By John Portch

Joe Montemurro, the Head Coach of Juventus Women, explains that the team’s President, Andrea Agnelli, wishes he had done things differently with the team.

“I remember going to a dinner with the owners and sponsors and I was sitting on the same table as Mr Agnelli, and we had a chat,” Montemurro tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“He said that one regret he has in life is that he didn’t start the women’s team earlier because he thinks Juventus is a little behind the top teams because he didn’t start five or six years earlier. That probably gives you an understanding of where the club sits in the landscape.”

The hope of both Agnelli and Montemurro is to see Juventus Women match the success and reputation of the men’s team. Since entering Serie A in 2017, the club has won the scudetto in five consecutive seasons and the aim for the future is to sustain that success and build a team that can compete regularly for the Uefa Women’s Champions League.

“There’s a saying at Juventus – ‘fino alla fine’ – which means ‘go to the end’ or ‘fight to the end’,” says Montemurro. “There’s another one: ‘vincere non è importante e l’unica cosa che conta’, which means ‘winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing’.”

The latter was uttered by former Juventus striker and second-highest scorer in the history of the men’s team, Giampiero Boniperti, at the inauguration of the Juventus Stadium in Turin in 2011.

Such thinking explains why Juventus Women turned to Montemurro in the summer of 2021. He has more than 20 years’ experience as a coach, In 2019, he led Arsenal Women to their first Women’s Super League title in seven years and, before that, claimed back-to-back W-League championships with Melbourne City Women in his native Australia.

“Part of the club’s growth and development was to bring in someone who has a bit of experience in Europe who can take the club to the next level,” says Montemurro. “We’ve instilled a methodology of play, which is mine. I have moulded it with some good things here in Italy and if you watch the game you’ll see a very identifiable style of mine. There’s been no real handbook that says ‘this is the Juventus style’ but it’s about representing the club in the right way with the values it has; the level of class with which it struts around in Italy and Europe.

“You feel Juventus, you feel the history, you feel the weight of wearing this jumper and that’s a great thing. It’s where you want to be in football and I love it.”

Montemurro is also driven by the desire to “educate” the women’s football landscape in Italy. “It’s not behind but women’s football in Italy still has a long way to go to find its place.” The 2022-23 season will be the first that Serie A Women is fully professional. “I want to create something that a lot of clubs can use as a template to say ‘this is how we will grow and get better so the game grows’.”

He has been afforded the space to innovate as there has been buy-in to his ideas across the board. “Everything I’ve brought forward or we’ve brought forward as a group to get better and better and better, we discuss it and look at it, and most of the time it’s actually ‘hey, I think that’s a good idea, we could do that’. And we’re sometimes talking about little things. Travelling two days before instead of one day before. The ability to innovate, and they’re so open to being this global brand that they’re looking at being the best and being creative. I really like that because it gets my mind ticking to be better and better and better. How can I be better? How can my staff be better? How can everyone around us be better because the club will give you that support but they’ll also say ‘look, it’s not the right time to do this because of this or that’. There’s never anything discounted.”

The Juventus Women senior team and academy are closely aligned, as one might expect, but there is also alignment between the women’s team and the Juventus men’s under-23s. “We work very closely together and follow similar processes to the senior men’s team,” says Montemurro, who likes his multidisciplinary team to be football-driven.

“The first thing, and I did it at Arsenal and I did it at Juventus, is to make sure that football is at the core of everything that we do because that’s what we’re judged on. It’s funny, because in the word ‘football’ the latter part of the word is ‘all’ so I flash that word up and say ‘it’s all of us’.

“I can then give the base to the medical staff to say, ‘OK, we’re playing X amount of games, we play this way, we know that we need players who are very good in small areas, they can recover because we play a short passing game’ – I’m using a very broad example – ‘so we need to focus on those things and get players who need to get aerobically fit as part of the game’. They can look at that. The sports science department or the S&C department then look at the football as the base of everything we do. So all of our warm-ups are based on the methodology of the football.

“This whole idea of ‘footb-all’ is as corny and clichéd as it comes, but it’s important. In the end, I’m just trying to create a football culture. All the other stuff is irrelevant. And I think you get buy-in. When the methodology is clear, when the way you want to play is clear, then the doctors understand, the nutritionists understand, and everyone understands what we’re trying to achieve in the long run.”

Montemurro also encourages his staff to prioritise their CPD with one request. “One of the things I tell each department is to stick within the football. CPD is very important, but make yours the best department in the world. Make it the best medical department in the world, make it the best analytics department. It’s your baby, make it you. I’m here to help you, obviously we’ve got certain pre-requisites week-in week-out that we need to do, but if you’ve got the opportunity to go and watch a game or watch some training and bring something back and do something, absolutely.”

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Montemurro about the biggest changes he has observed in football coaching in recent years. His answer is informed by his work at Juventus. “The top coaches are able to ascertain a level of hierarchy and respect, but also have a more human aspect. The head coach isn’t that far away from everything that’s happened. I think it’s becoming more, I don’t know if this is the right word, but more human in terms of the understanding of the player-staff-head coach connection and ascertaining the end goal. Everyone’s more in it together.

