Moneyball scouting - Christopher Martins Pereria

A while ago I looked for how the principles of 'Moneyball' might be applied to football. One of my suggestions was to look for players with blocked pathways to the first team. This might be young players at elite clubs, or players where the first team spot is taken up by an excellent player.

I randomly picked Lyon as my team to look at.

They have a thriving youth academy, and lots of very good young midfielders. So is there anyone in their squad who is good but not quite Ndombele good?

At the same time I've been using some good new data sets. And one name keeps coming up in my search for Ndombele like midfielders.

In a happy coincidence that players happens to be on Lyon's books.

Christopher Martins Pereira - Luxembourg and Troyes (on loan from Lyon)

21 year old Christopher is a 6ft 2 tall midfielder who can also play centre back.

The majority of his games are as a defensive central midfield player.

This season has been a breakout in terms of production with 2 goals and 4 assists.

He has over 30 caps for Luxembourg and impressed in the Nations League in a more defensive role with plenty of interceptions and tackles.

The driving runs from midfield are there too with twice the average number of dribbles, and 3x the number of fouls drawn as the average Ligue 2 midfielder. Passing is above average.

The most impressive thing about him is the improvement over the last year with him moving to a more forward thinking role with Troyes compared to his time at Lyon II and Bourg-en-Bresse. 

He has been good enough to be offered contracts with Lyon, but will be 22 soon, and is still nowhere near the first team, with his contract only having 16 months remaining on it.

As luck would have it somebody created a Youtube video of him and posted it today! Looks decent to the eye too. Looks like he has everything you would need in a top level Championship midfield. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wyscout review and poking around the French third tier

Image
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
Read more

Scouting report Dan Ndoye - Lausanne Sport

Image
I've decided to try out a new approach to scouting. Instead of looking at how well the player is playing which almost always shows up positively in the data I am going to look at the attributes the player has. I'm going to look at a combination of data and video and record the results here.  The categories I've chosen for assessing the player aren't ones I've given a huge amount of thought to, it is an initial list of the things I think are important to predict the long term career progression of young players. Player - Dan Ndoye Club - Lausanne Sport Age - 18 Position - plays across the front 3, most often as an inverted winger. Technical Foot Good ball striking ability with either foot. Comfortable using either to shoot with and generates good power. Probably gets a slightly better shape on crosses from the left but has played wide on either side of the attack and tends to cut in and shoot more than cross. Touch Close control with either foot
Read more

Data Analytics conference - Daniel Krueger report

Image
Seattle Sounders Inaugural Analytics Conference (6/22 – 6/23 2019) Summary by: @DanielKrueger96 Organizers: @analysefooty @SSFCSpSci #SSFCAnalytics Day 1 Opening Remarks Garth Lagerway, President of Soccer – Seattle Sounders FC Building an analytics department from scratch Starting with current roster: sports science emphasis (RPE, sleep, athlete surveys, performance testing Player recruitment Inherently less data on players outside of your own club because other clubs don’t release sports sci data Building automation Finding objectivity to allow for data driven decisions Introduced Ravi Ramineni – Director of Analytics, Seattle Sounders FC General takeaways: There seems to be a common theme with sports front offices. Team presidents and GMs rarely have a data background. The role of an in-house analyst is fairly new, so this makes sense. Though front office management may not have an understanding of the technical side of the analyst’s day to do task, it is important
Read more