Stop bunching

I took some heat on twitter last night after saying: Now the key words here that some people seem to have missed are "scour countries looking for talent in person" I want to look at the received wisdom that havings "boots on the ground" at an early stage is important in player scouting at the highest level. Pool of talent If you are Cambridge United there are probably literally thousands of players you could sign who would improve your first team. A lot of these players won't have their games televised. You, therefore, need a physical presence at games hoping to spot undiscovered talent. I'd still argue that the approach is far less efficient than investing in proper data scouting but that argument is for another blog. The pool of players in any country who are good enough to play in the first team at Manchester United (snide jokes aside) is tiny. By the time players are ready to go into their first team, they are established intern...

I don't think I need to explain just how ridiculous player transfer fees and wage levels are now across football. The average fee for a Premier League player in now well over £12m, wages are well above £50k a week, nudging nearer to £100k for first team ready players. Everybody wants that 'missing piece of the jigsaw' that is going to turn them from also-rans to challengers. I've written before about how fear of missing out is a huge driver in the recruitment of young players, most of whom will never make the first team. One concept from American sport I feel we are missing is 'value above replacement'. What does a generic football player at various levels do? If you swapped a player in your team for that generic player what would be the impact? So for example, if we say an average top 5 league striker is going to offer 14 G+A a season then clearly swapping them for Messi is going to have a much greater negative impact on Barcelona than swapping them o...

Sometimes you read an article or listen to a podcast, and there are a few lines in it that really make you think. Yesterday morning I continued working my way through (which makes it sound like hard work, it isn't they are great) the This Football Life podcasts. They are a series of interviews with people working in football, in analytics, coaching, player development and more. If you are reading this blog you will love them. The one that has caused me to think is the interview with Tommy Johnson . The former Celtic and Aston Villa striker. I don't want this piece to read like a personal attack on Tommy, that isn't my intention at all. Tommy has worked as a scout and head of recruitment at clubs such as Blackburn, Cardiff and Watford. He is open and engaging and generous with the detail he goes in to. He has clearly worked hard, putting in the hours and miles to scout players all around the globe. What I do want to highlight is the massive inefficiency in the proc...

The more that I have met people working in football the more curious I have become about the ability for smart clubs to exploit the seemingly inefficient way football seems to deal with player recruitment. I can understand at the money no object end of the game with multi-million-pound decisions and a limited pool of absolutely top end players that secrecy is key. This is probably also true for most clubs at "big 5" league level. If it comes out that Everton are desperate for a new right back then the price goes up by a few million at every selling club, along with the wage demands. Small pool of good enough players + high levels of competition for these players = high transfer fees and high wage demands. My assumption, upon which all this nonsense rests is that talent is approximately normally distributed among professional footballers. Image from  https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution.html If my assumption is correct (and it is a big ...