Insight
Picking the trends
As football-viewing experiences go, it must be the next-best thing to sitting in the stadium. This is the Performance Analysis Hub at UEFA’s HQ in Nyon, Switzerland, and I am sitting here on the night of the EURO 2024 semi-final between the Netherlands and England.
The scene evokes old pictures of NASA’s mission control: rows of seats set in tiers and filled by a team of analysts, their eyes fixed on events unfolding on the large screens at the front of the room. Here, far from the heat and emotion of the stadium in Dortmund, the analysts can view the action from four different angles, with the biggest screen offering the so-called coaching feed – the widest, ‘tactical’ angle.
Throughout the game, frequent insights are sent through by a member of UEFA’s technical observer group, an experienced coach watching in the stadium. To supplement what the eyes can see, here in the hub the analysts have access to live tracking and event data. Studies have shown that the human mind struggles to recall every event from a sporting occasion where key moments can shape perceptions. Hence this marriage of coaches and analysts to ensure no detail is missed.
The same process will take place during the coming Champions League season, with UEFA’s approach to assessing tactical trends a reflection of the importance of data analytics across the football industry today.
Every big club now has a team of analysts and their support is far-reaching. We hear about ‘Moneyball’ and a data-led strategy to transfers, but, as a starting point, just consider their work on a matchday alone. Clubs will typically have two analysts live-coding the action from high in the stand – identifying and collating the main tactical themes as the game is played – while the head analyst, sat with them, is connected to the dugout and communicates observations before going down to the dressing room at half-time and full time.
A detailed explanation of the process comes from Aaron Briggs, who spent two seasons as Pep Guardiola’s senior first-team performance analyst at Manchester City before graduating to assistant-coach roles with Monaco and Wolfsburg. “In every dugout, you’ll see someone with a headpiece in or earbuds and they’ll be linked to a tactical analyst in the stand,” says Briggs, now an elite development coach at Liverpool. “With the changes in the rules [permitting laptops], you have the wide angle on the bench also. I see something with my eyes and go and cross-check it, as it runs seven or eight seconds behind.
“The side of the pitch is not the best place to view the game. Even for the best coaches, with the half of the pitch that’s furthest away, it can be hard to see what’s going on. Someone in the stands has a better view and is ‘cold’ as they’re not involved in the emotion of the game.”
Hence the significance of the analyst’s observations, presented from a more detached perspective, during the interval, for example. “At half-time we have a process: what is the tactical trend of the game, what has worked and what has not? We’ll feed three or four clips back.” Come the end of the match, adds Briggs, a manager will typically review the key moments before speaking – be it to players or media. “He has calmed down and watched the clips back and has more facts – such as expected goals, possessions, final-third entries, distance covered, high-sprint running. Then he can go to the media and team and transfer his message across.”
Matchday is just the tip of the iceberg. Data, as another voice puts it, breaks down each phase of the game and, when applied well, can bring a clearer understanding of what success means and how to achieve it. As such, analysts spend their time collecting footage, data and watching games and this influences training plans for the week, as well as the game plan at the end of it.
In his role as assistant coach at Monaco and, more recently, Wolfsburg, Briggs became the link between the analysis unit and coaching and playing staff, tasked with breaking down the information collected by the club’s analysts and applying it to the training pitch. Data on the opposition, for example, would be delivered in separate video and text reports and would shape match preparations.
Briggs elaborates: “This is based on five or six games of the opposition and looks at everything – tactics, team shape, individual key players, and what they do in every phase of the game: goal kick, build-up, middle third, final third and transition. If the analysis has shown they don’t high-press the goal kick, for example, I’d say we need to work on solutions against a team that sits in a compact block and looks to counter. And so, in training, we’d need to do a lot of playing against a mid-block and defending the counterattack. I’d present to the players and say, ‘Right, guys, this is how we win – we have to break down this mid-block and one way is to go round and get lots of crosses into the box.’”
