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 Siddharth Ramsundar:
Here is Siddharth Ramsundar:
How did your first opportunity in football come about?
My first opportunity, in a more general sense, was self-created, when I started my blog tacticalfouling.com. I started it when I was just 14, obsessed with the tactical side of the sport, so I could 'analyze' Real Madrid's 3-1 win over Barcelona in October 2014.
My first true opportunity to work in football came during my senior year of high school (Fall 2017), as an assistant coach for my school team.
What attracted you to analytics?
Part of it was just intuition. Dating back to my first few games of FIFA as a 12 year old - which helped immerse me into the world of football - I would look at shot totals after games to see if I had created enough chances. Even if I lost, I felt forcing the opposition goalkeeper into a lot of saves and taking shots close to goal would pay off in the long term, much to the amusement of my friends at the time.
A more formal introduction came after I created my twitter account during Euro 2016. I started my account to share content and interact with other creators, inadvertently coming across a lot of public analytics work. The Double Pivot Pod and Michael Caley’s expected goals explanations were fascinating. Moneyball is also one of my favorite books of all time because it illustrates the limitations of the human mind, and the benefits of exploiting market inefficiencies.
Having been introduced to analytics so early on in my footballing education, I see the ‘analytics or eye test’ discussion as a false dichotomy. I'm always going to use both to draw conclusions. They're both just different ways of quantifying what we see. Broadly speaking, I trust the analytics for large aggregates and to paint a vague picture of a player/team. Nuance - which is equally crucial - requires the eye test.
Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?
Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?
The concepts of tactical fouling, and diving, intrigued me at first. As a Real Madrid fan at the start of the decade, my focus was on how Jose Mourinho's physical, counterattacking style contrasting Guardiola’s tiki-taka. Mourinho would instruct his players to foul in certain situations to upset Barcelona’s tempo. And, of course, Barcelona's players were notorious for exaggerating contact. I loved the competitiveness, and the idea that fouling and simulation were not just superficial elements of the game, but necessary elements of their strategies. Football felt like a true battle with big stakes.
Who/what is the player/concept you "missed" on? What did you learn from it?
I’m always learning, so I feel like I missed on a lot of things in the past, and will feel the same way about my understanding of many concepts/players today.
On a simple level: I used to be averse to the idea of offensive full backs. I used to laugh at Dani Alves' runs forward, wondering why he would leave so much space behind him. Now, I'm a huge proponent of playing full backs high and wide. I started changing especially around the April 2015 Clasico that Barcelona won 2-1. The game featured the 4 best inverted wingers in the world at the time: Ronaldo (though his dribbling started slowing down), Bale, Messi and Neymar. But none of them were particularly effective relative to the fullbacks, and if anything I noticed that Marcelo and Alves' tendency to push up helped their team retain the ball and effectively deny the wingers opportunities.
Of course, watching Marcelo destroy matchup after matchup in his prime - particularly in the Champions League - has had a huge effect in this regard as well.
Something else I was wrong about was Alvaro Morata’s ability to lead the line at a big club. I was very bullish on him when left Real Madrid. This is too long to summarize here, but I wrote (https://tacticalfouling.com/
If you could start over what skill would you build on first?
I’d say the skill I would’ve built first, if you can call it that, is my internal drive and discipline. I would've spent more time analyzing games, reading analysis, and just going through trial and error from a younger age. I could have had a larger body of work right now. My mindset is also why I never learned enough python/coding at a young age, and that’s a useful skill to have in data science.
Do you see player development as more of an art or a science? Is development on the club or the player? Why?
Do you see player development as more of an art or a science? Is development on the club or the player? Why?
I think player development is a science, in that all art can be reduced to a form of science as well. Oftentimes what we describe as art is really another level of intuitive thinking that we can’t explicitly quantify yet. But I believe it is just as real.
What I would describe as ‘art’ or ‘intuitive science’ in this case is the psychology behind motivation. Everyone’s personality is different, and they all respond to different styles of leadership and coaching.
In terms of mindset, I think the unifying theme is that all great, successful players are die-hard competitors. They want to absolute destroy the opposition out on the pitch, and have an internal fire pushing them on. That’s what allows them to work so hard on their craft, it pushes them to put hours and hours of discomforting work in to grow. The challenge is convincing a player to put themself through all that discomfort, and creating that mentality. Once they have it, the player alone will drive themselves to greatness.
