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 Joost van der Leij, football philosopher at Football Philosophy and founder of Football Behavior Management.
How did your first opportunity in football come about?
In the summer of 2016 I was asked by someone working for Hannover 96 whether I could improve their players with hypnosis. Hannover was just regulated, but they felt they had reasonable good players for the Bundesliga, but that it somehow didn't translate to victories on the pitch. Although I agreed to do this, I also wanted to develop a statistical model so we could actually measure whether their players were becoming better. At the same time, I was watching the European Championship that summer. While watching those games, it dawned on me: what clubs really want to know about players is only one thing: does a player strengthen my team or not. So I developed a Bayesian statistical model to calculate that probability. That seemed to work quite well. As a way of testing my Bayesian player model, I also developed a Bayesian match model that would give the probabilities of the favorite or the underdog winning, or a draw.
The match model turned out to come up with quite nice insights. In the semifinal between France and Germany, I saw in the first half that Germany was right to attack over their right flank. Although, there was a strong French left back, he was weaker than the right back. Germany was unable to penetrate the French defense in the first half. So one could see that during the break, the manager had instructed the team to attack over their left flank. My model predicted that this would be even more futile. That turned out to be correct as France won.
Then in the final, my model unlike the bookmakers and pundits on TV, predicted that Portugal was the favorite to win the European Championship, rather than France. When Ronaldo was injured and had to leave the pitch, my model predicted that this would strengthen Portugal, as Ronaldo was not playing at his best during the tournament. Then Portugal won.
Those two events made it that I decided to see whether we could make in the world of football.
What attracted you to scouting/analytics?
In 2012 I fell in love with statistics. I am an academic philosophers by profession. In 2012 I discovered the subjective Bayesian philosophy of professor Bruno de Finetti. Ever since I have been writing about subjective Bayesian statistics and creating Bayesian models. So when the opportunity was there to do the same in football, I started doing football analysis.
Who is the first player you "found"? What caught your eye?
Our first big hit player is Adrián Dalmau. We had an assignment from Heracles to find an unknown Spanish striker. Willem II had Fran Sol and Heracles wondered how it was possible that Willem II had Fran Sol and Heracles didn't. So our assignment was to find a Spanish striker for Heracles who would transfer to Heracles without any transfer fees being paid. Adrián Dalmau made our shortlist. Heracles liked him. The technical director flew to Spain to see him play and a deal was struck. Adrián Dalmau then became the #3 top scoring striker in the Dutch Eredivisie. In May 2018 we predicted that Adrián Dalmau would be worth 1.75 million in transfer fee in one year. In the summer of 2019 Heracles transferred Adrián Dalmau to FC Utrecht for 700K and Cyriel Dessers, a striker who is estimated to be worth 1 million.
Who is the player you "missed" on? What did you learn from it?
We constantly miss players. We don't mind. In fact we actively chose to do so. All data is subjective. That means that all data either overestimates a player, or underestimates a player. We choose to always underestimate players. What this means is that if a player does well in our FBM statistics, he is likely to do even better. The reason why we want to underestimate players, is that the risks in underestimating and overestimating are asynchronously. Overestimating a player leads to real monetary damage, whereas underestimating only leads to a hurt ego.
If you could start over what skill would you build on first?
Working out how to convince decision makers at clubs to do what is actually rational rather than what is the safest for their career.
Do you see player development as more of an art or a science?
Given that player development is not scientific at all, it is an art and not a science. If people claim it is scientific, they turn player development in a pseudoscience. At best player development is a protoscience, a precursor to a, yet to be developed, science of player development.
What is your favorite sports moment? Why?
Training with the Dutch national volleyball team U18 when I was 17 years and 51 weeks old. It was a very short adventure because I became too old and just wasn't good enough to play for the national team. Yet, I got an orange jersey and that is still my favorite sports moment.
What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?
I really like St. Pauli in the Bundesliga 2. I like them because they are such an odd club with their leftwing fans and policies.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into scouting/analytics?
It is more about who you know than what you know.
What is your favorite app/tool to use (for work or fun)?
I really like the apps we developed for Football Behavior Management. We have one app for analysts to use to judge players. Then we have a second app to find players who do well in our proprietary FBM statistics. And a third app to predict the outcomes of matches. That third app is also very handy as clubs can immediately see what how a potential signing would do in terms of dominance during an upcoming match and the chances to score he will create.
What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst/scout? Why?
It is a long list of the stuff we use to change people behaviors:
(1) Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T). CB5T shows you how your personality and evolutionary behavioral patterns are produced by the biological structure of your brain. Knowing the CB5T type of a player helps you understand how to influence him, how he will be part of the group dynamic of the team and how he will interact with the staff.
(2) Hypnosis for classical conditioning. Our brain creates probabilistic relationships between patterns in sense data. If certain sense data triggers negative patterns through association then hypnosis works best to break these associations. About one 1 in 3 players suffer from emotional distress and learning to deal with that helps them a lot.
(3) Operant conditioning. Our brain also creates probabilistic relations between our behavior and what our behavior gets us. A lot of unwanted behavior by players can be corrected through operant conditioning.
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