The Nowhere Men (18 page)

‘I have to ask myself: can I measure my input? I have to relate to executives, coaches, scouts and the manager. Analysts have to be multi-lingual, in performance terms. It is essential to be flexible, and to be aware of who you are addressing. To get these guys onside, to be able to share your message, you have to appreciate the importance of their expert eye and their intuition. Any work you do has to reflect the club’s fundamental philosophy, and contribute to the overbearing aim, of performing on the pitch.

‘I am fortunate because the boss is used to my type of stuff. He has an economics degree. He is comfortable around numbers. He believes everything is measurable. He challenges me, pushes me, forces me to move forward. The key thing is never to be happy with what you are doing. The game is so fast paced, and it is my job to say, “can we do this?” You have to continually push on. That takes a lot of energy, and you have to be passionate about what you do.

‘The coaches are so emotionally attached to their jobs. The boss expects emotionally driven debate, but wants to combine it with something tangible, like an objective analytical framework. I sometimes watch matches back with him. It is an unbelievable experience. He will occasionally spot something, and admit, “I didn’t see it like that at the time.” It is so interesting to see how perceptions can change.

‘Recruitment is a big area of influence. If clubs are spending vast sums, they have to be able to objectively support their investment decisions. Guys like me are the iPad, laptop generation. Those in their sixties, like many of the flat cap scouts, do not find it normal to use technology. It is easy to scare people if you are not careful. When you get to that stage it is a tough battle.’

The technology is impressive, and best studied in Knapper’s more natural environment, a Football & Science conference in London’s Docklands, organised by Jon Goodman, the former Wimbledon striker whose performance consultancy, Think Fitness, is used by leading clubs and players. I was there to moderate the keynote debate, but was intrigued by the breadth and simplicity of the Arsenal analyst’s work.

Knapper split the screen, to illustrate an extract from Arsenal’s 2–1 defeat of Barcelona in February 2011, so that match footage could be compared to an animated view. Basic information, such as the distance between central defenders, and player movement at set pieces, acquired an additional dimension. Intriguingly, young players, emerging in the academy, can be benchmarked against stellar players, such as Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshere. Walcott, in particular, seeks to study his numbers; others are more comfortable being assessed in traditional peer groups, like a back four. Such feedback, overlaid with video from the performance itself, is increasingly being downloaded on to a player’s iPad or phone.

Much of the data is deemed too sensitive to be in the public domain. Wenger, for instance, is extremely protective of physical data, used to determine levels of fitness and effectiveness. A player in the red zone, for example, is deemed to be suffering from cumulative fatigue. His ‘high intensity output’, his ability to reach a speed threshold of seven metres per second, is regarded with the reverence afforded holy writ. There are around 3,000 so-called ‘match events’, which can be distilled into movements, collated every tenth of a second. It can never be an exact science, because of the human element, and the major issue in recruitment, according to James Smith, Head of Technical Scouting at Everton, is the quality of the data:

‘We’re at the point where we’re teetering on the brink. At the moment, the stats are not quite insightful enough. Leon Britton at Swansea and his one hundred per cent pass completion rate is a great example. It doesn’t tell you anything. Nine or ten years ago, when I first saw Prozone, I thought: wow, that’s incredible. You can tell me how many headers he’s won? Tell me how many tackles he won? Wow. But now, that doesn’t really mean anything. What I need to know is how many headers he won in the opposition penalty area, how many headers he won in the attacking third. How many does he win from set pieces? How many does he win from set pieces in his own box? How many of them were contested? How many of them lead to a goal attempt? We need depth of data.

‘The data is sold on its objectivity. It’s fact. But how is it interpreted? An example: you play the ball back to your full back and he’s been told that we’re going to clip it into the channel, whenever possible. So he does that, and the opposition full back comes across and heads it out for a throw-in. Now in data world, that’s an incomplete pass, because the opposition won it. In the real world, the real football world, we’ve just won a throw-in in the opposition’s final third. So the full back has done exactly what we wanted him to do. Well done, son. That’s where the people using the information have got to be intelligent enough to understand what they’re looking at, and understand its limitations. The crux of the role in many ways is about information. How you get information, how you manage it and how you use it.’