For an understanding of the origins of performance analysis and data, it helps to speak to Atle Rosseland. Today the performance analysis supervisor at UEFA, Rosseland previously held roles in the Premier League, notably as first-team analyst at Burnley under Sean Dyche, and then with the English FA where he supported England’s senior men’s and women’s teams in a game and player insight role. Rosseland, who is Norwegian, names his home country’s former national-team coach Egil Olsen as a significant figure in the early application of performance analysis in football. There had already been one or two pioneers – such as Charles Reep, an RAF accountant-turned-coach who collected over 3,000 instances of event data manually at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden – yet Olsen, who led Norway to the World Cup finals in 1994, played a key role.
A professor at the Norwegian University of Sports Science, Olsen helped to develop “the first performance analysis tool on the market, Interplay, which allowed him to tag a game. He was using it with that team, who were ranked second in the FIFA ranking after USA ’94. They were the first to use it. It was driven by research grants, postgrad and PhD students – not full-time employees with governing bodies!
“They collected a lot of info around transitions. Egil Olsen played a 5-4-1 in a very strict zonal defence system. Olsen’s philosophy was based around a good zonal defence, direct vertical play against an organised opponent and quick counter-attacks which he defined as ‘breakdown’. They collected the data after the game and it was presented to all the players on matchday minus one. He would grade all the actions of every player and work out the average to give each an individual score, from one to six, based on the analysis. That was presented to each player in front of everybody in the room.”
With the advent of the internet, the Leeds-based Prozone became a “game-changer” in performance analysis at the end of the 1990s, adds Rosseland. “Prozone installed six tracking cameras to see how far players ran. They collected event data and physical data. A courier had to drive the data to you from Leeds and you got a disk two days after the game.”
By the start of the 2000s, Manchester United brought in a Prozone performance analyst, Simon Wells, who became the club’s first analyst. Arsenal did the same in 2009 when Ben Knapper, now sporting director at Norwich City, was recruited from Prozone as a first-team analyst supporting Arsène Wenger.
Christofer Clemens, today head of scouting match analysis and diagnosis with the German FA (DFB), remembers those days as he was then working for Amisco, a rival data provider from France, later bought by Prozone (today they operate together as Stats Perform). Clemens was a former student of Olsen in Norway, and his role was to seek new clients around Europe. “One of my first clients was Ralf Rangnick in Stuttgart, who had a good understanding of how to use it in a very physical approach – that is, the use of data in respect of physical workload.”
Clemens later set up the data analysis unit at the DFB, helping national coach Joachim Löw plan Germany’s FIFA World Cup triumph in 2014. As one of two analysts with the squad in Brazil, he would log data during games and use it for separate debriefs for both coaching staff and players after each match, as well as for subsequent meetings on the next opponents.
He gives the example of his work ahead of the stunning 7-1 semi-final win over Brazil. “We used some information to give a general overview of where we were in terms of our work rate, our physicality, our general way of executing things. Then we were asking, ‘What do we need for our next game and where do we have weaknesses to address?’ We tried to give the coach an idea where to spend the next two or three days in highlighting things to our players.”
The use of video clips was key to getting the message across. “In intense situations, with limited time, it can be easier just to show a clip and explain what you want and the challenges,” Clemens says, highlighting the need to “to narrow it down to the two or three important pieces of info”.
This point on interpreting the data takes us to the question of what comes next. Rosseland, recalling his first-team analyst days at Burnley, explains: “Since I started full time ten years ago, there has been a significant increase of data. We have entered the video and data interrogation phase. You see the coach-analyst coming into the game and to be a coach-analyst you have to have a Pro Licence. Their role is to translate information and data from the video room onto the training pitch.
“We’re also now in an era where teams want data which aligns to the coach’s model and you don’t find that data with a third party. So Everton would like data that would correspond to Sean Dyche’s philosophy, for example. It is bespoke so you either need to code it manually or ask, ‘How do you automate the data?’ Now information has to be provided so quickly, so we’re going into this automation phase. That info has to be fed live to the coaches and to do that you need automation. You need to use the tracking data you get and also take in the live-event data and merge the two and for that you need data engineers. The data analysts model it so you can get the data you want so you can feed it back at half-time and full time.”
