This is the fifth part in a series of articles looking at the use of data profiles in identifying potential recruitment targets within football.
You can read part one here, part two here, part three here and part four here.
This time we will look at the profile of the French central defender Jules Kounde and identify four other central defenders with similar profiles to the Frenchman.
Using data and, more specifically, data profiles as a part of the recruitment process is a very useful means of cutting through a lot of the noise that represents the sheer number of football players that there are in the world. Being able to use data and dashboards to quickly visualise the areas in which players may be similar or not can allow us to streamline our process in order to quickly sift through the thousands of players that a club may have available to them. For a club like Chelsea, who naturally shop at the top end of the market, this process is still important as they look to recruit a player for a position with specific skill sets.
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 order to create the shortlist of four players for this article, I will be using xGold to look for players who are similar to Jules Kounde and who are 23 or under with at least 400 minutes in the 2020/21 season.
Before we look in more detail at the players that xGold has suggested that we shortlist we first have to understand what Kounde’s data profile looks like.
The visualisations within this series are dashboards that I have build using Tableau and with data from Wyscout. The bar charts on the left of the dashboard are percentile bars. These are based on comparisons with all other players in their position within their dataset and with at least 400 minutes in the 2020/21 season. It possible goes without saying but the longer the bar the better the performance. To the right of that we have the raw per 90 data and then the players heatmap.
Immediately we start to see that Jules Kounde has a very balanced profile with strengths in all three areas that we identify on the dashboard. Attacking, passing and progression and defensive. Kounde is an extremely progressive player for a central defender with excellent outputs in terms of his ball-carrying with 1.84 progressive runs per 90. He also progresses the ball well with his vertical passing game with 9.91 progressive passes per 90 and 7.47 passes to the final third per 90. His defensive metrics are reasonable but his low output for defensive duels per 90 (4.93) are likely down to a combination of team style and his positional sense, he does, however, have a high completion rate in terms of these duels with 72.41%
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