11 Questions with Ciaran Grant

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 Ciaran Grant, founder of @TLMAnalytics

How did your first opportunity in football come about?

I don’t think my first opportunity in football has actually come about yet, I currently work as a pricing analyst in home insurance. I have liked the idea of using those analytical skills with more interesting data in sports, mainly football. The one thing I’ve been told countless times about trying to get involved with football on the analytics side is to produce content and get it out there. So that’s what I’ve started to do, just got to keep doing it and hopefully those opportunities will come!

What attracted you to scouting/analytics? What’s more intriguing now names or numbers?

I think the drive is wanting to understand how things work, I studied BSc Maths and Philosophy, then MSc Data Science. Both of which develop pattern recognition and problem solving skills. Being able to apply these in a game that lots of people enjoy, myself included, was a no-brainier!

I really like the idea that football can be explained mathematically, or optimised using mathematical theorems from other areas. I’m still trying to catch up to current knowledge on this front, books like David Sumpter’s Soccermatics, Michael Cox’s The Mixer, James Tippet’s The Football Code and Christoph Biermann’s Football Hackers are all great inspirations.

The numbers are more intriguing to me, the numbers make the names!

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

I’m not sure I can claim to have ‘found’ any of the concepts I have written about.

I think what really caught my eye was Sumpter using Voronoi diagrams to try to show how space is managed at different points of the game, and who controls it. I’m having a think about ways to get more out of that concept.

I have some experience playing in defence, so my intuition and perspective of most situations begin there. Quantifying defensive actions is hard and I’m interested in seeing where that goes so I’m trying to provide potential routes.

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

I think I decided to get into football analytics just after the rise of expected stats. Expected goals and assists had just become common knowledge in the industry but not really mainstream just yet. What I did overlook was that they could be added to still, specifically by Karin Singh with expected threat (xT). This adds meaningful a value to having the ball at all parts of the pitch rather than just near the goal.

I learnt that there’s still room for concepts to evolve if you look deep enough and put enough time into it.

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

Funny enough, fresh out of university for the first time that’s exactly the question I asked someone. This was 4 years ago and they suggested Data Science and statistics. Even after a mathematical undergraduate degree I realised what I learnt was hardly practical in work as I mainly did pure maths. Data science gives you an idea of working with large sets of data and automating model builds, statistics helps with interpreting the results and how meaningful things actually are.

Do you see player development as more of an art or a science? Is development on the club or the player? Why?

I think at early ages player development is a science, you need to learn fundamentals of how to use your body and the more time you spend in effective training the better you will be. More practice = more player development = more likely to play at higher standards (+ massive element of luck). Until the player gets to the peak of their career, I feel like development is on the player as ultimately it’s up to them how hard they work when no one is watching.

A player will always have some things they’re good at and some things they’re not so good at, even at their peak, whatever level that is. Once a player gets there (it’s also hard to know you’ve reached your peak), it’s up to the player to maintain that level for as long as possible. At that point, a player can become more/less useful depending on the situation they are in, so depending on the club, manager, position they’re played in, etc. That’s where the club comes in mostly I feel.

Especially at top clubs, most of the impact a club can have on development is going to be physical, either strength or speed or skill. It’s hard to train and develop someone’s mentality or understanding without it being a joint effort on both the player and the club.

What is your favorite sports moment? Why?

Messi’s 2nd goal v Real Madrid in 2011 Champions League. Reminds me that as much as I want to put everything down to numbers and calculations, you can never account for everything. Makes football exciting!

What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?

I grew up watching Guardiola’s Barcelona and peak Messi, I don’t think anything else comes close! That was the first time I saw that football can be calculated and *almost* completed so effectively. They made everything look so simple.

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

As mentioned before, I’ve been told to create content and get it out there! You need to help employers/recruiters know what you can do.

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

Football Manager through the years I’ve probably put the most hours into, though I try not to get sucked into it these years and be more productive elsewhere.

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

In the last few years I’ve started watching and appreciating the NBA much more! The American sports seem to be much further ahead in both their data available but also the franchises seem to be much more welcoming to the ideas of analytics than we are currently in football. Look at the rise of the 3 point shot for example! Using that as an inspiration helps keep believe we’ll get there in football.