
I was going to do a long blog looking at how you might identify good players to do the piano carrying job, then it struck me that......
I was going to do a long blog looking at how you might identify good players to do the piano carrying job, then it struck me that......
When we think of the top teams nowadays we can see every player cost over £30m and earns £150k a week. Surely they are more than just piano carriers?
And hang on, didn't Cantona refer to Didier Deschamps as a water carrier? He was great, he won everything.
But being a piano (or water carrier) doesn't mean you aren't any good. Nor does it mean you wouldn't be the piano player at another club. Take the absolute worst regular Premier League player you can think of put him in your Sunday League and he'd be like Messi compared to you. At the top level we are talking fractions of a fraction of the top 1% of world footballers in ability.
What it does mean is that in any team structure you need 8 players who can rely on to create a defensive structure and you can allow 3 the freedom to improvise.
There is no such thing as a piano carrier who isn't also a top level footballer once you reach the elite.
There is no such thing as a piano carrier who isn't also a top level footballer once you reach the elite.
Revisiting my blog on lower league analytics
Indecisive Dave was one of my favourite characters in the Fast Show. A man who would change his opinion under the slightest challenge.
I recently posted that lower league clubs should use data in their decision making, and that coaching should be data informed.
Seb C on twitter made some very good counter arguments regarding data for match day use.
In his view data analysis is far less likely to have benefits over and above spending that time and money on more traditional ways of working. Video scouting, set piece practice. In short analysis of data isn't going to add a lot of value for the coaching staff.
Top level coaching (by which I include all professional leagues) is something that is mysterious to a lot of us. We see the end result on the pitch but I often wonder how we separate out the various elements that make a up a performance.
Do training drills have a measurable impact on player performance? I've read lots of highly thought of tactical coaches saying the single most important element of their craft is their man management skill. Some managers have a reputation (fair or otherwise) of being a good man manager but limited technically, and some the reverse.
Do players naturally adapt to the game or follow managers instructions to the letter.? They say no battle plan survives first contact (or the Mike Tyson version "everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth") so is it better just to work on your own style of attacking and defending and not worry so much about stopping the opposition?
The same goes for player scouting. We see the end results with the eye and with the data but what we don't see is how much the system they are playing in will impact them. I always give the example of Everton Baines vs England Baines where two completely different roles had a huge impact on player performance.
Plus we have the ever present problem that data only exists for players who are playing. A Premier League squad will contain 50-75 professional players aged 17+ but only 11-14 of them will appear in a data release each week. Those 50+ non playing players might be better than the ones in your data but how would you know? Would it not be better to be scouting youth and reserve games rather than looking at the same data everyone else has?
I think my thinking on analytics in football, from a coaching point of view, is currently on the downward slope of Mt Stupid on the graph below. I still think it is great, and enjoy reading about it but now I've opened myself to some of the counter arguments I can see that there are still some fundamentals I need to consider.
I recently posted that lower league clubs should use data in their decision making, and that coaching should be data informed.
Seb C on twitter made some very good counter arguments regarding data for match day use.
In his view data analysis is far less likely to have benefits over and above spending that time and money on more traditional ways of working. Video scouting, set piece practice. In short analysis of data isn't going to add a lot of value for the coaching staff.
Top level coaching (by which I include all professional leagues) is something that is mysterious to a lot of us. We see the end result on the pitch but I often wonder how we separate out the various elements that make a up a performance.
Do training drills have a measurable impact on player performance? I've read lots of highly thought of tactical coaches saying the single most important element of their craft is their man management skill. Some managers have a reputation (fair or otherwise) of being a good man manager but limited technically, and some the reverse.
Do players naturally adapt to the game or follow managers instructions to the letter.? They say no battle plan survives first contact (or the Mike Tyson version "everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth") so is it better just to work on your own style of attacking and defending and not worry so much about stopping the opposition?
The same goes for player scouting. We see the end results with the eye and with the data but what we don't see is how much the system they are playing in will impact them. I always give the example of Everton Baines vs England Baines where two completely different roles had a huge impact on player performance.
Plus we have the ever present problem that data only exists for players who are playing. A Premier League squad will contain 50-75 professional players aged 17+ but only 11-14 of them will appear in a data release each week. Those 50+ non playing players might be better than the ones in your data but how would you know? Would it not be better to be scouting youth and reserve games rather than looking at the same data everyone else has?
I think my thinking on analytics in football, from a coaching point of view, is currently on the downward slope of Mt Stupid on the graph below. I still think it is great, and enjoy reading about it but now I've opened myself to some of the counter arguments I can see that there are still some fundamentals I need to consider.
Image taken from here
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