To highlight the futuristic feel of performance analysis in the here and now, Rosseland and his team use AI to receive data more quickly. For example, the software they use can produce average position maps based on event and tracking data – and delivers these in real time.
Yet as the technology gets ever more sophisticated, these experts all agree that soft skills – interacting and communicating effectively with the team – remain vital, not least for transferring information to players. Personal connections are crucial. “It is really important how you connect with the players and I always give feedback one-to-one,” Briggs explains. “In a team setting, not many modern players will raise their hands and speak. When it’s one-to-one, they’ll open up more. How you connect with a person is still massively relevant in today’s game. We’ll have a conversation and then show the clip. Your primary option must be to connect as a human being.”
Over in Germany, Clemens concurs: “It is not about the skills on a computer and how to understand data – still the biggest skill of a really good analyst is knowing what not to say and how to select the important info from the unimportant info. That means you’re part of the coaching staff and you have to understand the coach and the situation. Data analysts are important to give a holistic view, but you must understand the game from a player or coach perspective and not just deliver facts without delivering solutions. Now it’s much easier to use a lot more info, but it is much more difficult to get to the one piece of information that is helpful and necessary.
“A performance analyst or someone working in this field will need a very high psychological understanding of the player. If you really understand not only the football player but the person and how he reacts on the pitch, you have a good feeling of what he needs to perform on the highest level. This is for me the next big thing – a bit interdisciplinary between sports psychology and match and performance analysis coming much closer together to give a good overview of how to address and approach the player.”
“Each player will have an individual development database and we sit down with the analyst and give them key metrics for each position,” Briggs explains. “An analysis department can grab hold of that and code it for you. Imagine you have ten things for the No9 – five with the ball, five without. They will code these moments for you.” In other words, a series of clips offering examples from matches.
“After every two or three games, I’ll sit down with the striker, one-to-one, and say, ‘This is what you’re doing really well, this is why you are in the team: you are pressing, you are aggressive. But you can add more movement in the box, you’re a bit static, too easy to mark.’ And then you put a session on the pitch. If it’s about his movement, you might put on crossing and film the session. In short, this is where the analysis is feeding through to the training pitch.”
As for how players respond, Briggs returns to the importance of interpersonal skills. “I’ve sat in meetings with three points for a player and they may see two points and say, ‘I completely agree with you’ and for the third they’ll say, ‘I don’t think that will improve my game, so I’ll focus on the first two.’ You have to feel what they are feeling. It is alright to have the best technology, and we can talk about clips and draw on them and make them look great with telestration software, but the personal skill set is massively relevant.”
As football-viewing experiences go, it must be the next-best thing to sitting in the stadium. This is the Performance Analysis Hub at UEFA’s HQ in Nyon, Switzerland, and I am sitting here on the night of the EURO 2024 semi-final between the Netherlands and England.
The scene evokes old pictures of NASA’s mission control: rows of seats set in tiers and filled by a team of analysts, their eyes fixed on events unfolding on the large screens at the front of the room. Here, far from the heat and emotion of the stadium in Dortmund, the analysts can view the action from four different angles, with the biggest screen offering the so-called coaching feed – the widest, ‘tactical’ angle.
Throughout the game, frequent insights are sent through by a member of UEFA’s technical observer group, an experienced coach watching in the stadium. To supplement what the eyes can see, here in the hub the analysts have access to live tracking and event data. Studies have shown that the human mind struggles to recall every event from a sporting occasion where key moments can shape perceptions. Hence this marriage of coaches and analysts to ensure no detail is missed.
The same process will take place during the coming Champions League season, with UEFA’s approach to assessing tactical trends a reflection of the importance of data analytics across the football industry today.
Every big club now has a team of analysts and their support is far-reaching. We hear about ‘Moneyball’ and a data-led strategy to transfers, but, as a starting point, just consider their work on a matchday alone. Clubs will typically have two analysts live-coding the action from high in the stand – identifying and collating the main tactical themes as the game is played – while the head analyst, sat with them, is connected to the dugout and communicates observations before going down to the dressing room at half-time and full time.
