A key part of modern recruitment is understanding how to use data effectively as a part of your process.
While I would never suggest that a player, at any level, should be signed purely based on their data profile it is still important to understand the story that the data is telling you.
Data can help you to cut through some of the noise created by the sheer number of professional footballers that exist in the game today.
Wyscout is an incredibly useful tool for clubs at all levels with their access to video and data but it can be easy to get lost down a rabbit hole of footage if you are not careful.
As a part of Total Football Analysis we offer clubs, players and agencies a consultancy service and a large part of that is built around the use of data and video scouting to provide shortlists of players that fit a specific profile.
To do this we make use of a tool that we know as xGOLD.
This has been custom-built in-house to streamline the use of data in the identification of talented players.
In a series of articles for the website, I will be using xGOLD to identify players that have similar profiles to a more well-known player in this position.
The first profile that we will look at is Trent Alexander-Arnold (TAA) of Liverpool and England.
We should probably start with a disclaimer that this process is not intended as a means to find a player that is exactly identical to TAA.
Instead, it gives an early warning of players who are profiling in a similar way to TAA.
From this point on we would then carry out due diligence in terms of creating a profile of the player in question and carrying out extensive video scouting.
Trent Alexander-Arnold, 22-years-old, Liverpool and England
The profile above is created separately to xGOLD with the use of Wyscout data.
On the left-side, we have percentile bar charts that show a players performance in metrics that we believe are key to the position in question.
Th
