The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Siblings’ journey from Barca to Dons
The tale of how a Catalan brother and sister performance analysis team came to be working at Aberdeen was always likely to be full of twists and turns.
In mid-July, the Dons revealed Jordi Rams, 29, had joined the club as head of performance analysis, while sister Marta, 31, would be working as an analyst with the first team.
The Reds’ press release mentioned the Barcelona-raised siblings had arrived from European group stage regulars FC Midtjylland, of Denmark, while Jordi had also previously spent time in the United States as part of the FC Barcelona Academies youth programme.
However, the Rams’ back story has a lot more to it.
It’s a tale of two sports – football and basketball – with the siblings spending five years on opposite sides of the Atlantic during their education in performance analysis, before joining forces to work together at Champions and Europa League group stage level and, finally, moving on to Aberdeen with a little help from Aston Villa set-piece coach Austin MacPhee.
Sitting down with The Press And Journal at Aberdeen’s Cormack Park training ground two months after the news of their appointment, Jordi and Marta sketched out the unconventional path which led them to Jim Goodwin’s Dons.
Jordi said: “I think it’s quite interesting, because we mixed two sports, and it’s thanks to those two sports we are here, more or less.
“In my case it was football – I tried to play more seriously, but to have more fun I decided to play with my friends.
“At this point is when I started coaching and being interested in that world. I took my higher education and also my Uefa A licence, then after that, I was involved in local clubs in our area.
“I went to a bigger club in Barcelona, UE Cornella, where I had the opportunity to face big teams in our area like Barca, Espanyol, Girona – big clubs – and then I had the opportunity to go to the United States with Barca Academies as a coach.”
It was in 2015 – the year Jordi landed his overseas coaching role with Barca’s American youth programme – when the siblings discovered performance analysis.
They were exposed to the software they have since become masters of: video analysis programme, Hudl Sportscode.
In the years which followed, while Jordi was in America coaching with Barca Academies but also learning performance analysis on the job with Charlotte Independence and San Antonio FC, the elder Marta was also honing her craft – in a different sport entirely with FC Barcelona’s women’s basketball teams.
Marta explained: “I came from basketball, not football.
“I played basketball since I was eight years old until 18 or 20. I started coaching around 16 or something like this.
“In 2015, we met Xavi Guila and Lluis Casas, and they showed us what analysis was and this programme, Hudl Sportscode, and since then I was focused in analysis.
“My first job as an analyst was with FC Barcelona in women’s (basketball). The first two years I was with the academy with some teams and then the last two years I was with the first team.”
Marta would then spend a couple more years working with a local basketball club in Badalona – on the outskirts of the Catalan capital – before finally moving into football and teaming up with Jordi at FC Midtjylland during Covid in 2020.
She insists the transition between analysing performance in basketball to analysing it in football was an “easy” one, due to both sports being formation-based team games where set-pieces can be all-important.
Plus, growing up where the Rams did, football is ubiquitous.
It was Jordi who found the opportunity to join FC Midtjylland, with the younger Rams sibling returning to Europe and arriving in Denmark for the 2020/21 season, while Marta, meanwhile, initially did the job from Spain.
The first season with Midtjylland was one in which the Danish Superliga champions contested a Champions League group with Ajax, Atalanta and Liverpool.
Although they finished bottom of the pool, they ended the campaign with a 1-1 draw in Italy with Atalanta, before a 1-1 draw with Jurgen Klopp’s English Premier League Reds in Denmark.
Jordi insists performance analysis work at European elite level comes with the
same objectives as they are now trying to meet at Aberdeen.
He said: “It’s more or less what we’re trying to do here – identifying strengths, weaknesses and trying to find new opportunities to punish them and things to adjust to out of possession, for example.
“But against these teams you have to adapt a lot and I think we did a good job.
“We drew against Liverpool in our last game.”
These valuable experiences of top European football competition continued to come for Marta and Jordi in their second year at Midtjylland, with the pair working side by side in football in the physical sense for the first time.
Jordi said: “The next season we had the opportunity for both of us to be there in Denmark, with very good experiences in the Europa League and in one round of the Conference (League).
“In the qualifying rounds (for the Champions League), we played Celtic, PSV…
“PSV was a very, very strong team and it was very difficult, but it allowed us to compete in the Europa League – against Braga from Portugal and Red Star in Belgrade – which was a great experience.
