Stop bunching

My belief is that data scouting works. You can narrow a massive field to a very small field of potential players by identifying players with the attributes you want. You can identify these attributes by looking at how players perform these tasks which are reflected in their performance statistics. But how many statistics do you need to look at to see if a player is actually any good? Well, I have made an exciting discovery. I reckon one statistic alone has been enough to identify pretty much the cream of Europe's defensive talent. As regular readers will know I think Ligue 2 is the best value league around, for many reasons,  so we will base this experiment on that. What I want to do is use the data from previous years to look at young players who showed up well in a category and follow their career from that point. I'm choosing the Wyscout category of "progressive passes" which I think means accurate long passes and normally shows up good passers from dee

"The operation was a complete success, but the patient died" Scouting, in these data-driven days, seems easy. Too easy maybe. The data is good enough now, even from the no or low-cost providers to identify good young players in form. Chances are that 20-year-old starting in a big 5 league and putting up good numbers is going to be a good player. The higher cost providers give far more granular data which enables you to identify these good talents even earlier. Looking for a creative, left-footed central player with the ability to press? Give me a data subscription and half an hour and I'll get you a list that I'm fairly comfortable won't look too silly in a couple of years time. But player identification is only part of the process. Two of the recent yo-yo clubs Aston Villa and Newcastle, plus Fulham this season, seem to have embraced strategies I generally approve of; data scouting and recruiting from specific markets. I recently tweeted about Villa:

At the end of last year, in a period of boredom between contracts, I decided to try my hand at data scouting. I'd always enjoyed the numbers side of football, and wondered how effective just using data available from Wyscout to find promising players could be. The rules of my game were: I couldn't have heard of the player already. They had to be under 22. The underlying data had to be good, I couldn't just pick on goals/assists, it had to be backed up with the expected output. I would then watch 5 minutes or so of them in action, in clip form, from Wyscout. The players I found were: Ligue 2: Alexis Claude Maurice Cheick Doucoure Florian Aye Franck Honorat Christopher Martins Perreira Serie B David Okereke Davide Frattesi Liga 2 Manu Vallejo Alejandro Pozo N1 (French third tier) Vincent Thill Moussa Sylla Maxime Fleury Youssef Maziz Mahdi Talal Nathanael Saintini Lenny Vallier Vallere Pollet Quentin Boisgard Evidence is here and here.

I've seen a few posts recently asking about the scouting process, the "how do you judge a player" part is interesting. If it is easy then everyone would get every transfer right. If it is pure fortune then some clubs wouldn't be consistently better at it than others. So it must be a skill of some sort either in having an "eye" or of knowing which data to rely on to make a good judgment. Like many people in this corner of the internet, I have always enjoyed being able to lay claim to have spotted a talented player before everyone else. My earliest memory of this was sticking an "FAO Joe Royle" note in with my Evertonian magazine subscription cheque when I was about 14.  It advised him to look at Patrick Vieira (then captaining Nice) and Dynamo Kiev's Andrei Shevchenko (and Marlon Beresford but I tend to leave that one out!) as I'd read about them in World Soccer. Dear Joe, I know you can't have got my last letter as you tried to si