“I think coaches are still just starting to understand that ultimately they have to make decisions but the decisions are more informed through processes. Obviously our scope of work is broader now. We are involved in every aspect of the game. I don’t think it can be left to say ‘I’m just going to go on the park and Sunday’s my day or game day’s my day’; now it’s really important that everyone’s involved in that. The staff and everyone is involved in how we go forward but obviously with your eye on top of it. I think there’s just been a more human factor and I think that the top coaches are usually empathetic to the wellness and wellbeing of their staff and players. I think that’s been a big change. It’s not just a job any more – it’s a lifestyle. You’re spending so much time here and you have to make it the best place it can be, and I think we as head coaches – or I am anyway – are more concerned about the welfare and wellbeing of your staff and players. That results in performance.”

What of the coach of the next ten years? “I think the coach of the future is one that will need to understand the sports science, S&C, sports medicine. I just think it’s going that way and I think we need to have a broader understanding of every little bit because, ultimately, if you’re not involved in the market, I know you’ve got scouts and analytics, the scouting and analysis departments do a lot of that work for you, but if you don’t understand the background of the player you’re investing in or the staff that you’re investing in, then how do you deal with them when they’re going forward? They may have had a bad experience at a club and they’re coming into another situation. How do you deal with that?

“I think the coach of the future will be more educated and understanding of all the other disciplines involved and I think with that will come a new wave of innovation in how we see the game and how we approach the game tactically. It’s already happening with a lot of clubs; the Brentfords and their ‘Moneyball’ approach. [Bayern Munich men’s Head Coach] Julian Nagelsmann with the big screen next to his training pitch. The level of coaching is going to be so high because everyone’s going to have a great understanding of the discipline that innovation is just going to go to the next level.

“The coach of the future is very exciting,” Montemurro concludes.

“I won’t see it because I’m an old man, but definitely I’ll watch this space from the beach in my holiday home, wherever it is.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Colin Brett is a soccer analyst who spent time working for tracking company ChyronHego and betting analysis provider Football Radar. He noticed a gap in data coverage for players in the League of Ireland—it was “inaccurate at best,” he recalls—so he started building a platform to fill that void.

During the pandemic pause on sports, however, Brett recognized an even greater deficiency in the player development infrastructure, so he pivoted his startup, PlayerStatData, to address the Under-13 through Under-19 population. The target user is currently academy directors and player development coordinators, but Brett says further iterations will likely suit coaches and the athletes themselves.

The PlayerStatData app, which launched in the US and Canada earlier this month, seeks to provide objective performance data culled from video analysis, physical test results, a centralized library of coaching assessments and, crucially, a monitoring system for psychological and socio-economic insights.

“We want to see be a solution for all and to be an all-encompassing solution as well, which means that we want to be accessible, affordable and available to all clubs at all youth levels across the US and Canada,” says Brett, the CEO and co-founder of the Waterford, Ireland-based company. “And we want to give them the full picture of a player’s development.”

Context is critical. Family backgrounds and finances all play a role in player progression, especially in the North American pay-to-play model with costly club and travel teams representing an important pathway. Teenagers’ mental health and perspectives need to be considered, too.

“Coaches have become a lot more open to psychological output because, especially with the age that we’re looking, 13 to 19, there’s a lot going on physically and mentally with them at that age,” Brett says. “There’s a lot of stuff to understand with them too. So that’s where we want to get the best advice, because it’s important to get that right.”

For that, Brett has turned to Laura Finnegan, a lecturer in sport management at South East Technological University in Waterford, as an advisor. Her master’s thesis was in sports psychology, and her Ph.D. dissertation studied the organizational structure of talent development in Irish soccer. Finnegan has done research work on behalf of Uefa and US Soccer as well.

“It’s valuable everywhere to be able to see the player in the round,” she says. That 360-degree view, which PlayerStatData will incorporate piecemeal in future updates, is a novel approach to a market that does have several digital scouting video platforms, GPS wearables and new sensors already. “I really think that’s what’s going to set them apart,” Finnegan adds.

Malcolm Gladwell detailed in his book Outliers that a disproportionate number of NHL players were born in the early months—January, February and March—because the Canadian youth program cutoffs were at the start of the year, thus favoring the slightly older kids. Finnegan has noted similar patterns in academies in the United Kingdom and thus advocates for delayed selection of players because many physical skills don’t manifest until after puberty.

“It’s all stacked with boys that are our early maturers, and in the early years, all born earlier towards the cutoff as well,” she says of the academies. “That was one example of something that we could layer in so that you’re not just necessarily comparing Boy A with Boy B, but actually, you’re comparing boys with someone of the same maturity status as him. You’re trying to be fairer for those kids. For me, it’s just adding an extra lens for coaches.”

PlayerStatData has done some early work with the academy of Waterford FC, which competes in the League of Ireland’s First Division, and has attracted some early clients overseas such as Ottawa University Arizona, a nationally ranked NAIA program. PlayerStatData also sponsored a local Under-14 tournament where it did analysis for the participating teams, which included a team from the Blackburn Rovers, whose first team is one rung below the Premier League. Brett envisions a platform that’s truly customizable so that users can meet their needs no matter the staffing and resources.

