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 Ryo Nakagawara
Here is Ryo Nakagawara
What attracted you to scouting/analytics? What’s more intriguing now names or numbers?
It began more as a way for me to improve my programming skills. Nowadays it's more about having fun and learning about different players/tactics from a different point of view than what I was used to for most of my life. To learn any (programming) language you need a lot of practice but a lot of the examples and tutorials in the learning material I was using just wasn't motivating enough for me. So, I decided to just try web-scraping, cleaning, and visualizing soccer data that I could find anywhere and that's how it all began for me.
Sometimes the numbers/data show something simply watching a game can't and other times it's the complete opposite so it's never about "names or numbers" but doing due diligence on both. There's still a lot more data people can do to translate to players/coaches/general public about how impactful they can be (especially with the backlash from certain sections of the media and general public against football analytics). The more people on both sides of the spectrum interact with each other the better all of our understanding of football will be. Maybe in the near future we'll have more hybrid people who are brilliant at both the pitch-side aspect (coaching/scouting/training) and the analytics side of things!
Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?
I'm limited in what I can find with my current skills and set-up (not a lot of easy and legally web-scrapable websites for the lower tier leagues for example) so finding somebody "new" isn't something I've done. However, even for the top leagues there is occasionally a player or two that's gone under the radar or performing contrary to expectations that show up on some of the graphs that I've shared online. It's been interesting to then keep tabs on them through the season both stats-wise and watching their games more carefully!
If you could start over what skill would you build on first?
Probably writing about soccer. Recently I've been taking notes on Liverpool's games and just posting a rough post-match summary alongside my xG match visualizations. The key thing here is that I'm trying to fuse both my football stat graphs with my own tactical insights of how the players/teams played - what they did well, what they didn't do well, etc. Games usually finish 3-5AM for me so it's hard being coherent but at the same time, I have a day job, so I can't dedicate extra time to watch a game repeatedly and do a more detailed write-up. Still, writing these notes and doing a summary in a time crunch (I force myself to write something or I won't allow myself to go to bed) has been very helpful and it's something I want to keep doing in the future. Writing concisely about the numbers, tactics, and how they fit the way the game played out is something I'm slowly learning more about as I keep finding great new resources/people on Twitter and the web (Spielverlagerung, ZonalMarking, StatsBomb, Opta, BetweenThePosts, etc.).
What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?
Managers: Klopp. The way he can infect not just a team but even entire organizations is quite extraordinary. For BVB and Liverpool you can clearly see the great working environment/culture he creates.
Players: Oliver Kahn at the 2002 World Cup. Stevie G (Istanbul, 2006 FA Cup Final, that one game vs. Napoli where he came on at halftime when we were a goal down and he scored a hattrick to win the game, etc.). Shunsuke Nakamura and Hidetoshi Nakata for really paving the way for Japanese players in Europe. Their success really inspired a lot of kids and we've got players heading over to Europe from a much younger age these days.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into scouting/analytics?
I can only speak for the analytics side of things so learning a programming language. Creating good viz and analytical reports takes time but with programming you can semi-automate if not fully automate a lot of the repetitive busy work. I've said this repeatedly but this is still a hobby for me and it can't take too much of my time so in recent times I've been developing tools (workflows, RMarkdown reports, Shiny apps, R packages) to automate the data gathering and cleaning process and it saves SO much time. It's also about reproducibility which is a big thing in science in general where you want other people to be able to replicate your work. Having an analysis that is reliable, well documented (your methods and your data), and can be found to produce the same results over and over again gives you a lot more credibility as an analyst. Programming languages as well as version control tools (git) can help with a lot with that. I am a huge proponent of R but of course Python is a good language too that is used by many analysts.
What is your favorite app/tool to use (for work or fun)?
R programming language and the tidyverse (mainly {dplyr} and {ggplot2} libraries). I proudly proclaim myself to be nothing but a "ggplot2 merchant". I also really like creating my own R packages so I'm not copy-pasting the same bits of code to run analyses for different players/teams/situations. Like I said before having things organized and set in a certain workflow can really save you time and let you focus more on analyzing football than worrying about code. Recently I've been thinking about using RMarkdown to create player/team report templates as well.
What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst/scout? Why?
My current job as a analyst at an international development NGO helps with my R skills and my analytical skills. My hobby in footy analytics helps me learn new things I can use at work and vice-versa so it is a very harmonious symbiotic relationship. Focusing more on statistics and modeling are my future aims and I already have great resources for being a part of the #rstats and footy analytics community online. I was also a student in Psychology and Economics so doing a lot of analysis in those disciplines has given me some lots to think about in terms of how I can apply it to football.
On a different note I've talked a bit previously about my very multi-cultural upbringing, whenever I had to move to a new country playing football was usually the best new way I could make friends. Even so I had to adapt quite a bit to different football styles and cultures and that experience really fuels my interest in the adaptability of footballers who move across countries and different footballing environments. The "smart" teams take these issues into account but it can be a very complicated thing to analyze as people are very different and it may require a lot of digging that you may not have the resources (time and/or money) to spend. With how much more international the game has gotten it's quite clear that most clubs now have specific support staff for these kind of things which is interesting to see.