A detailed explanation of the process comes from Aaron Briggs, who spent two seasons as Pep Guardiola’s senior first-team performance analyst at Manchester City before graduating to assistant-coach roles with Monaco and Wolfsburg. “In every dugout, you’ll see someone with a headpiece in or earbuds and they’ll be linked to a tactical analyst in the stand,” says Briggs, now an elite development coach at Liverpool. “With the changes in the rules [permitting laptops], you have the wide angle on the bench also. I see something with my eyes and go and cross-check it, as it runs seven or eight seconds behind.
“The side of the pitch is not the best place to view the game. Even for the best coaches, with the half of the pitch that’s furthest away, it can be hard to see what’s going on. Someone in the stands has a better view and is ‘cold’ as they’re not involved in the emotion of the game.”
Hence the significance of the analyst’s observations, presented from a more detached perspective, during the interval, for example. “At half-time we have a process: what is the tactical trend of the game, what has worked and what has not? We’ll feed three or four clips back.” Come the end of the match, adds Briggs, a manager will typically review the key moments before speaking – be it to players or media. “He has calmed down and watched the clips back and has more facts – such as expected goals, possessions, final-third entries, distance covered, high-sprint running. Then he can go to the media and team and transfer his message across.”
Matchday is just the tip of the iceberg. Data, as another voice puts it, breaks down each phase of the game and, when applied well, can bring a clearer understanding of what success means and how to achieve it. As such, analysts spend their time collecting footage, data and watching games and this influences training plans for the week, as well as the game plan at the end of it.
In his role as assistant coach at Monaco and, more recently, Wolfsburg, Briggs became the link between the analysis unit and coaching and playing staff, tasked with breaking down the information collected by the club’s analysts and applying it to the training pitch. Data on the opposition, for example, would be delivered in separate video and text reports and would shape match preparations.
Briggs elaborates: “This is based on five or six games of the opposition and looks at everything – tactics, team shape, individual key players, and what they do in every phase of the game: goal kick, build-up, middle third, final third and transition. If the analysis has shown they don’t high-press the goal kick, for example, I’d say we need to work on solutions against a team that sits in a compact block and looks to counter. And so, in training, we’d need to do a lot of playing against a mid-block and defending the counterattack. I’d present to the players and say, ‘Right, guys, this is how we win – we have to break down this mid-block and one way is to go round and get lots of crosses into the box.’”
For an understanding of the origins of performance analysis and data, it helps to speak to Atle Rosseland. Today the performance analysis supervisor at UEFA, Rosseland previously held roles in the Premier League, notably as first-team analyst at Burnley under Sean Dyche, and then with the English FA where he supported England’s senior men’s and women’s teams in a game and player insight role. Rosseland, who is Norwegian, names his home country’s former national-team coach Egil Olsen as a significant figure in the early application of performance analysis in football. There had already been one or two pioneers – such as Charles Reep, an RAF accountant-turned-coach who collected over 3,000 instances of event data manually at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden – yet Olsen, who led Norway to the World Cup finals in 1994, played a key role.
A professor at the Norwegian University of Sports Science, Olsen helped to develop “the first performance analysis tool on the market, Interplay, which allowed him to tag a game. He was using it with that team, who were ranked second in the FIFA ranking after USA ’94. They were the first to use it. It was driven by research grants, postgrad and PhD students – not full-time employees with governing bodies!
“They collected a lot of info around transitions. Egil Olsen played a 5-4-1 in a very strict zonal defence system. Olsen’s philosophy was based around a good zonal defence, direct vertical play against an organised opponent and quick counter-attacks which he defined as ‘breakdown’. They collected the data after the game and it was presented to all the players on matchday minus one. He would grade all the actions of every player and work out the average to give each an individual score, from one to six, based on the analysis. That was presented to each player in front of everybody in the room.”
