On Monday Evening, Omar Chaudhuri, Head of Football Intelligence at 21st Club, gave a brilliant talk to a room full of attentive eyes and ears all keen to hear about how data is influencing better football decisions.
Covering a wide range of topics, Omar eloquently discussed data uses in football, the effect that’s now having on recruitment and management and the impact of luck, as well as trying to change the general conversation in boardrooms across the globe.
For anyone not aware, 21st Club is a consultancy that pride themselves on partnering with teams who want to think and act smarter.
Giving data context and harnessing it with their own intelligence, they’re able to help members of the football world gain competitive edges against opponents.
The talk stemmed from the brilliant book Changing The Conversation, readily handed to all attendees on arrival.
The concepts in the book are a collection of insights, grouped together under main sections.
Strategy, talent, planning and performance provide the outline to a number of thought provoking pieces of writing with the recurring theme of football, but being thought about differently.
And it was the theme of the talk, as Omar worked through various slides featuring points like recruitment dilemmas and 21st Clubs own global player and club ratings leagues, where they’re able to place teams and players in an international super league that is exempt from football associations and borders purely with the aim of ranking the best sides according to their model.
Slides continued on the importance of underlying performance and half time reports provided to coach’s midway through matches, all done to help remove the noise from the crazy game of football and show how contextualized data can only assist in the long run.
Luck was also an interesting section, something a lot of people struggle to comprehend, with almost everyone underestimating its role in football.
The Harry Kane & Marcus Rashford situations proving that being in the right place at the right time was lucky for two players who may not have been worth the huge sums we now hear touted.
If they hadn’t been given the room to grow and develop after their fortunate early impacts, luck could have them in very different situations.
Many interesting sections came and went but one Brentford fans may find particularly poignant was a segment on recruitment issues when evaluating players performing in Holland.
A player posting excellent numbers in the Eredivise may look like a superstar against Excelsior but how would they perform if moved to The Championship or to a team battling for the top six positions in the premier league?
Quantifying the strength of shot data and other key numbers players produce in Holland needs to be correctly weighted, taking into account strength of opposition.
Data and overlap analysis can help clubs to not fall into the mistakes of another Vincent Janssen, Josh McEachran or Alfonso Alves.
Promoted sides were discussed, looking at the struggles of Fulham in the Premier League, when they were ever so effective in the Championship.
The Wages = Wins Fallacy comes to mind, but are the problems they are experiencing down to approach and not adapting to the right strategy, even after spending hundreds of millions pounds and surely making themselves stronger?
Fulham were promoted as a dominant attacking side with the aim of creating randomness in games, lots of chances in attack and letting their vastly superior talent over power the opposition.
The underdog effect could be where their strategy is falling down. In a stronger division like the premier league, Fulham could hugely benefit from a change in mind set to evolve away from an attacking open side to a more conservative and defensive unit, keeping games low scoring and reducing randomness.
Fulham have been far too open and could maybe increase the probability of survival in the top flight earning a lucrative second season at the top table if they would be more Stoke.
A Q&A session to finish had Omar offering his expert take on questions around bad football club habits, boardrooms buying into data and potential non-football markets clubs are likely to exploit in the future.
Why are British clubs with their vast financial resources still weaker when compared with their European counterparts?
It may not all be their fault, and more down to circumstance as Omar introduced a real world case - The British club premium - where a selling club doubled the valuation of a player simply because a British cub was interested.
The topic of tracking data and matching it with the event data most people are now common with arose. The need for extremely intelligent analysts to even begin to make sense of it all was put forward.
Where and how football invests in these types of areas or how do teams even begin to recruit into newly formed analytical departments is another area 21st club can help with.
Lastly the future of data and analytics was touched upon and that if everyone got to the stage of using very similar data, could we reach a point when certain data sets become overvalued.
Using expected assists as the example, could we reach a situation where all clubs were using this metric as a point of performance measurement, and if this became the case, could the next competitive edge be in the process behind producing a high expected assist value?
As always, for the smart thinkers and those that think differently, if it’s not broken, try to break it.
You can follow Omar Choudhuri here
And 21st Club here