“What’s useful is we did some bespoke design,” says Waterford FC academy director Mike Geoghegan. “So Colin sits down and asked me, what information am I looking for? What’s the sort of things that I want to track as a head coach? Because it may not be the same for every head of academy.”

For now, the PlayerStatData staff manually tags video and collects data, but computer vision algorithms developed in conjunction with professors at the local university are being developed. Brett wants that process automated within 18 months so that coaches only need to upload video into the app. “We want to get into a situation where it’s drag, drop, collect, and pick up the reports,” he says.

The Waterford academy, for instance, is staffed by part-time coaches who don’t always have the time to “extract and properly manage the data and draw insights from that data,” Geoghegan adds. “So I’m saying, I’ve got lots of recordings, lots of football, lots of coaches, but I’m not really getting this information in any way because it’s no one’s job.”

Brett sees the US and Canadian soccer systems as needing a tool like his to eliminate subjective coaching bias; the volume of players and vastness of geography make it hard for objective monitoring.

“It’s a bit of a wild west when it comes to pay-to-play and the sheer size of the market,” he says, adding: “There’s an openness to data, there’s an openness to finding that edge, it’s an openness to use a couple of innovations to get ahead, be that as a club or be as a player.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

“High performance doesn’t end with the players,” says Max Lankheit.

The San Jose Earthquakes’ Director of High Performance, who took the role in January this year having previously served as the team’s Head of Athletic Performance, is discussing his thoughts on where ‘high performance’ starts and ends with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“That was one of the things I wanted to change the moment I took charge of a department,” he continues. “High performance affects the entire organisation and it’s something we need to instil – not only in the high-performance department – because I think it’s a misconception that high performance only affects what’s happening on the field and the front office absorbs this just by association.”

The idea of holistic high performance is what drives our conversation around the usefulness of objectives and key results as a goal-setting framework for a sports organisation. “OKRs originated from Intel and Andy Grove (in its original form ‘output-based management’) and the concept was further developed into OKRs by John Doer with Google,” says Lankheit, who has piqued our interest through his work at San Jose.

For over an hour he describes the processes he has introduced to enable effective performance reviews across his high-performance team. His account is detailed, personal and laced with conviction but comes with a caveat.

“It’s important to understand that you cannot just do OKRs,” he says. “I’ve tried it twice in the past and both times I’ve failed miserably. It’s not to say that someone else couldn’t do it the first time but nobody I know has done an OKR implementation right the first time they do it; and I think you need to make those mistakes to understand what you could have done differently.”

Here, we delve further into Lankheit’s approach to performance reviews and the rationale behind his approach.

Results

Lankheit states that measuring staff performance and impact is difficult, but his efforts at San Jose are guided by five “imperatives”. “They are: clear vision, targets and commitments – individually as well as group-based – transparency, meaningful marketing, which translated into our environment means a player-centric approach and, finally, performance-oriented management.”

With those imperatives as the starting point, Lankheit explains that the objectives of an organisation are necessarily influenced by its vision but are not necessarily cascading down into the objectives of each department. He says: “Your department objective may change every 4-6 months, and for us right now, it’s ‘establish a seamlessly integrated player-care system’. This means that for this objective, every individual has certain key results that they need to hit. ‘Individuals’ in this case meaning the staff members of my department.”

Lankheit begins to illustrate his point with the hypothetical target of treatments administered per day by his staff (“a silly example but easy to comprehend”).

“At the beginning we sit together and say, ‘OK, we mutually agree that the result for you is to deliver ten treatments each day’. That’s the key result the staff member is committed to achieve and that’s going to be put into our management system so it can be tracked. It’s tangible and it’s quantitative – not qualitative – the qualitative aspect is the department objective, but the quantitative aspect is what each individual can provide because that is measurable. That’s important to me because either you achieve it or you don’t. You have a direct influence on that that nobody else has.”

The last point about the individual’s agency in delivering upon a key result is important. “Before I took over this department, bonuses were only connected to player availability,” adds Lankheit. “Now, you and I both know that player availability depends on so many factors that it’s out of our hands as a department.” A common enough example is a player selected to play a match against the recommendation of the high-performance department. “That’s why it’s important to me that we find performance measurements that are directly under the sole influence of that individual or department.”

Those measurements also provide the basis for review conversations that should take place in pre-determined timeframes, informally and formally. “And it’s not a perfect world because I currently underdeliver on this,” he admits. “I just had some performance reviews with my staff, and then you talk about, ‘OK. These were the deliverables and did you or did you not get there? If yes, awesome. Maybe the performance goal wasn’t hard enough, so maybe you should have delivered 15 treatments each day’. OK. Does it make sense to raise that or are you like, ‘actually, it didn’t have the impact that we expected, and I think we should focus on something else’?”

Lankheit then further breaks down key results into ‘commit’, ‘target’, and ‘stretch’. Ten treatments per day could be the commit and 12 could be the target. “I could say ‘this commit is the least I expect from you and if you don’t deliver on this then we’re going to have a very hard conversation about it because you committed because you had the resources, you thought hard enough, it can’t be on our end.’

“If you’re able to do the commit goal, the target is what you actually want to achieve but knowing that if you didn’t hit this you can say to me ‘this was the goal but I was unable to do it. I hit the commit but I didn’t do the target because I didn’t have enough resources from you. Or if we had another table, no problem, but the tables were always full’. Now they can come back to me and say there was a problem, which helps me to raise the bar as well.”