“We’re here to try to help the club reach these objectives and these experiences.”
A well-known Scottish football face – or, perhaps, haircut – had a hand in the Rams’ move from Denmark to Aberdeen during the summer.
Jordi had already noticed and applied for the head of performance analysis vacancy left by Greig Thomson at Pittodrie when he asked then-Midtjylland assistant coach Austin MacPhee – who has also served as assistant with Scotland, Northern Ireland, Hearts and, crucially, St Mirren – if he could put a word in with the Dons.
Detailing the chain of events, Jordi said: “It was one of my best friends, Jose Rodriguez – he is also at Aston Villa with Austin, because we met each other in Midtjylland.
“He told me: ‘Hey, have you seen this opportunity?’
“(And I said:) ‘Yes, I applied a few weeks ago, but how does it work? I didn’t get a reply or a response.’
“He told me: ‘Tell Austin, maybe he knows someone at the club’.
“I asked Austin and he said: ‘OK, let me check’.
“A few weeks before, the club had signed Jim Goodwin and they were pretty good friends – they knew each other in St Mirren, I think, where Austin was part of the staff.
“At that moment it moved faster. I had the first meeting with Steven Gunn (Aberdeen’s director of football) and Emma Flett (football operations coordinator), then very quick with Jim.
“I think we connected, and also, when they met Marta, they saw the value of adding our profiles.
“It’s all about being efficient and trying to provide as much information as they need, as fast as possible.
“I showed them what we do. Then together with Marta we showed them, and I think they liked it and that’s why we’re here.”
What do Aberdeen’s performance analysts… do?
Well, a large part of their role is “coding” hours and hours of match footage – this means breaking upcoming Premiership opponents’ performances down into clips showing all of the elements of their tactical approach, as a team and individually, and laying bare their strengths and weaknesses.
Having a “very detailed” understanding of what your rivals are going to do – and what you could do to exploit and/or combat it – come each Saturday is the aim.
Explaining how performance analysis can feed into a team’s tactics in the modern game, Jordi said: “We need to know if the counterattacks are from the left side, right side, if they cross the ball, if they go through the central channel, if they play short but very quick, or if they play long.
“We code all these things so we know exactly how they counter-attack if they counter-attack.
“At the end we might decide to cover right side because we identify they do the counter-attacks in the left channel, it’s very easy for us to go and find the clips to show them to the players.
“It’s a balance – we spend a lot of time coding, but then selecting clips and organising the meetings is very quick.”
The dossiers Jordi and Marta prepare on upcoming opponents, sent to boss Jim Goodwin and his staff, and explained to management and players in meetings, have to be spot-on.
They make tactical assessments of opponents and, as such, can have a heavy bearing on what is worked on in training by the management team and players during the week to prepare for the game in question.
Outlining how their analysis plays into the week at Cormack Park, Jordi said: “Very early in the morning on Monday, they (the coaching staff) can see everything – the reports – more or less the first image of the opponents we’re going to face on Saturday. We have different meetings of staff regarding the week and how the players are and all these things, then the same afternoon or the next day is when we sit and take a look at the clips we thought would be interesting.
“And, from there, we prepare the next days – the week is already planned, but when they have all this information is when we close (in) that ‘we’re going to do this, this, this’ or ‘we’re going to follow this plan’.
“When we’re finished with all this is when we start preparing the meetings for the players.
“It’s not all the clips we show them, just one or two of each important aspect to consider.
“Marta, especially, writes all the individual stuff for the players – clips from opponents who they are maybe going to compete with 1v1, just for them to get an idea of what they are going to do.
“We’ve got quite a new squad of players and they don’t know the (opposition) players in the league, so I think it helps and they are happy with all this kind of information.
“With the goalkeepers, we do some individual stuff for goalkeeping coach Craig Samson.”
Jordi added: “On gameday we do live analysis – the most important thing during the games is to provide constant feedback to the staff.
“Again – it’s not that we are constantly talking to them, because they are in their roles and have to control a lot of things.
“But when we see something or send them the image, they have an iPad so they can check every moment that they want.
“Also, at half-time we provide feedback – sometimes just for the staff, and sometimes for the staff and players we’ll show this moment or this clip.
“We are here to support the players. They play the game. We don’t play the game, the staff don’t play the game.
“They take decisions and our role is to help them take good decisions.”