With the advent of the internet, the Leeds-based Prozone became a “game-changer” in performance analysis at the end of the 1990s, adds Rosseland. “Prozone installed six tracking cameras to see how far players ran. They collected event data and physical data. A courier had to drive the data to you from Leeds and you got a disk two days after the game.”
By the start of the 2000s, Manchester United brought in a Prozone performance analyst, Simon Wells, who became the club’s first analyst. Arsenal did the same in 2009 when Ben Knapper, now sporting director at Norwich City, was recruited from Prozone as a first-team analyst supporting Arsène Wenger.
Christofer Clemens, today head of scouting match analysis and diagnosis with the German FA (DFB), remembers those days as he was then working for Amisco, a rival data provider from France, later bought by Prozone (today they operate together as Stats Perform). Clemens was a former student of Olsen in Norway, and his role was to seek new clients around Europe. “One of my first clients was Ralf Rangnick in Stuttgart, who had a good understanding of how to use it in a very physical approach – that is, the use of data in respect of physical workload.”
Clemens later set up the data analysis unit at the DFB, helping national coach Joachim Löw plan Germany’s FIFA World Cup triumph in 2014. As one of two analysts with the squad in Brazil, he would log data during games and use it for separate debriefs for both coaching staff and players after each match, as well as for subsequent meetings on the next opponents.
He gives the example of his work ahead of the stunning 7-1 semi-final win over Brazil. “We used some information to give a general overview of where we were in terms of our work rate, our physicality, our general way of executing things. Then we were asking, ‘What do we need for our next game and where do we have weaknesses to address?’ We tried to give the coach an idea where to spend the next two or three days in highlighting things to our players.”
The use of video clips was key to getting the message across. “In intense situations, with limited time, it can be easier just to show a clip and explain what you want and the challenges,” Clemens says, highlighting the need to “to narrow it down to the two or three important pieces of info”.
This point on interpreting the data takes us to the question of what comes next. Rosseland, recalling his first-team analyst days at Burnley, explains: “Since I started full time ten years ago, there has been a significant increase of data. We have entered the video and data interrogation phase. You see the coach-analyst coming into the game and to be a coach-analyst you have to have a Pro Licence. Their role is to translate information and data from the video room onto the training pitch.
“We’re also now in an era where teams want data which aligns to the coach’s model and you don’t find that data with a third party. So Everton would like data that would correspond to Sean Dyche’s philosophy, for example. It is bespoke so you either need to code it manually or ask, ‘How do you automate the data?’ Now information has to be provided so quickly, so we’re going into this automation phase. That info has to be fed live to the coaches and to do that you need automation. You need to use the tracking data you get and also take in the live-event data and merge the two and for that you need data engineers. The data analysts model it so you can get the data you want so you can feed it back at half-time and full time.”
To highlight the futuristic feel of performance analysis in the here and now, Rosseland and his team use AI to receive data more quickly. For example, the software they use can produce average position maps based on event and tracking data – and delivers these in real time.
Yet as the technology gets ever more sophisticated, these experts all agree that soft skills – interacting and communicating effectively with the team – remain vital, not least for transferring information to players. Personal connections are crucial. “It is really important how you connect with the players and I always give feedback one-to-one,” Briggs explains. “In a team setting, not many modern players will raise their hands and speak. When it’s one-to-one, they’ll open up more. How you connect with a person is still massively relevant in today’s game. We’ll have a conversation and then show the clip. Your primary option must be to connect as a human being.”
Over in Germany, Clemens concurs: “It is not about the skills on a computer and how to understand data – still the biggest skill of a really good analyst is knowing what not to say and how to select the important info from the unimportant info. That means you’re part of the coaching staff and you have to understand the coach and the situation. Data analysts are important to give a holistic view, but you must understand the game from a player or coach perspective and not just deliver facts without delivering solutions. Now it’s much easier to use a lot more info, but it is much more difficult to get to the one piece of information that is helpful and necessary.