Some players have that mentality from a young age, especially those coming from poverty. LeBron James, for example, talks about how he had that desire to be great drilled into him by middle school. Those born in discomfort will always be willing to embrace more because they realize it helps them grow.
Other players can have it coached into them. This is where the club and coaching staff are responsible - if they know what buttons to push, they can help build a player’s character and light their inner fire. The challenge is pushing young players without discouraging them or burning them out, which requires an intuitive grasp of psychology.
This quote from Trent Alexander Arnold on his youth coaches stood out for me:
“Alex and Critch were just hammering me every day. If I made a mistake they would laugh. They would stop training and make the best player go one on one with me. If he got past me everyone would cheer. They were putting me in a harsh environment to try and better me and make sure I was ready to make that step up.”
What is your favorite sports moment? Why?
LeBron James’ 51 point performance in game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals. That is probably the single greatest sporting performance I’ve ever seen. It felt like he had mastered the sport. His control over the game was unparalleled. Watching that was a psychedelic experience.
The performance was so good it led Steve Kerr, head coach of the opposing Golden State Warriors that night, who also played on the legendary Bulls teams of the 90s, to declare that LeBron was “playing basketball at a level that I’m not sure anyone’s ever seen before when you consider everything he’s doing.”
What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?
Mentality and preparation wise I’m heavily inspired by LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kobe Bryant. I know the latter two have blemishes on their record, but I look up to them heavily strictly in terms of preparation and dedication to their craft. They all combine(d) incredible work ethic with great creativity (seeking marginal gains in every way possible), and I relate in many ways.
On another level, the coach that inspires me heavily is Diego Simeone. His achievements in the Champions League knockout stages from 2014-2020 are clear evidence that there are multiple ways to win in football. He helped demonstrate some of the things that drew me to football in the first place: that excellent defensive organization can go a long way, and that resource/talent deficits can be overcome through sheer willpower. It’s a shame that domestic leagues are all about hammering teams with a resource disadvantage, whereas knockout ties can be won through attrition. For me, considering the scarce resources he had to work with, Simeone might be the coach of the decade.
Jose Mourinho was very similar as well. His philosophy ahead of the Inter-Barca tie in 2010, as described by Patrick Viera, resonates heavily with me: “Sometimes you have to accept that you are playing against a better team. The better team, yes, but not meaning the winning team.”
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into media/analytics?
The first piece of advise I’d give them is to be clear about: their goals/aspirations, how they’d like to grow their resume, as well as the amount of time they can put into football. Personally, being a fan and working in this field to make a living are not the same thing. The former is a fun pastime, and requires no critical thinking skills, whereas the latter requires a degree of seriousness.
And that leads me to my second point, I would advise them to limit their use of twitter. Twitter is only a good place if you follow people who are serious about their work. There are way too many people who have accounts simply for the sake of casual debate, or to ‘stan’ their favorite player or team. A little fandom is obviously fine, but the amount of discourse that is polarized and disingenuous is remarkable.
Furthermore, a shocking number of intelligent people I follow use twitter as a social outlet, and rationalize this usage for other reasons. Twitter was designed to hack your brain like a drug, the constant scrolling releases dopamine; especially once you build your following, I urge anyone reading this to channel their tweets into articles or content. Being online all day is neither normal nor healthy, no matter what your timeline makes it seem like.
What is your favorite app/tool to use (for fun!)?
I used to enjoy using fourfourtwo’s stats zone app, which had a lot of cool data and visuals to look at for individual games. Nowadays I find that basketball statistics are more contextualized and superior to publicly available football stats, so I scroll through those for fun more often. I only have access to certain statistics, but Ben Taylor (Thinking Basketball) and the Basketball Reference (bballref) are incredible sources.
What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst? Why?
My study of physics and consciousness. I’m a physics major at school and that is my primary discipline, football is relatively speaking just a hobby. Physics is much more difficult to understand than sports. That contrast in difficulty is what helps me a lot, because I do have to use a lot of similar critical thinking skills as a sport analyst, just at a much lower level.