There’s gold in them there geeks. Some clubs buy raw data and attempt to develop their own mathematical models. Others use external analysts to initiate the recruitment process. This gives a suspicious, oversensitive or simply lazy manager the comfort blanket of a list of suggested targets, tailored to his needs. Companies such as Prozone and OptaPro seek to assist the process of comparison and cross-checking, which precedes the stampede of a transfer window. They drill down into the quality of passing and possession; plot goals against probability and record a player’s touch and stamina.

Prozone’s Recruiter programme offers clubs access to detailed biographical and technical information on more than 80,000 players worldwide. Scout7, the English company which bills itself as ‘professional football’s global leader in the provision of scouting, recruitment, player administration and management solutions’, works with 150 major clubs, and has a database of 130,000 players, in 130 nations. It also provides a video scouting package, containing 1600 matches a month, drawn from 126 Leagues across 60 countries. Suddenly, an old school scout’s contacts book looks dog-eared, and as relevant as a quill.

Jack Dodd, a Scout7 analyst who specialises in youth recruitment, has seen the weaknesses of the system at first hand: ‘Scientific principle can make a difference, even on quite a basic level, but some clubs still judge a twelve-year-old right back by the same criteria by which they judge an eighteen-year-old striker. For want of a better word, it is the lazy part of the football industry. There’s something similar in the way some miss the point about
Moneyball
. That was not just about the use of statistics. It was about the use of statistics no one had previously looked at properly. It was about finding value in things people didn’t value.’

The profit motive fuels change, and invites extremes of jargon. Prozone’s business development director Blake Wooster, whose clients include Manchester United and Real Madrid, espouses the concept of Player Archaeology. This involves retrospective longitudinal research, which attempts to place pivotal moments in a footballer’s development into perspective. Manchester City’s James Milner, whose transient career has involved five clubs since his emergence at Leeds as a 16-year-old winger, is deemed to be the perfect specimen.

Wooster’s analysts distilled Milner’s natural characteristics, such as showing for the ball, crossing, passing and shooting, into a single statistic, Offensive Efficiency. This, in short, was calculated on the number of successful passes, crosses and shots for every pass he received. Two patterns of behaviour stood out. It took time for him to adapt to a new team’s playing style, and he often flourished after a loan spell, most pertinently when he spent a season at Aston Villa, from Newcastle, in 2005–06.

Wooster admits: ‘Of course, the key is not necessarily what happened, but why it happened. We can all speculate on why Milner’s performances improved, and data doesn’t provide all the answers, but it’s fascinating to use the Player Archaeology as a platform to go back in time and attempt to understand the underlying factors behind performance development. More importantly, if we can consistently identify success patterns, then we can endeavour to replicate the things that worked and avoid the things that didn’t.’

True Believers recoil, and bemoan the commercialisation of their community. The sports analytics movement has been largely driven by bloggers and statisticians who have the principled defiance of struggling poets entombed in an attic. Money means more to them in an equation than in a bank account. They disseminate knowledge through cyberspace, on online forums and in research papers. They argue that the reticence of Premier League clubs to offer more than generalities in their sphere of interest ignores the benefits of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ approach, which has enabled baseball and basketball to develop advanced analytical frameworks.

Ironically, Manchester City, the club backed by unfathomable wealth, best understands the nuances of the process. Gavin Fleig, their head of performance analysis, became the new hero of the Sabermetric Revolution when he persuaded Opta to allow him to share data from the 2011–2012 season, which was coming to a close.

He oversees a team of ten analysts. Four are employed to dissect the performances of the first team. The rest monitor age group squads, from the Under 21 elite development group down to the under 9s. They all operate from what was once a small interview room on the first floor of City’s Carrington training complex. The place where such managers as Kevin Keegan, Stuart Pearce and Sven-Goran Eriksson would be within armpit-sniffing reach of sweaty scribblers has been extended to include docking stations, for players to assess the minutiae of their performance. Those undergoing rehabilitation programmes can watch motivational personal highlight packages.