“A performance analyst or someone working in this field will need a very high psychological understanding of the player. If you really understand not only the football player but the person and how he reacts on the pitch, you have a good feeling of what he needs to perform on the highest level. This is for me the next big thing – a bit interdisciplinary between sports psychology and match and performance analysis coming much closer together to give a good overview of how to address and approach the player.”
“Each player will have an individual development database and we sit down with the analyst and give them key metrics for each position,” Briggs explains. “An analysis department can grab hold of that and code it for you. Imagine you have ten things for the No9 – five with the ball, five without. They will code these moments for you.” In other words, a series of clips offering examples from matches.
“After every two or three games, I’ll sit down with the striker, one-to-one, and say, ‘This is what you’re doing really well, this is why you are in the team: you are pressing, you are aggressive. But you can add more movement in the box, you’re a bit static, too easy to mark.’ And then you put a session on the pitch. If it’s about his movement, you might put on crossing and film the session. In short, this is where the analysis is feeding through to the training pitch.”
As for how players respond, Briggs returns to the importance of interpersonal skills. “I’ve sat in meetings with three points for a player and they may see two points and say, ‘I completely agree with you’ and for the third they’ll say, ‘I don’t think that will improve my game, so I’ll focus on the first two.’ You have to feel what they are feeling. It is alright to have the best technology, and we can talk about clips and draw on them and make them look great with telestration software, but the personal skill set is massively relevant.”
As football-viewing experiences go, it must be the next-best thing to sitting in the stadium. This is the Performance Analysis Hub at UEFA’s HQ in Nyon, Switzerland, and I am sitting here on the night of the EURO 2024 semi-final between the Netherlands and England.
The scene evokes old pictures of NASA’s mission control: rows of seats set in tiers and filled by a team of analysts, their eyes fixed on events unfolding on the large screens at the front of the room. Here, far from the heat and emotion of the stadium in Dortmund, the analysts can view the action from four different angles, with the biggest screen offering the so-called coaching feed – the widest, ‘tactical’ angle.
Throughout the game, frequent insights are sent through by a member of UEFA’s technical observer group, an experienced coach watching in the stadium. To supplement what the eyes can see, here in the hub the analysts have access to live tracking and event data. Studies have shown that the human mind struggles to recall every event from a sporting occasion where key moments can shape perceptions. Hence this marriage of coaches and analysts to ensure no detail is missed.
The same process will take place during the coming Champions League season, with UEFA’s approach to assessing tactical trends a reflection of the importance of data analytics across the football industry today.
Every big club now has a team of analysts and their support is far-reaching. We hear about ‘Moneyball’ and a data-led strategy to transfers, but, as a starting point, just consider their work on a matchday alone. Clubs will typically have two analysts live-coding the action from high in the stand – identifying and collating the main tactical themes as the game is played – while the head analyst, sat with them, is connected to the dugout and communicates observations before going down to the dressing room at half-time and full time.
A detailed explanation of the process comes from Aaron Briggs, who spent two seasons as Pep Guardiola’s senior first-team performance analyst at Manchester City before graduating to assistant-coach roles with Monaco and Wolfsburg. “In every dugout, you’ll see someone with a headpiece in or earbuds and they’ll be linked to a tactical analyst in the stand,” says Briggs, now an elite development coach at Liverpool. “With the changes in the rules [permitting laptops], you have the wide angle on the bench also. I see something with my eyes and go and cross-check it, as it runs seven or eight seconds behind.
“The side of the pitch is not the best place to view the game. Even for the best coaches, with the half of the pitch that’s furthest away, it can be hard to see what’s going on. Someone in the stands has a better view and is ‘cold’ as they’re not involved in the emotion of the game.”
Hence the significance of the analyst’s observations, presented from a more detached perspective, during the interval, for example. “At half-time we have a process: what is the tactical trend of the game, what has worked and what has not? We’ll feed three or four clips back.” Come the end of the match, adds Briggs, a manager will typically review the key moments before speaking – be it to players or media. “He has calmed down and watched the clips back and has more facts – such as expected goals, possessions, final-third entries, distance covered, high-sprint running. Then he can go to the media and team and transfer his message across.”