He continues: “The stretch goal is kind of a grey area where everything needs to fall into place for you to be able to do 15 treatments, for example”. Stretch goals are beyond an individual’s control. So then if you hit 15, we say ‘this is fantastic, you had a fantastic quarter, but I don’t expect it and the person also doesn’t expect it to happen.’ A coach might say ‘I wasn’t able to deliver more than those 12 treatments because we trained twice a day and there was a gym session in between, so there was no time for me in those two hours to do that’. So you need to change the whole structure to achieve that. Or ‘we had so many injured players that we had to focus on those guys. I couldn’t do treatments for injury prevention’. “Consequently, while ‘commit goals’ are under the sole influence of each individual, ‘target goals’, and ‘stretch goals’ might need contributions from co-workers, disciplines, or even departments.” Hence, by doing so Lankheit embeds cross-functional, interdisciplinary collaboration into his people and performance management.

“That offers me the opportunity to go outside of the department and go, ‘OK, this is what we need to do as an organisation. We have a structure problem here. If we really want to do better then we have to do this’. That helps me to manage upwards and outside of the department.”

Values and traits

Under Lankheit’s Leadership San Jose’s Performance Department also lives by certain values and he assesses how his staff deliver on those values. “Was it ‘sometimes’, was it ‘consistently’, was it ‘most of the time’ or was it ‘always’? I don’t have to give an example for ‘always’ or ‘most of the time’ because then a person knows if they’re doing the right thing,” he says. “But the moment it is just ‘sometimes’ or ‘consistently’ then I will have to give examples where I’ll say ‘look, this is where you didn’t deliver when you had the chance to, but you didn’t’. Or ‘we have six core values in our department and you didn’t deliver on this one’. One aspect is the pure performance side and another is how culturally the person delivered on the promise of ‘this is what we stand for’ from a personal or overall cultural perspective.

Lankheit will also assess his staff based on four traits: problem-solving, execution, thought leadership, and emerging leadership. He says: “It’s the same with the values – ‘never demonstrate it’, ‘sometimes demonstrate it’, ‘consistently demonstrate it’ and so on – that way you do that development right there as people will say ‘this is a companion area I need to improve on’.

“We can say, for example, ‘in this performance review we identified that you are a thought leader but you are not showing emerging leadership skills, meaning you’re a fantastic individual contributor but it’s now on you to lead others’. Two different things. ‘People come to you because they know you’re the best at what you do, but you have to proactively go out there because you are a subject matter expert. Then you need to reach out to others to ask how what I do can make you do your job better?’ That comes from those reviews and then we work on that.

“We essentially take one main goal out of what we identified of those four traits that is the most important to work on in the next four months. It may also be the following four months as well, but that’s how we balance it out to personal development. Now, if emerging leadership is the one thing we want to work on in the next four months, that means I need you to take part ownership of someone else’s results. Now you need to demonstrate that you can support that person.”

At that stage, the conversation may return to commit goals and target goals. “Values and traits work hand in hand with goal setting. That’s also why the constant communication of meeting once a day, even for two minutes, to say something like ‘there was a chance where you could have done that – does it make sense to you? ‘Yes’. ‘Perfect. Next time I want you to jump in on that.’ I am always encouraging my staff to take responsibility. I would like them to do everything they do without me being there. They should be thinking ‘what is Max’s job here anyways?’

“We also have 360 reviews. I get the feedback from my employees. The employees each get one from me and also get to nominate one or two people, depending on how big the department is, that they want to be evaluated by, peer to peer. I don’t like the fact that I, as manager choose a person to evaluate you – I think it’s more helpful if that person nominates somebody that they want to evaluate them. Obviously, if they nominate their brother and I say ‘I don’t want your brother to evaluate you’, they understand, but generally, at least in our department, they would choose somebody who’s not necessarily their closest peer because they want that feedback.”

Removing subjectivity

In concluding his thoughts on how he is working to make staff assessments more effective, Lankheit once again emphasises the value in setting tangible goals. “It takes the subjectivity out of it,” he says. “If there’s tangible goals, I have nothing to argue. If you’ve delivered on a certain result, behaviour, or trait, you did it, so you deserve your bonus. We in pro sport live in a result-driven world. If someone doesn’t reach it the person has to tell me why. There might be a explanation that’s reasonable, but otherwise it’s just me saying ‘I think you should have done more or I think you didn’t deliver on that.’ It leaves room for this discontentment and resentment in your staff because they could always say ‘it’s because you don’t like me’ or ‘it’s just your perception. You never spend time with me, you’re always in the gym or at training. You only see me once a week so how does that make you the judge of the other 200 times I’m in contact with the player?’ With that embedded objectivity you take it out.

“The other thing, the cultural component, is subjective, which is why I need to bring examples. If I don’t bring examples, then there’s no point in me bringing it up in the first place. It also helps to create that feedback loop mindset in your employees as well because they’re doing the exact same thing. They’re not setting me targets but they’re evaluating me as well, so they understand it.”

