While the top-5 European leagues have been relatively set in stone for some time, although Portugal has this season been challenging France in the co-efficient standings, the next tier down from the top-5 leagues tends to be the most interesting to me from a recruitment perspective. The likes of the Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese leagues along with some others including Austria, Switzerland and Poland and even the likes of Sweden and Norway are all interesting in terms of the quality of their play and a willingness to give regular first-team minutes to younger players.
Indeed, a smart team from those top-5 European leagues will do a lot of their recruitment from the leagues listed and those in the second tier of leagues will recruit from the next tier down, and so on and so on. This hierarchy in terms of recruitment to some extent negates the difficulty of judging a players ability to make the step up to a more competitive league environment. There are of course always examples of players who are able to make the jump from a smaller league to one of the elite competitions in European football but as a general rule, the tier system holds.
For a modern recruitment team best practice now dictates that data is used to cut through the noise of the sheer amount of players who would potentially make realistic targets based on budget and the requirements in terms of player profiles.
When I am using data in the recruitment process my methodology remains relatively static. I use Wyscout as the data source, the best option from a cost/quality/depth perspective and Tableau as the tool for visualising and interpreting the data. Using these simple tools I am able to gain insights into the performances of players and indeed clubs from across the football world. I have my own combinations of metrics that are used to identify players that are well but these are also combined with metrics that meet the specific requirements and style that the client club prefers. Having assessed player performances I then move on to the longlisting process using custom-built dashboards within Tableau. These will be shown below and allow me to quickly assess player performance across a number of key metrics depending on the position of the player in question.
While data remains an important part of the recruitment process it should be used carefully and in conjunction with live and video scouting in order to ensure that you have a well rounded and complete recruitment process that helps you to reach the correct decision when signing a player to your club.
In this article, I have used simple data profiling to identify five players who have been impressing so far this season in the Belgian top-flight.
#1 Joseph Okumu, 24-years-old, central defender, Gent and Kenya
The first player on my shortlist is one who is relatively new to life in Belgium as he only moved to join Gent in July of this year for fee that was reported to be in the region of £3.15M. He was previously on the books of Elfsborg in the Swedish Allsvenskan and his performances were attracting the interest of several clubs around Europe before Gent finally moved to sign the imposing central defender for a fee that I am sure will go on to look like a complete bargain.
Joseph Okumu has had. one of the most unique and interesting career paths in football up until this point with moves that have taken him from his native Kenya to South Africa and then to the lower leagues of the United States before eventually ending up in Europe in Sweden and now Belgium. He is an established international with Kenya and he should go on to be one of their most important players for years to come. Okumu is an imposing central defender listed at 193cm | 643 but his power and pace is only a small part of his game as his game understanding and ability in possession shines whenever he is on the pitch. He is predominantly right-footed but capable of playing as the right-sided or left-sided central defender in most systems.
So far t
