Football Intelligence – the game’s direction of travel

Some people are turned off by statistics in football. Frequently I get responses when I tweet basic stats saying ‘I use my eyes’ – or words along those lines – disregarding any form of data or numbers. That’s fine – we all appreciate football in different ways.

Well, I unashamedly like data. I don’t ‘do’ stats  particularly well; I don’t have a formal background in statistics and I’ve never been involved in that type of scholarly research, and so I leave it to the experts and mostly keep it simple, focusing on ‘events’ – tackles, passes, assists, shots, goals. But there’s a growing community dedicated to ‘advanced’ statistic and, at major football clubs, teams of statisticians are starting to use ‘football intelligence’ data.

I had been recommended this presentation by various people over the last couple of months, and today I finally got around to watching it. It is Damien Comolli – formerly Sporting Director at Spurs (2005 – 2008) – presenting a Performance.LAB Innovation Seminar about Squad Management.

I don’t want to spoil it, as it’s a must watch. But it’s fairly Spurs-centric, and Nabil Bentaleb is used as an example throughout. In addition, if this doesn’t make you want us to sign Christoph Kramer, nothing will.

At the same event, Paul Power gave a presentation about Game Intelligence. He states towards the beginning of the presentation that they used 260 million points of data to prepare for that presentation alone. That is remarkable in itself. But look at how they’re using it, and it will blow your mind.

It amused me somewhat that Comolli talks about how Luka Modrić – a player who doesn’t stand out when you look at event data alone – helped drive them to work on some of these models. To essentially prove, statistically, that he is the brilliant player that we know he is from simply using our eyes.

Where this will lead next is fascinating. This sort of data is already being used to recruit players, and to analyse existing players’ performance. Indeed at Spurs we have Paul Mitchell, recruited at the back end of 2014 from Southampton as Head of Recruitment and Analysis. He who is famous for his ‘black box’ and use of data. He uses data and visuals together, presumably in ways similar to what is seen in Comolli’s seminar.

The next step will be to drive coaching forward – to apply the numbers to coaching methods and to help players improve based on very specific data. To prepare players and teams for specific opponents by targeting their weaknesses and stopping them from using their strengths.

Of course you can’t just have the data. You need someone to analyse it, you need someone to present it, and you need to make judgements and have conversations – to remember that different coaches want different players to do different things. It’d be no good to give Mauricio Pochettino a player who is brilliant at controlling possession and tempo by taking lots of touches because he actually wants his players to move the ball quickly.

And so conversations need to be had, logic needs to be applied, and also personalities need to be analysed. But it’s fascinating nonetheless.

I expect some form of backlash in terms of how players will adapt to being analysed. For example, players all get their numbers back immediately after a match, and there have been stories about players playing lots of safe, square passes between one another late in games to drive their pass completion up. Advanced analytics and football intelligence will know this, and these sorts of safe passes will not allow the player to stand out – because only passes that matter will add value.

You can, of course, still continue watching football without digging any deeper – the beauty of the game need not change. But rest assured that beneath the surface is a team aiming to ensure that clubs get every inch of value from players in an ever-changing environment.

Join the conversation

  1. Amen. Any club not using data to improve training, tactics, fitness and recruitment is going to be falling behind, badly. Saw that presentation too, it was fascinating
    1. Did you watch Paul Power's presentation too? Really good!
  2. All American sports are using advanced statistics to analyze peformance. Clubs who do not embrace additional information to improve will be left behind. There is a backlash by former players and some television analyst. The most successful use a blend of statistics and in-person scouting.
    1. Spot on.
  3. Thats a great article, tx.. Always wondered what it was about Mitchell's approach that caught Levy's eye so much..There does seem to be a different approach this summer, even down to Levy accepting less for a particular transfer fee through not getting involved in so much brinkmanship (which I'm sure must grate him a little!). Just getting the deal done and losing the deadwood in order to move on to the next piece of business (a strategy we may only see this summer due to the amount of work he and Baldini have in restructuring the squad). There seems to be a more efficient approach recently i.e. this overhaul of squad could have happened last summer/january but patience was opted for). I kind of agree with you that there can be an amount of analysis/paralysis with all this data but it certainly has its place. Damn good read..Are you tracking who reads this, what age they are, what knowledge they have and how many sign up for future posts lol????
    1. Haha I like it! Well I can tell you where you found the link to my blog, how's that?! Mitchell's a fascinating character - in some ways I want the official site to run a feature on him, but in others I want us to leave him as an enigma!
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