Now that the January transfer window has closed clubs can take a breath and reflect on those deals that they were able, and in some cases, unable to do. In football, however, there is no true break and clubs that recruit intelligently and that work to a clear plan will be constantly reassessing potential targets that meet their recruitment criteria. In order to manage this need for constant recruitment analysis smart teams will assign their analysts with tasks that include checking and updating data on players in markets that interest them. An important part of running a recruitment department in this way is understanding which markets are accessible to your club, based on your budget, and knowing which of these markets has a tendency for developing talented players.
Sometimes requests from coaching staff or directors can be slightly unhelpful, I was once asked by one club to identify a tall striker for their club. No context, no player profile just a very basic physical description. These kinds of requests are, of course, extremely unhelpful and indeed inefficient as in order to recruit effectively you need to have at least a framework of a profile that explains what kind of player you are looking for and what kind of role they will play in the team from a tactical point of view.
It is easy to get lost in data. There is so much available from a variety of data providers and you have to understand how to access the key parts of these data sets to fit your own needs. In order to explain this concept more thoroughly, I have created a scenario for myself in which the head of recruitment has tasked me to run data searches for players from Scandinavia. The broad stroke of this enquiry is that the club are looking to build a knowledge base on central midfielders in the region and the head of recruitment has provided three basic player profiles that the club will look to use going forward. The first is for a creative midfielder that can play as an 8 or a 10 and that creates chances for teammates. The second if for a ball progressor who stands out either in terms of driving forward with the ball or playing progressive passes that threaten the opposition penalty area and the third is to find a high volume passer who is also capable of playing forward.
The purpose of this data analysis is to provide a framework to show the initial stages that I would go through to begin to provide a shortlist for further examination. This is in no way intended as a tool to provide a definitive list of targets and there would need to be further data analysis on each player followed by video and live scouting before a decision could be made.
The creator
For the purposes of this search certain criteria have been put in place. We are looking for young players with development potential and as such the maximum age has been set at 22. We are also looking for players who can provide a reasonable sample size and as such only players who have played at least 600 minutes will be considered. In order to identify the creative midfielders in the first instance, we create a simple data query that isolates the number of passes played into the penalty area per 90 minutes and their xA(expected assists) per 90.
Immediately we see some interesting names in the magical top right quadrant of the scatter graph above. These data searches, even with positional filters added, are open to certain errors and we see one here in the immediate outlier. Jon Thorsteinsson of AGF is included because he has played some minutes in the centre of midfield this season but he is mostly a left-winger and as such his data in this set will be skewed somewhat. There are, however, still some interesting names that we can pick out.
- Evande
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