Measuring heart and desire and scouting by Google Alert

One thing that was mentioned time and again by the professionals at the Opta Pro Forum was the importance of character.

You can be a skillful and productive player but if you don't have the right work ethic or have an abrasive personality you can end up as a net negative influence on the team.

So how do we scout for personality?

One of the slightly clichéd critisisms of data is "data can't show me heart", "data can't show me desire"

But how would you quantify heart and desire?

I'd probably look at actions performed at certain game states.

Does a player "hide" when they are in losing positions or do they look for the ball as normal, or even more than usual?

When I think of the likes of Gerrard or Rooney I remember players that would demand the ball more and more when their teams were losing. Often dropping deeper to get on the ball and make things happen. The boring analyst side of me wonders if this is a net positive or negative to a team when the shape breaks up but the fan side thinks it is what I want to see from my players.

So I'm thinking we probably could come up with a metric for desire/heart/passion/will to win. Just off the top of my head I'd probably like to see the impact on how often a player touches the ball, relative to their normal output within their team, when they are in losing positions. Perhaps even the distance covered, the pressure events they are involved in, possession regains, ambitious passes, those Gerrard style Hollywood shots (good or bad, you decide).

Certainly I think there is a potential way to look at it.

But what about personality? No data is going to be able to measure that.

Well recently I've been running a trial (sample size 1 so not that scientific to be fair) to see if you can use freely available public information to get insights into a players character.

Introducing Google Alerts for scouting.......

Go to Google - News - Type your players name in - Get Alerts. Job done.

How does that help?

Almost every club is covered in some way by local press and fan websites.

Almost every club has pre match and post match conferences, match reports, player interviews, opinion pieces, previews.

Clustered among those are references to the player your are scouting.

The articles are send directly to you, translated (if required) by the magic of Google and appear in your inbox.

So my sample player, who is Alexis Claude Maurice of Lorient in France who I picked out from data scouting, and who has since got the goals his data suggested he should.

Let us look at his google news stories - and try and ignore the weird translations.

Well we can see that at 20 he is comfortable talking to the press with "every point is important" showing he can talk like a footballer should. The headlines are positive calling him the strongest link, he has taken over, and something about big Alexis riding a hake which is perhaps a little unusual but each to their own.

 

Clicking into one of the articles we see the following

 "On the Lorient side, we hope that this disappointment will serve as a lesson as striker Alexis Claude-Maurice says: " We are inevitably disappointed after leading 2-0. In the second half, we started a little longer. In the second, there was a little less movement when we had the ball, so that we released a little more. And the more we cleared, the more the block opened. At the loss, there was a lot of space, so a lot of races to do. It made us tired. We should have sat down, calm down and continue playing. We learn .

This looks to me signs of a player with an intelligent mind who thinks about tactics and is open to learning.

Another article  describes him as the technical leader of the team and again praises his tactical and technical thinking.

I presume lots of clubs already do personality and background checks on their players. But given the importance of it perhaps some pre-filtering through freely available sources could help.