Lankheit also ensures that staff members are given a copy of their review a day or two ahead of their appointment. “I give them my review 24 to 48 hours beforehand so that they have time to digest and think about my feedback instead of getting it on the fly and potentially reacting out of emotion. They have time to blow off steam if they don’t agree, they have time to reflect and come up with objective objections, if they disagree.”

It is not, however, intended as an exercise in micromanagement. “Everyone’s had micromanagers in the past,” he says with disdain. “It is important to get out of people’s ways and let them do their best work. When something is on my table, there has to be a good reason it ends up there otherwise I trust the fact that you’ll do the best job you can, you’re committed to your key results, so now you execute on them. Then we can have a conversation if you didn’t meet them and then I can jump in if you feel you need help from me. Otherwise, go and do the best job. I hated the micromanagement aspect of it when I was in certain roles and I think that’s why I am trying to be hands off.”

If anyone would like to discuss Max’s approach to OKRs and performance reviews, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch with Cameron Macdonald

Thierry Henry, an assistant coach with the Belgium men’s national team, wants to help players to develop what he calls their “camera”.

“I know it might sound strange, but people always wonder about the best camera they can buy,” he said. “You have it – it’s your brain.”

The former France international, who played for clubs including Arsenal, Barcelona and New York Red Bulls, was talking at the Leaders Sport Business Summit, which took place at London’s Twickenham Stadium last month, in his capacity as an investor in the virtual reality [VR] platform Rezzil.

The aim of the company is to augment the way players train in the modern era – from professionals in top-flight club and international games to the grassroots level. Rezzil’s suite of offerings ranges from their Player collection, which helps remove the barriers to entry from training, such as access to facilities or coaches, to their Index series, which compiles data collected from virtual drills to help identify player characteristics. With a particular focus on developing the ‘cognitive fitness’ of elite players, the platform has garnered interest and investment from other former players including Gary Neville and Vincent Kompany

“You have some players that will see stuff that some players will not see,” added Henry. “I always say your eyes are useless if your mind is blank. It’s something you can work on.”

Henry, who is widely considered to be one of the most cerebral footballers of his generation, described himself as a “thinker of the game.” He said: “You will often have a coach that will tell you how to make you faster, make you stronger and whatnot along those lines, but it’s rare that you can have someone to tell you how to make you smarter and help that muscle memory that you have.”

VR has its early adopters but there is still considerable resistance across the game. “People have to be more open to accept it. It’s tough to say to someone ‘your brain doesn’t function well’ – in brackets I want to say I’m talking about the game not talking about life.”

Henry retired from playing in 2014 after having won the World Cup, Euros, Champions League, English Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga and France’s Ligue 1 amongst numerous other honours during his 20-year playing career. He is also Arsenal men’s record scorer with 228 goals.

He began coaching Arsenal men’s under-15s in 2015 and, a year later, became an assistant coach with Belgium under Roberto Martínez. The Red Devils would go on to finish third at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Henry then took head coaching roles at another of his former clubs, AS Monaco, and at Montreal Impact, before making his return to Martínez’s coaching ticket at Belgium in 2021. The team are once again tipped to do well at next month’s World Cup in Qatar.

Inevitably, in the past seven years, there have been times when Henry has worked with players who were not blessed with the skillset he possessed as player. He told the audience that coaches must have empathy when highlighting a player’s shortcomings, let alone issues with their in-game cognition. “When you challenge someone about what they see and what they do and how smart or not they are, it can be hurtful at times,” he admits.

Stimulating the brain

Henry emphasised that it is important for coaches to make players think. “I played with players, and I won’t name names, but you ask them why they make that pass and they don’t even know,” he said. “[They say] ‘I don’t know. I saw a player and I passed the ball’. ‘Did we have an overload or did we have an underload?’. ‘I don’t know’. ‘You passed the ball on the side when there was one Arsenal player against four. If you turn the other way, we were on an overload. Why?’.”

VR can help a player repeat a scenario they played out at training. “You [can] ask players in their room, not only on the field, to recreate a scene that they played in the morning; option A, option B, option C or whatever it is. ‘Why did you pass the ball there?’ ‘We had an overload so it’s obvious’. ‘Well done’.

“Some players pass the ball because it’s blue and blue,” he said with a tone of bemusement. “So what’s the point behind it? There’s got to be a purpose when you pass the ball.”

This mentality was installed in Henry when he was an undergraduate at France’s fabled Clarefontaine academy. The teenage Henry was fast but some of his other skills were deemed underdeveloped. “All I had was my speed, so my gift, but I had a coach called Joaquim Francisco Filho, a Brazilian coach, that was giving me tasks when I was young. So he used to tell me before a game: ‘Thierry, today you can not use your speed’ and I looked at him and said ‘are you mad? That’s my thing. Why are you taking my gift away?’ And he said ‘because one day you’re going to meet someone that is as fast as you – how can you beat him?’ I started to think ‘I need to move better’. I was fast but I was never going to be gone; like if you’re fast you’re fast, if you’re tall you’re tall, but he was challenging me and stimulating me. We were also in a special school, I have to say. The way they were thinking was different.