Matchday is just the tip of the iceberg. Data, as another voice puts it, breaks down each phase of the game and, when applied well, can bring a clearer understanding of what success means and how to achieve it. As such, analysts spend their time collecting footage, data and watching games and this influences training plans for the week, as well as the game plan at the end of it.
In his role as assistant coach at Monaco and, more recently, Wolfsburg, Briggs became the link between the analysis unit and coaching and playing staff, tasked with breaking down the information collected by the club’s analysts and applying it to the training pitch. Data on the opposition, for example, would be delivered in separate video and text reports and would shape match preparations.
Briggs elaborates: “This is based on five or six games of the opposition and looks at everything – tactics, team shape, individual key players, and what they do in every phase of the game: goal kick, build-up, middle third, final third and transition. If the analysis has shown they don’t high-press the goal kick, for example, I’d say we need to work on solutions against a team that sits in a compact block and looks to counter. And so, in training, we’d need to do a lot of playing against a mid-block and defending the counterattack. I’d present to the players and say, ‘Right, guys, this is how we win – we have to break down this mid-block and one way is to go round and get lots of crosses into the box.’”
For an understanding of the origins of performance analysis and data, it helps to speak to Atle Rosseland. Today the performance analysis supervisor at UEFA, Rosseland previously held roles in the Premier League, notably as first-team analyst at Burnley under Sean Dyche, and then with the English FA where he supported England’s senior men’s and women’s teams in a game and player insight role. Rosseland, who is Norwegian, names his home country’s former national-team coach Egil Olsen as a significant figure in the early application of performance analysis in football. There had already been one or two pioneers – such as Charles Reep, an RAF accountant-turned-coach who collected over 3,000 instances of event data manually at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden – yet Olsen, who led Norway to the World Cup finals in 1994, played a key role.
A professor at the Norwegian University of Sports Science, Olsen helped to develop “the first performance analysis tool on the market, Interplay, which allowed him to tag a game. He was using it with that team, who were ranked second in the FIFA ranking after USA ’94. They were the first to use it. It was driven by research grants, postgrad and PhD students – not full-time employees with governing bodies!
“They collected a lot of info around transitions. Egil Olsen played a 5-4-1 in a very strict zonal defence system. Olsen’s philosophy was based around a good zonal defence, direct vertical play against an organised opponent and quick counter-attacks which he defined as ‘breakdown’. They collected the data after the game and it was presented to all the players on matchday minus one. He would grade all the actions of every player and work out the average to give each an individual score, from one to six, based on the analysis. That was presented to each player in front of everybody in the room.”
With the advent of the internet, the Leeds-based Prozone became a “game-changer” in performance analysis at the end of the 1990s, adds Rosseland. “Prozone installed six tracking cameras to see how far players ran. They collected event data and physical data. A courier had to drive the data to you from Leeds and you got a disk two days after the game.”
By the start of the 2000s, Manchester United brought in a Prozone performance analyst, Simon Wells, who became the club’s first analyst. Arsenal did the same in 2009 when Ben Knapper, now sporting director at Norwich City, was recruited from Prozone as a first-team analyst supporting Arsène Wenger.
Christofer Clemens, today head of scouting match analysis and diagnosis with the German FA (DFB), remembers those days as he was then working for Amisco, a rival data provider from France, later bought by Prozone (today they operate together as Stats Perform). Clemens was a former student of Olsen in Norway, and his role was to seek new clients around Europe. “One of my first clients was Ralf Rangnick in Stuttgart, who had a good understanding of how to use it in a very physical approach – that is, the use of data in respect of physical workload.”
Clemens later set up the data analysis unit at the DFB, helping national coach Joachim Löw plan Germany’s FIFA World Cup triumph in 2014. As one of two analysts with the squad in Brazil, he would log data during games and use it for separate debriefs for both coaching staff and players after each match, as well as for subsequent meetings on the next opponents.
