Friday 17th March 2017.

One of the biggest challenges facing today’s football club is how, not whether, to incorporate the vast potential of the burgeoning analytics movement.

But the nature of this challenge is not necessarily obvious. Even after the powers that be make the decision that this rich seam of information is simply too good to ignore, the difficulty remains that football is essentially a game managed by players and players have usually spent their time on the pitch rather than in the classroom or laboratory.

So what’s needed is some way of bridging the gap between the ‘boffs’ and the ‘jocks.’

Ironically though, the gap is less wide in reality than in perception. Last month’s OptaPro Forum hosted a concise but informative presentation by Neil Charles of Hilltop Analytics called Shoot! Optimising the Location of Attempts on Goal wherein he examined, among other issues, the behaviour of Tony Pulis’s West From team.

On the face of it you might expect Pulis would have little truck with the analytics community but what Charles’s data analysis showed was that in fact the ‘Pulisball’ method was very much in harmony with the conclusion of this piece of work.

I think this demonstrates that there is more to link than to separate the analysts and the ‘football people’ if football clubs can find an effective way to really get them together.

Adam Bate of Sky Sports writes an interesting piece here  with a link to Neil Charles’s presentation.