“As a striker, you’re always [with your] back to the goal and the challenge one time was that you cannot pass the ball back. Then how am I supposed to play if I cannot pass the ball back? But suddenly you stand in free quarters and you try to find space so that you can turn; you start to understand space better, running the line better, seeing things better. Speed was always there and if you can now have what we were talking about with Rezzil, to develop and stimulate your brain, after you have people along the way that think about winning. That coach who thought about winning thought about stimulating my brain and developing my brain. It was very important that I took it on board and it never left me since.”

Contactless reps

“As a player, I didn’t want to miss training because I didn’t want to miss the tactical part of it and what we were supposed to work on,” said Henry of memories of his own injuries and periods of rehabilitation.

VR has the potential to enable athletes in rehabilitation to reduce their risk of collisions or impacts. “So suddenly you go out there but you can’t really hit the ball,” he continued. “At one point the ball comes to you and you hit it and you’re like ‘why did you hit it?’ It’s just a reaction, the ball comes and you hit it, so maybe if you stay in the room [a rehabilitation facility at the training ground], they replay the training session to you, and even if the ball comes at one point you know what you have to do the day after, the week after, how long it’s going to be. I think it’s important for you to work tactically without getting injured.”

Similarly, Henry argues that you can learn to head the ball more effectively but without the need for endless physical repetition. “We don’t have a helmet and it does hurt,” said Henry, who was never a great header of the ball. “You can learn about how to head the ball without going too far in the repetition.”

As moderator Karthi Gnanasegaram brought the session to a close, Henry suggested that VR could be used to inculcate tactics at a team level. “You’re the coach and you’re behind them, you’re amongst them and we’re in the room and you tell them on the morning of the game, ‘no, a bit more on the left, a bit more on the right, you go, you squeeze’. instead of doing that on the field you can do that in a big conference room at a hotel. That type of thing can be a great advantage for any coach.”

The pressure of a game scenario may never be adequately recreated, but VR can permit the reps to build familiarity with the situation and the muscle memory to execute the moves in competition. “When you arrive in a situation [in a game], how would you handle it without losing your mind?” asked Henry rhetorically.

“This is why it’s important to see with your mind and not with your eyes.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Ali Krieger has starred for the US women’s national team for most of the past 15 years. She was a member of two World Cup-winning squads, starting every match as a defender during its 2011 runner-up finish and 2015 title run and made three appearances during the 2019 tournament. In all, Krieger has 108 caps and was named to CONCACAF’s Women’s Team of the Decade for 2011–2020.

A two-time All-American at Penn State in 2005 and ‘06, Krieger then began her long professional career. In addition to playing five seasons in Germany, Krieger has been with the NWSL since its inception, spending time with the Washington Spirit, Orlando Pride and now Gotham FC. She and her wife, fellow USWNT veteran Ashlyn Harris, were acquired in the offseason by Gotham, whose general manager, Yael Averbuch West, is a former teammate.

Krieger recently partnered with social sports platform Strava, which launched a new “Strive for More” campaign. The accompanying pledge seeks to garner support and visibility around equitable sport for female athletes and teams. Strava is contributing $1 million over the next three years toward the cause.

On joining Strava’s ‘Strive for More’ campaign . . .

Strava reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to come on board and be an ambassador as a professional female athlete to help spread the word about ‘Strive for More’ and the pledge and their campaign that they’re leading—which has been really incredible for females, for allies, for supporters, fans, friends and family all over the world. As you know, Strava can connect globally and not just within our country, which is incredible, and we all need the support.

I immediately wanted to help and get on board with the pledge and the whole sporting community to pledge their support for more equity in women’s sports. This cross-promotion of me being a footballer and talking about ‘Strive for More’ in other female sports and with other athletes has been pretty incredible.

On her goals for the pledge . . .

I want to see more people wanting to watch women’s sports, supporting women’s sports, putting money where their mouth is and really giving women what they deserve because they endure just as much emotional, physical, mental energy as our male counterparts. We deserve to be seen and be heard and get what we deserve.

On the example of the USWNT’s equal pay fight . . .

It was a great foundation for other sports to get involved and other companies—for example, Strava—to support female athletes and their fight for equity and equality and respect. That was just a great foundation for us to want to help women in general. It wasn’t just about us as a soccer team and our sport specifically and within our country; it was fighting for women in general, across all industries, all sports.

I think we really started this massive wave of female athletes wanting more for themselves and being more confident in those types of discussions. To fight for more equity and money and sponsorships and all the things within their contracts with their employers, but also with their agencies and their teams or clubs or organizations. It wasn’t just a fight selfishly for us, as soccer players and a team. It was a fight for all women, across all industries, to really amp up everyone’s confidence in fighting for what they deserve for doing the same amount of work as anyone else and just getting the resources that individuals need to perform their best no matter what they’re doing.

On how standards are evolving in the NWSL . . .

Slowly. The work will never be done. Most importantly, we have to constantly fight for what we deserve and what the standard is. We actually hold a high standard, both on and off the field, and I think a lot of female athletes do or else they wouldn’t be in the position that they’re in, at the levels that they’re at. Now it’s really focusing on the club level. For the NWSL, it has been 10 years, and it still somewhat feels like we’re behind. So, we do have to continue within our own organizations at each club in the NWSL—there are 12 clubs—and then within our teams and then get our younger players to jump on board and say, you need to have a voice, you need to continue to carry this baton to fight for your generation in order to get more.

