9 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 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:

What is your first memory of football?

Got a picture of my dad holding me up by the arms and kicking a football before I can walk!

What attracted you to data and scouting? What’s more intriguing now, refining your processes and acumen or 'discovering' players?

Trying to understand or ‘solve’ the game of football. There are way too many known unknowns and unknown unknowns to be able to do so completely, but we can definitely do better. Being able to make better informed decisions will lead to more success.

Refining the process is way more appealing than ‘discovering’ players. You need to continuously learn and update your process to be able to make better decisions and that will  naturally lead to discovering more higher quality players. If you focus on just the players, there is a lot of luck and variance involved in discovering individual players, you won’t know how to replicate it. If you focus on improving your process, discovering more players will come as a result.

This applies to everything, focus more on the process and the result will sort itself out. The other way round doesn’t always follow.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche regarding recruitment you’ve found in this space?

Not so experienced in club recruitment, but from the outside it seems like clubs focus too much on recruiting players because they can rather than they should. Buying a plyer for a position they are already saturated in or buying a player that now blocks the path to first team for a youth player or buying a player on an expensive long contract way past his prime.

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

Learn how to learn!

What is more important domain knowledge or curiosity?

I feel like these aren’t mutually exclusive, and both are great to have. Curiosity will lead to domain knowledge but domain knowledge may lead to over-confidence and a lack of curiosity . So will go with curiosity.

What is more useful in analytics - breadth or depth of talent? Why?

Depends what your goal is and what your colleagues are good at.

If you are a large team with many other analysts, then you cover the breadth by sheer volume of analysts. Then you need the analysts to have sufficient depth to get relevant insight.

If you are a smaller team (or an individual), then depends what your goal is. If you want to get a job doing something specific, then depth is necessary. But if you are required to be a one man data team then you need to accept less depth for the requirement of breadth to at least be competent across the board.

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

I think getting Cruyff, Pep and Messi all in a room would blow anyone’s minds.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into this space?

Actively contribute to the space and keep trying! I’m still in this position myself, constantly evaluate what your qualities are and ensure they’re relevant for the role you want to get.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

Something like ‘harder you work the luckier you get’ or ‘enjoy the process and the results will come’.