It began more as a way for me to improve my programming skills. Nowadays it's more about having fun and learning about different players/tactics from a different point of view than what I was used to for most of my life. To learn any (programming) language you need a lot of practice but a lot of the examples and tutorials in the learning material I was using just wasn't motivating enough for me. So, I decided to just try web-scraping, cleaning, and visualizing soccer data that I could find anywhere and that's how it all began for me.
Sometimes the numbers/data show something simply watching a game can't and other times it's the complete opposite so it's never about "names or numbers" but doing due diligence on both. There's still a lot more data people can do to translate to players/coaches/general public about how impactful they can be (especially with the backlash from certain sections of the media and general public against football analytics). The more people on both sides of the spectrum interact with each other the better all of our understanding of football will be. Maybe in the near future we'll have more hybrid people who are brilliant at both the pitch-side aspect (coaching/scouting/training) and the analytics side of things!
Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?
I'm limited in what I can find with my current skills and set-up (not a lot of easy and legally web-scrapable websites for the lower tier leagues for example) so finding somebody "new" isn't something I've done. However, even for the top leagues there is occasionally a player or two that's gone under the radar or performing contrary to expectations that show up on some of the graphs that I've shared online. It's been interesting to then keep tabs on them through the season both stats-wise and watching their games more carefully!
If you could start over what skill would you build on first?
Probably writing about soccer. Recently I've been taking notes on Liverpool's games and just posting a rough post-match summary alongside my xG match visualizations. The key thing here is that I'm trying to fuse both my football stat graphs with my own tactical insights of how the players/teams played - what they did well, what they didn't do well, etc. Games usually finish 3-5AM for me so it's hard being coherent but at the same time, I have a day job, so I can't dedicate extra time to watch a game repeatedly and do a more detailed write-up. Still, writing these notes and doing a summary in a time crunch (I force myself to write something or I won't allow myself to go to bed) has been very helpful and it's something I want to keep doing in the future. Writing concisely about the numbers, tactics, and how they fit the way the game played out is something I'm slowly learning more about as I keep finding great new resources/people on Twitter and the web (Spielverlagerung, ZonalMarking, StatsBomb, Opta, BetweenThePosts, etc.).
What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?
Managers: Klopp. The way he can infect not just a team but even entire organizations is quite extraordinary. For BVB and Liverpool you can clearly see the great working environment/culture he creates.
Players: Oliver Kahn at the 2002 World Cup. Stevie G (Istanbul, 2006 FA Cup Final, that one game vs. Napoli where he came on at halftime when we were a goal down and he scored a hattrick to win the game, etc.). Shunsuke Nakamura and Hidetoshi Nakata for really paving the way for Japanese players in Europe. Their success really inspired a lot of kids and we've got players heading over to Europe from a much younger age these days.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into scouting/analytics?
I can only speak for the analytics side of things so learning a programming language. Creating good viz and analytical reports takes time but with programming you can semi-automate if not fully automate a lot of the repetitive busy work. I've said this repeatedly but this is still a hobby for me and it can't take too much of my time so in recent times I've been developing tools (workflows, RMarkdown reports, Shiny apps, R packages) to automate the data gathering and cleaning process and it saves SO much time. It's also about reproducibility which is a big thing in science in general where you want other people to be able to replicate your work. Having an analysis that is reliable, well documented (your methods and your data), and can be found to produce the same results over and over again gives you a lot more credibility as an analyst. Programming languages as well as version control tools (git) can help with a lot with that. I am a huge proponent of R but of course Python is a good language too that is used by many analysts.
What is your favorite app/tool to use (for work or fun)?
R programming language and the tidyverse (mainly {dplyr} and {ggplot2} libraries). I proudly proclaim myself to be nothing but a "ggplot2 merchant". I also really like creating my own R packages so I'm not copy-pasting the same bits of code to run analyses for different players/teams/situations. Like I said before having things organized and set in a certain workflow can really save you time and let you focus more on analyzing football than worrying about code. Recently I've been thinking about using RMarkdown to create player/team report templates as well.
What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst/scout? Why?
My current job as a analyst at an international development NGO helps with my R skills and my analytical skills. My hobby in footy analytics helps me learn new things I can use at work and vice-versa so it is a very harmonious symbiotic relationship. Focusing more on statistics and modeling are my future aims and I already have great resources for being a part of the #rstats and footy analytics community online. I was also a student in Psychology and Economics so doing a lot of analysis in those disciplines has given me some lots to think about in terms of how I can apply it to football.
On a different note I've talked a bit previously about my very multi-cultural upbringing, whenever I had to move to a new country playing football was usually the best new way I could make friends. Even so I had to adapt quite a bit to different football styles and cultures and that experience really fuels my interest in the adaptability of footballers who move across countries and different footballing environments. The "smart" teams take these issues into account but it can be a very complicated thing to analyze as people are very different and it may require a lot of digging that you may not have the resources (time and/or money) to spend. With how much more international the game has gotten it's quite clear that most clubs now have specific support staff for these kind of things which is interesting to see.
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