Fleig’s manifesto, best expressed in an interview in the
Guardian
in August 2012, was heartfelt, unexpected and a potential game changer: ‘Bill James kick-started the analytics revolution in baseball. That made a real difference and has become integrated in that sport. Somewhere in the world there is football’s Bill James, who has all the skills and wants to use them but hasn’t got the data. We want to help find that Bill James, not necessarily for Manchester City but for the benefit of analytics in football. I don’t want to be at another analytics conference in five years’ time talking to people who would love to analyse the data but cannot develop their own concepts because all the data is not publicly available.

‘The responsibility for developing analytics has always tended to fall on the clubs and that hasn’t really changed, even as the community of statisticians, bloggers and students who are focusing on performances and analytics has grown dramatically. Bill James didn’t work for a club. He was a statistician with a normal job outside of the sport but he was able to get hold of the data because it was made publicly available by the broadcasters and the league itself. There is a data culture in America. There isn’t a data culture in the UK, although we are getting there.

‘The whole reason for putting this data out there is to open the doors. The data has value, previously it has been kept in-house and behind guarded doors, but there is now a recognition that clubs need to help this space develop. There are a lot of people out there blogging and doing their own research and they can do a lot more with this data. I hope it will have a big impact on those who want to do research. It might just be the armchair enthusiast. If the worst it does is show a few people that there are different ways of looking at a player’s performance, then great. If it helps universities and gets the blogging world talking and coming up with fantastic ways of modelling performance, that is what we want. We want to engage with them.’

Reports of
Moneyball
’s demise in English football had apparently been exaggerated. But, elsewhere, on the dog days of another season, those players beyond the influence and imagination of keyboard dreamers were playing for their lives.

IT WAS JUST
another day in purgatory. The Shrewsbury Town team arrived at Prenton Park in a rust-streaked transit van, borrowed from the Centre of Excellence. The remnants of breakfast, sandwich cartons, cereal bar wrappers and plastic juice bottles, littered the footwells. The collection of strangers, strugglers and condemned men, obliged to represent Tranmere Rovers in a game that officially did not exist, were left to their own devices.

Such matches, played behind closed doors and off limits even to scouts, are football’s equivalent of a visit to the Tidy Tip. Professional footballers, items which were once shiny, new and cherished, were being recycled. Of the 13 players used by Tranmere in a 2–0 defeat watched only by manager Ronnie Moore, his coaching staff, chief scout Dave Philpotts and myself, only defender Michael Kay would be around for the 2012–13 season.

Six would be released immediately. The lucky ones would be scattered like seeds on the wind, and find clubs as disparate as Inverness Caledonian Thistle, Wrexham and 1461 Trabzon Karadenizspor, a feeder club in the Turkish First Division. The unlucky ones were left in limbo. Martin Devaney, a typical victim of football’s recession, would play a single Irish League game for Bohemians, endure an unsuccessful trial at Portsmouth, and would still be searching for employment in the January 2013 transfer window.

Perhaps the veteran winger, and those around him, should have paid more attention to an abandoned banner which fluttered at the back of a deserted terrace. It read: ‘Where there is faith, there is light and strength.’ On this mid-May morning in 2012, on a hard pitch scarred by a long season, all three were in short supply. Philpotts, a kindly man despite the harshness of his trade, had seen it all before, in the 16 years he had been searching for bargains on behalf of Merseyside’s traditional second club.

We met in the club shop, and paused in an alcove used by groundsman Andy Quayle, close to the dressing rooms. They count the tea bags at Tranmere; these were jumbo-sized, triangular and had to be stretched to infuse four cups. We took the brew, milky and surprisingly strong, upstairs and along a narrow carpeted corridor. Philpotts fumbled with his keys in the darkness before unlocking and furling a metal grille which blocked the entrance to the directors’ box. He was at ease, at home.