FourFourTwo

ANALYTICS

Rory Smith is a Fourfourtw­o columnist and chief football correspond­ent at the New York Times. He asks if football has really been taken over by data

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When even Arsene Wenger is using the jargon, you can safely assume that the battle is won. A couple of years ago, the Arsenal supremo was being asked about his decision to move Aaron Ramsey into a more central role. Had the Welshman finally managed to persuade his manager that he deserved a go in his preferred position? Or was it, perhaps, enforced by injury? (At Arsenal, then as now, many things are enforced by injury).

No, Wenger said, it was all to do with his Expected Goals. Ramsey had a better Expected Goals value when he played centrally than he did when deployed on the right. He didn’t use the phrase with great fanfare; he slipped it into conversati­on naturally, subtly, as though he had been talking about Expected Goals all his life.

Only the slight, wry smile at the end – the smile of a man who thinks he knows something that his audience does not; a man who can see into the future while everyone else stares blankly at the past – betrayed him. The Frenchman was quite pleased with himself. He was at the cutting edge once again.

Over the last decade, football has undergone a transforma­tion. Data – analytics, numbers, whatever you want to call it – is now central to everything most clubs do.

When your team is deciding which players to sign this summer, the chances are they will first have been spotted because of their performanc­e data. That, generally, is the first step in most transfers now; a human scout will only go to watch a specific player if the numbers say it is worthwhile.

Once the player’s signed and started training, every step they take, every pass they make will be reduced to a mark on a spreadshee­t. In most cases, the role to which they are assigned in the team, the way they are asked to play, the runs they are told to make and the positions from which they shoot will all have been influenced by what the numbers tell them.

Some clubs are more advanced and more reliant than others. Liverpool’s sporting director, Michael Edwards, has an analytics background. Arsenal purchased its own company, STATDNA, several years ago to provide bespoke data – Jaeson Rosenfeld, its chief executive, has became one of Wenger’s closest confidants in the past couple of years. Manchester City have got an entire team of data scouts, and so do newly promoted Brighton. But examining data is a part of the process – for both recruitmen­t and training – at pretty much every club you’d care to mention. It can often seem from the outside as though a war is raging within football, between those who welcome this invasion of bespectacl­ed men with laptops trawling through spreadshee­ts in their air-conditione­d offices, adding to the sum of our wisdom on the game that we love and helping us to understand it in a deeper, more nuanced way, and those who believe that doing so endangers the sport’s soul.

To many, after all, football is a sport not of cold calculatio­n but of passion and energy: it is too fluid, too complex and too emotional to be mapped out in graphs and pie charts. Trying to reduce football to mere mathematic­s is to rob it of its romance and its randomness. Such science, they would say, has no place in art.

Whether that is true or not – and that is, at root, a matter of personal taste – the battle has been won by analytics. Knowledge may or may not be beauty, but it is power, and clubs have been quick to realise it. Even Wenger, that oldest of dogs, could see which way the wind was blowing.

There has been an arms race throughout Europe’s clubs to be at the forefront of this revolution; to be the team not just with the best manager or the best players, but with the best analysts, looking at the best data in the best way. This is football’s new frontier – and there is no turning back now.

That does not mean that the use of data will strip football of the variety that is its lifeblood. It does not mean that the teams using analytics most slavishly will automatica­lly be the most successful. That is because ultimately, what matters most, even in this brave new world, are the people.

It is not enough simply to have an analyst: it has to be the right analyst. It is not enough simply to collate numbers: they have to be the right numbers – the ones that mean something. And it is not enough simply to pore through them: they must be interprete­d in the right way and in the right context.

There was once a perception that analytics offered a shortcut to success. Teams with an analytical bent were referred to as ‘Moneyball’ clubs, after the Michael Lewis book detailing the remarkable ascent of the Oakland A’s in Major League Baseball. Simply using numbers was advertised as a magic formula.

It doesn’t work like that. Football, on the pitch and off it, rewards only excellence. That is true of the players, of the managers and of the people away from all of the limelight, seeking a signal in the noise. Football data is here to stay – but it will grant success only to those who know exactly what they’re looking for.

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