According to Tom Cooper, a performance and match analyst with UEFA, another significant step forward is the type of analyst now being employed by clubs. “More and more are data scientists,” he says. “It’s not enough to have a video and provide stats: you have to interpret the stats. So you’re seeing more and more people working as analysts who are physicists and nuclear engineers.” Opta’s team, for example, includes people with PhDs in chemistry and biology.
Metrics must now measure quality, not quantity. A new one coming into vogue is possession value, as Cooper explains. “This tells you the likelihood of a certain pass leading to a goal compared with another pass. It takes into account historical data based on that location and the other players’ positioning to try, in real time, to say, ‘If you pass here you have a better likelihood of scoring than if you pass there.’ It also helps to assign credit to players who are contributing to possession but may not be recognised by more generic stats. It can tell you the percentage chance of success for a whole possession.”
Big data’s tentacles reach far and wide within football clubs. Manchester City employed their first full-time set-piece specialist in the summer, then added a set-piece analyst. Michael Edwards, sporting director at Liverpool, was initially hired as the European champions’ head analyst; now he oversees recruitment. On the latter, Cooper says that data helps clubs build positional profiles of potential signings. “Now you can analyse 1,000 games’ worth of data in an hour, rather than watch 1,000 hours of video,” he says. “If a club know the type of attributes they want for a certain position, data can easily highlight players that fit their profile.”
However, for all the virtual valleys of information now available, simplicity is important. For example, Luke Benstead, head analyst for the Belgium national team, took a less-is-more approach when creating his own focused set of metrics to make the data more meaningful for Roberto Martínez and his coaching staff. Moreover, the consensus among analysts seems to be that data must be accompanied by video footage in order for coaches to fully embrace the message.
Balsom stresses that players must be beneficiaries too: rather than looking at metrics focused on linear movement, they must be able to see their “quality of movement”. He cites the example of Leipzig playmaker Emil Forsberg’s display for Sweden against Germany at the 2018 World Cup, whereby he spent just 44 seconds on the ball. Yet, says Balsom, “he’s coming back, he’s being part of the line, he’s blocking passes. There’s so much going on without the ball and we want to give him credit.” And preferably, we might add, in a human voice – rather than that of Alexa.