He gives the example of his work ahead of the stunning 7-1 semi-final win over Brazil. “We used some information to give a general overview of where we were in terms of our work rate, our physicality, our general way of executing things. Then we were asking, ‘What do we need for our next game and where do we have weaknesses to address?’ We tried to give the coach an idea where to spend the next two or three days in highlighting things to our players.”
The use of video clips was key to getting the message across. “In intense situations, with limited time, it can be easier just to show a clip and explain what you want and the challenges,” Clemens says, highlighting the need to “to narrow it down to the two or three important pieces of info”.
This point on interpreting the data takes us to the question of what comes next. Rosseland, recalling his first-team analyst days at Burnley, explains: “Since I started full time ten years ago, there has been a significant increase of data. We have entered the video and data interrogation phase. You see the coach-analyst coming into the game and to be a coach-analyst you have to have a Pro Licence. Their role is to translate information and data from the video room onto the training pitch.
“We’re also now in an era where teams want data which aligns to the coach’s model and you don’t find that data with a third party. So Everton would like data that would correspond to Sean Dyche’s philosophy, for example. It is bespoke so you either need to code it manually or ask, ‘How do you automate the data?’ Now information has to be provided so quickly, so we’re going into this automation phase. That info has to be fed live to the coaches and to do that you need automation. You need to use the tracking data you get and also take in the live-event data and merge the two and for that you need data engineers. The data analysts model it so you can get the data you want so you can feed it back at half-time and full time.”
To highlight the futuristic feel of performance analysis in the here and now, Rosseland and his team use AI to receive data more quickly. For example, the software they use can produce average position maps based on event and tracking data – and delivers these in real time.
Yet as the technology gets ever more sophisticated, these experts all agree that soft skills – interacting and communicating effectively with the team – remain vital, not least for transferring information to players. Personal connections are crucial. “It is really important how you connect with the players and I always give feedback one-to-one,” Briggs explains. “In a team setting, not many modern players will raise their hands and speak. When it’s one-to-one, they’ll open up more. How you connect with a person is still massively relevant in today’s game. We’ll have a conversation and then show the clip. Your primary option must be to connect as a human being.”
Over in Germany, Clemens concurs: “It is not about the skills on a computer and how to understand data – still the biggest skill of a really good analyst is knowing what not to say and how to select the important info from the unimportant info. That means you’re part of the coaching staff and you have to understand the coach and the situation. Data analysts are important to give a holistic view, but you must understand the game from a player or coach perspective and not just deliver facts without delivering solutions. Now it’s much easier to use a lot more info, but it is much more difficult to get to the one piece of information that is helpful and necessary.
“A performance analyst or someone working in this field will need a very high psychological understanding of the player. If you really understand not only the football player but the person and how he reacts on the pitch, you have a good feeling of what he needs to perform on the highest level. This is for me the next big thing – a bit interdisciplinary between sports psychology and match and performance analysis coming much closer together to give a good overview of how to address and approach the player.”
“Each player will have an individual development database and we sit down with the analyst and give them key metrics for each position,” Briggs explains. “An analysis department can grab hold of that and code it for you. Imagine you have ten things for the No9 – five with the ball, five without. They will code these moments for you.” In other words, a series of clips offering examples from matches.
“After every two or three games, I’ll sit down with the striker, one-to-one, and say, ‘This is what you’re doing really well, this is why you are in the team: you are pressing, you are aggressive. But you can add more movement in the box, you’re a bit static, too easy to mark.’ And then you put a session on the pitch. If it’s about his movement, you might put on crossing and film the session. In short, this is where the analysis is feeding through to the training pitch.”
As for how players respond, Briggs returns to the importance of interpersonal skills. “I’ve sat in meetings with three points for a player and they may see two points and say, ‘I completely agree with you’ and for the third they’ll say, ‘I don’t think that will improve my game, so I’ll focus on the first two.’ You have to feel what they are feeling. It is alright to have the best technology, and we can talk about clips and draw on them and make them look great with telestration software, but the personal skill set is massively relevant.”
