11 Questions with @danzn1

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football scouting journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is @danzn1:

How did your first opportunity in football come about?

I have not done any work in football, it still is purely a hobby for me.

I did have a few people approach me though and I think the main draw were my visualizations and analyses I post on Twitter and sometimes blog about.

What attracted you to scouting/analytics?

I have always been an analytical person, played football when growing up, and at some point started getting back into watching more games. I had someone at a bar refer Spielverlagerung to me. Until then I had not come into contact with structured analysis of football at all, so I was eager to find out more about a bit. Some time later I read about Midtjylland, Ted Knutson and his blog Statsbomb and slowly started reading up and dabbling a little in programming myself.

What attracted me most was that I could just jump in and had to learn new things. Football analytics is a great avenue to learn about programming, statistics and data visualization.

Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?

I’m not sure I found anything. It is exciting to parse through data and find a player whose statistics all light up on the screen in front of you. How those players develop is often the real question though.

That is why I am very curious about how skills transfer between different contexts, teams and leagues for example. I imagine one of the most important challenges for clubs to be finding players who can already or will be able to play at a clubs level but who have not yet proven themselves there.

Who/what is the player/concept you "missed" on? What did you learn from it?

I can’t think of anything concrete, but there is so much I don’t know.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

I would start out with a basic understanding of stats and data visualization and learn to program. That way you can always find little projects to work on with the data that is available and while doing so produce some graphics about things you find interesting that you can share.

I would also form the habit of abstracting my code into functions and start composing my code into modules and packages earlier, so it’s all reusable. That’s something I didn’t do enough for a long time.

Do you see player development as more of an art or a science?

I can only speak of the stats and scouting side. That I see it as parts of both.

On the data side, at this point it is probably also more art than one would think. Do you know which stats are stable and meaningful? How can we estimate where a player will be in 1-2 years? How well will a player adapt to a tougher league, or perform on another team?

I think you will have try to combine the knowledge gained from scouting and the stats with an idea of how factors like the one mentioned may impact performance in a different context.

With the advancement of more advanced statistical models it is definitely getting more sciency though.

What is your favorite sports moment? Why?

Celebrating a goal/a win as a fan doesn’t lose its appeal.

What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?

Anyone who works hard and continually strives to get better at what he does.

Apart from that, I do respect Jürgen Klopp a lot, not only for his football prowess, but particularly because he combines that with authenticity, an open mindset and great motivational and people skills.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into scouting/analytics?

Just go for it. Start putting yourself out there, learn to program, start a blog. Unlike a couple years ago there are a lot more resources available to get started today.

It is a great hobby to learn things. Treat it as such, who knows what may develop from there.

What is your favorite app/tool to use (for work or fun)?

I do my work in python and love it, because once you create a visualization or an analysis framework, you can automate (most of) it easily.

What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst/scout? Why?

Having played competitive card games for the better part of my life is something that honed my thinking and pattern recognition. It taught me to think more in terms of probabilities, how likely various outcomes are and the value of them. It taught me not to be as results oriented. In the short term you can be rewarded even if you make mistakes and you can lose even though you did the best you could. Over the long term though, having good processes is key in maximizing your chances of success, whatever you do.