I think the club level is definitely still at a level where it could be a lot better, so the standard yet isn’t as high. We’re continuing to do that as a collective group, which you saw in 2020 and last year, as well—coming together as a group in fighting for each other and the conditions that we have and that we have to deal with day in and day out within the organizations and the cities that we play in. Once again, along with the ‘Strive for More’ campaign and being an ambassador for Strava and their strong message; even at the club levels, this will help the equity, the inclusion and the demand to give women more for what work they’re putting it.

On playing for former USWNT teammate Yael Averbuch West at Gotham FC . . .

I feel like it’s so beneficial when you have an athlete that has been through the trenches and has been through the grind and can now be in a position of power to fight for us, to have a better understanding of what we need to, one, keep us happy and, two, to perform our best every single day. And then, on game day, perform in order to get three points and win. So that’s what is needed: former players and people who have been through that experience because some people don’t really understand unless you’ve really been through it. She’s in such a great position for us.

She’s actually a good friend of Ashlyn and I. So I want her to succeed in the position that she’s in. We have a really great relationship in kind of telling her, ‘Hey, things could be this way, maybe we can put this on the list of how we can make this better.’ We’re kind of her eyes and ears as well, and I really enjoy that.

We want to see her succeed and the club succeed, not only ourselves as individuals, the team, but we want to continue to fight. So it’s not just at the national team level that we’re using our voice. It’s now within the organizations that we’re playing at the club level.

On her use of training tech . . .

We all have a GPS tracker, and then we have a heart rate monitor that we wear every day so that they can see the numbers and [see] if you’re maybe running a little too much or a little too hard a few days before the game where you have to be 100% fit. So they’re constantly watching. They have an iPad out there. They watch your numbers constantly throughout the training sessions. So if you need to do more, you stay and you do a little more after practice.

But it’s really beneficial for us, especially after games [when] you see where your heat map was on the field and then the energy that you’ve obviously played in, to be able to mark like, ‘Okay, how many days do you need rest in order to continue to keep that standard just as high for the next match?’ And then they actually have numbers to go off of when we say, ‘Hey, I’m feeling actually really good today, or I’m actually super tired.’ They can check the numbers to see how much you’ve run that past game or training session to make sure that everybody is fully set and injury-free going into every season.

On the importance of recovery . . .

Our job is a 24-hour job because recovery is huge. People say, ‘Well you only work two or three hours a day.’ I’m like, ‘No, I work 24 hours a day because you have to spend that extra time making sure you recovered so that you’re able to be 100% the next session.’ I do have a Whoop to keep track of all that information, which was good because I had sleep [data] on there, too. It was good to compare it with some of your friends or teammates.

On her use of Strava . . .

I downloaded the app right away when they reached out, and I’ve been a participant so far. Because of Whoop, we have our Fit for 90 app, and we have all these other apps that we use for soccer that definitely will be a go-to for me when I’m done playing and I don’t have to report on our NWSL soccer app. And we also have an app for the national team. So there’s a lot of apps, and they know exactly what we do all day. So [Strava] will be on my phone and very accessible for once I’m done playing and retired in the next year or so. And I can use the Strava app to stay active and to stay motivated and to stay supporting women and female athletes all over the world.

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

The Big Interview brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Joe Montemurro how coaching in both the English and the Italian languages has influenced the way he thinks about football.

“It hasn’t changed my ideas and the way I think about the game, it’s probably more how I deliver the message,” says the Head Coach of Juventus Women.

Montemurro has more than two decades of coaching experience under his belt, including successful spells at Melbourne City in his native Australia and at Arsenal Women in the English Women’s Super League.

Then, in the summer of 2021, he jumped at the chance to take the reins at Juventus Women in Turin, Italy. It offered Montemurro a return to his family’s homeland, a place where he has deep roots and a strong affinity.

“It was just the right job at the right time, I felt, with family here, my ability to culturally understand the day to day aspects of living in Italy, which was important. And like I’m an Arsenal fan I’m a Juventus fan too, so it’s another string to the bow.”

Learning the landscape

How has going from Arsenal to Juventus changed how Montemurro coaches? “I’ve coached in English and Italian since my arrival, probably some days more in Italian. It’s finding that happy balance,” he says. “So while my ideas haven’t really changed there’s a lot more design, even in my training session structure, as it might get lost in translation so it’s better that I show it on the park. It’s probably even made me better as a coach because I’ve been a lot more detailed and a lot more thorough in terms of organising the sessions so that everyone understands them and feels they can be part of it. I can adapt if I see something is not working. It’s obviously harder with the communication scenario but it’s probably made me grow as I’ve been more detailed in making sure we’ve got all the options covered.”

Bringing clarity to his communication has been Montemurro’s most obvious coaching challenge, particularly given the high level of existing understanding amongst his largely Italian playing group. “Their base education is quite astonishing,” he says, “and there seems to be a lot more focus on structure, on tactics, and ideas of the team.”

He explains that there are cultural contrasts too, such as in the ways that Italian players express their passion compared with their Australian or English counterparts. But, as he says: “In the end, the leader has to be clever in ensuring the messages are clear and translated in a balanced and sincere way.”

