Thursday 29th September 2016.

Billy Beane’s former Oakland A’s colleague and current AZ Alkmaar data analyst Bill Gerrard gave his view on the progress of analytics in football recently. While frustrated about the relative sluggishness on the part of clubs to fully embrace the benefits of evidence based decision-making, professor Gerrard recognised the difficulty of overcoming natural human biases. I think we all pin our hopes for the future on the emerging ‘Prozone generation’ of players being more receptive to scientific feedback and this rubbing off along the way. This is what he said.

Speaking to the British Science Festival in Swansea this month, Dr Tom Markham, head of strategic business development at Sports Interactive (the makers of Football Manager) urged us to accept the era of ‘big data’ is all around us and take a leaf out of the books of cricket’s Duncan Fletcher, rugby’s Clive Woodward and cycling’s Dave Brailsford. 3,000 players in 51 countries is just too much for a club to handle so a database such as that of Football Manager can do the recruitment grunt work if used in collaboration with traditional evaluation methods. Here’s Dr Markham’s perspective.

The combination of Arsenal owner Stan Kreonke’s commitment to the numbers and manager Arsene Wenger’s legendary prudence in the transfer market made the purchase of analytics company statDNA an obvious move back in 2012. Last month the company were seen to be expanding their operation on the lookout for new scouts for their offices in Seattle.