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 Crewe Analytics:
Here is Crewe Analytics:
How did your first opportunity in football come about?
It hasn’t happened yet! I just write about my team Crewe Alexandra with an analytics perspective. Working within football would be a dream, but I’d have to be sure I was adding value first.
As I’m building my analysis skills, I’m more confident that my work could be helpful. For example, I’m working on some analysis focused on the upcoming salary cap in English Football’s League One and Two which I hope will be useful for people inside of football as well as outside.
What attracted you to scouting/analytics? What’s more intriguing now names or numbers?
The names are what I’m interested in; numbers are the best tool for finding out more about them. My big attraction to analytics is how it helps tell the story in football. So many of us are football obsessed and will hoover up any content about it, but a lot of what’s out there is quite bad. It doesn’t give the fan anything new, it doesn’t answer ‘how’ and ‘why’ things in football happen, it’s quite focused on the ‘what happened’. If you’re watching a game at the ground or on TV, a lot of journalism and content online is telling you stuff you already know. It isn’t challenging you; you aren’t learning.
As a Crewe Alexandra fan I’m fortunate that we’re had some great local journalists over the years, like Peter Morse, who help tell the story of the team and do give the fans some more insight. But as a small club, you have limited coverage. So, the attraction for me was trying to dig deeper into my team and write stuff that would interest Crewe fans and fans of Lower League football. I’ve had great feedback from the football analytics community which I’m thankful for and has given me lots to think about, but they weren’t my focus initially.
Who/what is the first player/concept you "found"? What caught your eye?
I can’t claim to have found anything. There have been a few players throughout the years that I’ve seen early in their careers and thought ‘he’s quite special’. From a Crewe perspective the obvious one is Nick Powell who was running our games at the age of 17 and just popped out – everyone in the crowd knew it, it’s just a shame that the crowds were a few thousand people rather than 50,000.
At other clubs I’d say Aaron Wan-Bissaka stands out. I happened to be watching a lot of Crystal Palace when he first broke through, and I just thought his skillset was so unique. His defensive skills were so polished, he just looked unflustered. I think increasingly when I look at player’s play or their data I’m thinking “what can they do that others can’t?” rather than “are they any good?” which is a more positive mentality but it’s also more useful from an analysis perspective. Rare skills make you stand out.
Concepts on the whole interest me more though. Specifically, how do you recruit and coach a squad to play a certain style/styles. How to you keep a squad of 20+ players happy and motivated, and maximising their contributions to the whole effort. It’s the boring HR/management aspects of football that are the most fascinating to me. It’s just a group of human beings trying to do their job well. If you think about it like that, the lessons you can take from football can apply to anything.
Who/what is the player/concept you "missed" on? What did you learn from it?
I think was slow to learn about analytics in football and I would love to have learnt about it sooner. It’s really helped enrich how I watch football and my relationship with it. Football is such a passion and to continue to learn more about how it’s played and how it works is exciting. You’ve watched this thing every week of your life for as long as you remember, but there is still so much out there to find out.
If you could start over what skill would you build on first?
I’m lucky I suppose that I’m still early on in my analysis journey, the stabilisers are still on.
The key principles that I try and build upon are:
- The writing itself. The best way to improve your writing is to read a lot. Writing with a purpose and for an audience is also important. I won’t write anything until I’ve got a clear structure in mind for how I want to present it. When I write, I’m always thinking about who might read it, and what I want them to take away from what I’m writing. It’s easy when you’re using a lot of data to lean on it all the time. But if you’re not careful it just swamps your writing. If the data is the only thing you want to share, just send people a spreadsheet or a data viz. Writing is different – you can set a scene, you can tell bad jokes, whatever you want. It’s a bigger world that just the data itself.
- Using good data. For people like me who are just writing about football in my free time, access to good quality, low cost lower league football data is difficult. There are sources though like WhoScored and FBRef. You can also gather data yourself. The most important thing though is to scrutinise what data is useful and what is means. I’ve never seen someone give a good explanation of what a ‘smart pass’ is for example but I see that stat quoted all the time. Similarly, people use defensive stats like number of tackles, headers, interceptions etc to try and win arguments about which defender is better. Using stats like that makes Virgil Van Dijk look like Djimi Traore! People need to sense check their data.
- Using good data visualisation. This is the key thing for me currently. I’m spending as much time as I can learning Tableau to try and improve how I visually display data. If you are good at that, you can give people so much insight in seconds. People like Peter McKeever on Twitter – he put outs a diagram and you are looking at this beautiful, clear picture for 20 seconds and all of a sudden you are tricked into knowing which obscure French footballer is great at dribbling or whatever. It’s an amazing skill.
