By Tony Attwood
The current situation in the Premier League is not, as some would have it, that clubs are now simply “using more data.” Rather they are using the data in a much more sophisticated way than before.
The way I see it, the PL has changed because clubs are organising their teams differently. For clubs are evolving how they play, the likes of which they have never employed before. And to do this clubs are hiring recruitment analysts, data scientists, and performance analysts.
Now such people are to be found in many if not most large companies in other fields of work. Football however has always been a little slow on picking up on this approach, often because those employed in senior roles are ex-players who themselves never studied managing and selecting people. They might dismiss the new statistical approaches as “clever-clever” ideas that don’t work like an old fashioned number 9 changing at defences.
Of course I don’t know exactly what Mikel Arteta and his management team get up to, but this is the approach I think he has used from day one, and I believe he learned it in the management team at Manchester City. Of course what ManC also then had was the money to bring in the players who could deliver exactly what the statistical models showed was needed, so they could buy the players to fit their particular needs. And ManC had the finances to do that, as the League sat back and allowed them to buy whatever players they wanted.
Now of course other clubs are catching up – ranging from Arsenal where Arteta brought with him the knowledge of what was needed to build a team that could play in a particular way, and hence win the league, through to Chelsea who had the money but not the technical understanding of how the entire game could be changed.
But although this approach has been so successful at Arsenal and indeed previously had brought unprecedented success for ManC many club directors still don’t believe in these “clever-clever” “new-fangled” approaches, adopting instead the old “I think I know what a good footballer looks like” approach… Hence they spend, don’t succeed, sack the manager, and start again.
Thus clubs like Tottenham despite having all that data still go on thinking they can hire a manager and buy the best players, and win the league. But that’s not how it goes any more..
Of course part of the problem is that there are always people around saying “use this new method, it delivers better results,” and many of them have no idea what they are talking about. So club owners can justify staying with the old proven ways of working.
But this is where Arsenal came good by having owners who had seen how sporting success could be created through an approach that was quite different from the approaches used in the Premier League.
Of course one of the big problems with the traditional system of recruitment and development of play for Premier League clubs was the notion of having one top scorer in a team that can go and win the Premier League. The existence of Haaland with 27 goals suggests this idea is still valid.
But such top scoring players are getting harder and harder to find, not least because in many cases their skill can be nullified by man-marking them out of the game. Worse, there are very few of these players and every top club in Europe is looking for them.
So now what some clubs are doing is looking for goal scorers who are less obvious. Thus last season Arsenal had a top scorer who scored 14 league goals – the seventh highest in the league, which doesn’t sound very good. Except Arsenal were the second highest scorers of goals in the Premier League last season – without a Haaland type player.
So instead of saying “we need a top goal scorer” Arsenal looked to nurture a player who can score a fair number, but who on the pitch will draws defenders out so that others can also score. And it turned out to be more effective.
In short some clubs are still looking at the game as it existed 20 years ago, in very simple terms – like finding a big number 9 who is a top scorer. Such searches can still work for clubs with infinite amounts of cash, but other clubs need to be more clever, finding tactical changes as well as goal scorers.
Arsenal were one of the first innovators of this change in recent times bringing in Thierry Henry who played much of his football as if he were a winger, and yet still became top scorer. That was the clue: forget the old simplicity and instead score goals through different routes which can confuse the opposition.
Last season Arsenal explored various alternative approaches and scored just six goals fewer than ManC, but still ended up with the best goal difference in the league. A goal difference that was 25 goals better than that of Manchester United, who had the third best goal difference in the league!! That shows us the sort of on-field organisation and planning that is going on these days. It has nothing to do with getting a better centre forward or a new winger. It is about the whole tactical evolution of the football within the club.
In my opinion even clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United are nowhere near where Arsenal have got to in this regard, and that makes me feel rather positive about this new season.
