Stop bunching

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...

In my working life up until this point, I've always taken on jobs where my role was to remove constraints. Automate the boring bits of people's work, free up time for the value-adding activities, look for where processes are slow and where investment could increase capacity. All that type of stuff that is painfully boring to read about, let alone do. Nordsjaelland have embraced a self imposed constraint on promoting youth Yet in football, I actually think constraints can be useful. There are naturally occurring constraints, for example, no club has full data, video, or live scouts positioned at every possible place potential recruits are in action. Almost all clubs are constrained by money. They operate within a budget, there isn't any point in Grimsby Town enquiring about the availability of Lionel Messi. But what if the standard approach to scouting and player recruitment isn't as efficient as it could be? What if imposing some constraints led to bet...