Do you see player development as more of an art or a science? Is development on the club or the player? Why?
I’ve read quite a lot about coaches recently and successful coaching in other sports or occupations.
There seems to be a thread of great coaches that have a very scientific approach, built upon great data, sturdy research, lots of insight etc but they make it feel like an art. A lot of the best football coaches now are from Germany and seem to have a similar approach. You look at Tuchel or Naigelsmann or Klopp or whoever and it’s obvious that they rely on a tonne of insight to be successful. But also, with people like Klopp, I could see myself going for a beer with him and not talking about football at all. The background approach is science led but the application of the coaching is very human.
In terms of the role of the club and player in player development – both are important, and the environment around the player is critical. People are so harsh on footballers. Whether people are fans of football or not, they seem to be blame footballers for anything from the price of a season ticket to the salaries nurses get. It’s out of their control, blame owners and politicians! These are young people who are uniquely insanely skilled, in the top 0.01% of their profession at the age of 18, and people just slag them off constantly. I would need a lot of supportive people around me to deal with that, and to continue to improve my skills.
What is your favorite sports moment? Why?
I think you’ve had this answer in these interviews before but it’s the end of the 2019 Cricket World Cup Final for me. For a start, it was a great game between two brilliant teams. Cricket is a bit less tribal than football most of the time, and you came away from that game just feeling good about cricket itself, rather than just the fact that England won the World Cup.
That win was also the culmination of 4 years of incredible strategy and coaching for the England One Day cricket team. I used to dislike One Day cricket essentially because England seemed to dislike it when they played, they were so joyless. Then they brought leadership on board who embraced unique skillsets in their players, were data led in their strategy, and were human in their leadership. Eoin Morgan is a skilful player but he’s also a brilliant coach on the field and uses the science/art balance perfectly, I think he was key to letting players flourish. They were then the most fun team to watch for 4 years and won all the time as well.
This all led up to the World Cup final, on home soil. As the team got better, the pressure on them got higher. The stakes just grew and grew. In the end, you had the final on terrestrial TV on England, played out in front of an enormous audience around the world. Under this enormous pressure, players like Joffa Archer, Jos Buttler and Ben Stokes just went out and played with freedom and ended up winning the World Cup.
What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?
Coaches wise I’d point to people like Pete Carroll at the Seahawks in the NFL, Steve Kerr in the NBA. I’ve mentioned Eoin Morgan who is a player. I like coaches that celebrate their players as human beings, who let them try out stuff, who let them speak up about causes they are passionate about. The type of manager I’d want to work for.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into media/analytics?
I think pick something to focus on initially and drill deep. For me it was my football team, and really trying to understand how it works, and then how to convey that to people. I knew Crewe fans would also be interested so I had a small ready-made audience, which was a bonus.
It doesn’t have to be your team, it could be a league, a position, club finances, football psychology, football physiotherapy, whatever. Just think about what you can focus on and add to individually.
Also don’t be afraid if you don’t ‘fit the mould’ – if you aren’t a maths geek, if you aren’t a white male etc. I appreciate it might not look like the world for you, but for analytics to be truly insightful it needs new perspectives and ways of thinking. I know there is Measurables Office Hours which supported members of communities underrepresented in sports analytics. I think reaching out to things like that, and to ask advice from people whose work you like, is always worth a shot.
What is your favorite app/tool to use (for fun only!)?
I like Tableau for data visualisation. For writing, I like going into the proofing settings on Microsoft Word and ticking a lot of ‘grammar and spelling’ editing boxes, and then watching it gradually underline every single line of whatever I’ve written because it always needs a lot of editing. Then I like chipping away at my writing, editing it down.
What other sport/hobby/discipline do you feel improves your work as an analyst? Why?
My main inspiration to get into football analytics was other sports, specifically NFL and cricket. The coverage of those sports, even for the ‘casual fan’ is higher quality. It digs into the details of the sport, why things happen, how things happen etc. They are more granular sports, but they also respect their audience’s intelligence.
I consumed football as a casual fan, going to games, watching Match of the Day, playing Football Manager, occasionally checking my fantasy football team, all that stuff. Seeing how other sports covered themselves made me dig into better football insight, and it opened an entire world for me.
In terms of specific writers whose work I really like, here is a small (non-exhaustive list):
NFL: Sheil Kapadia
Cricket: Freddie Wilde, Ben Jones, there is also a guy called Karthik Shashidhar who wrote a brilliant newsletter called Criconometrics that I hope he brings back!
Football: Grace Robertson, Mark Thompson, Carl Anka, Michael Cox, James Yorke, Paul Riley
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