There are also differences in the work culture. “The culture is very hierarchical. There’s the head coach and the assistant coach and you sort of have to go through a process to get to me, which hasn’t sat well with me – I open the door to my office so you can come in all the time – they’re very hierarchical and respectful, which I think comes from the typical Italian family setup.

“The other thing that’s quite interesting is that I am one for saying if you’ve finished your job you should go home and get out of here because obviously football isn’t a nine to five job. But a lot of them would stay to simply show me that they’re here and I’ve tried to change that.”

Montemurro is also honing his ability to manage upwards. “I wanted to learn the political landscape of football in Italy and that of Juventus. I need to know who the people are who will get things done. It’s understanding the mechanisms of the way it works politically,” he says. “But I haven’t changed my style or ideas, it’s just having that understanding of where things fit in, and where things are, and understanding historically where we’ve come from so we don’t make those mistakes again or so we can use those things for the betterment of the group.”

Instilling belief

Juventus Women was founded in 2017 and has won Serie A in each of its five season’s competing in Italy’s top tier, including an unbeaten campaign last season. The next step is maintaining that dominance at home as the teams around Juve strengthen as well as competing and making further inroads in the Uefa Women’s Champions League.

The club’s Sporting Director, Stefano Braghin, saw Montemurro, whom he met when Juventus played a practice match with Arsenal during their WSL title-winning 2018-19 season, as a missing piece of the jigsaw.

“It’s a different project here” says Montemurro, who spent four years at Arsenal. “Juventus is a project of growth in Europe, but it’s also a project of growth in Italy. Yeah, the club still wants to maintain that level in Serie A, but now it needs to be doing what it needs to do in Europe.”

He also wants to play a role in the growth of Italian women’s football, the top tier of which is fully professional for the first time during this 2022-23 season. “I want to create something that a lot of clubs can use as a template to say ‘this is how we will grow and get better so the game grows’.”

Last term, Montemurro’s team dominated at home and emerged from a tough group in the Champions League that contained English champions Chelsea and German side Wolfsburg, both of whom would go on to claim their respective domestic titles last season. Juventus drew at home to the Germans and claimed a famous victory in Wolfsburg. They also held Chelsea to a goalless draw in London, another eye-catching result that would help to secure their route to the quarter-finals.

Eventual champions Lyon would eliminate Juve over two legs but it was a creditable campaign, especially given that Juve shook off an early defeat to Chelsea in Turin to progress from the group.

At the outset, however, Montemurro noticed an inferiority complex in his players. It may have been born from the collective memory of heavy defeats in the past. “My players just felt inferior,” he says. “It was just ‘we’re not good enough, we’re inferior, we’re just not to that level’. Slowly it was just about helping them to believe. I would say, ‘you are at that level, you can do the same. There will be games that you lose and games where you win, that’s just how it is, but the reality is that we did it on the park’.

“We did it every day on the park and what I would do is, in the introduction of the way we wanted to play, the things we wanted to do, I would just show them, ‘you’ve done it. You’ve played out from the back. We’ve created these goal-scoring opportunities’ and it reignited the idea that ‘you are Juventus, most of you are playing for your national team, why are you so scared of Chelsea or Wolfsburg? They are in the same position as you’. I made them believe, ‘hey, we’re going to go out there, we’re going to play our style of football; the style’s going to be important for gauging where we’re at and you’ll see that you can be competitive with the likes of Lyon, Wolfsburg and Chelsea’.”

It remains a work in progress but he can see the difference, even in training. “In pre-season, just to give you a simple example, just doing rondos. When I got here last year that ball’s going out and people couldn’t even put two passes together; a simple 5 v 2 or 4 v 2 in a square. Now it’s second nature like they’re drinking a coffee. They’ve seen it themselves, they’ve seen the improvement, technically, tactically, but also mindset and believe going into these games.

“The good thing about it is that Serie A this year will be very competitive. Inter have invested, Roma have invested, Milan have invested, they’ve all brought in some big players. So we’re going to be up against it.” It is going to make Juve’s life harder at home but, as he admits, it will also force Montemurro and his players to ensure they are good enough to stay ahead of the pack. “It has to go that way.”

Balancing challenge and support

Montemurro explains that the strong links between Juventus’ academy and its first team have smoothed the transition of his younger players into their first-team environment. There are, however, steps he can take as Head Coach to ease that process even further.

“The first thing to do is to give them the opportunity to make mistakes,” he says. “So it’s OK that you made a mistake, you can make errors. That’s fine. They shouldn’t feel overawed. So get them to find a level of comfort to be who they are, that’s the first thing.

“The second thing is that it takes a bit of time to get used to the high tempo rhythm. The rhythm and intensity is just a little bit higher and that’s when they start to shine. Once they get used to the tempo and the rhythm of the way we do things, then usually they can relax and start to play. So one of the first things I told them is that it’s going to take time to get used to the tempo and you can make mistakes.

“The third thing is then getting used to the attention to detail, whether they’re in the gym or on the park because maybe in youth or academy level they were able to get away with things, the attention to detail is very important whether you’re doing a squat in the gym or you need to receive the ball so that the next pass is quick. That attention to detail is difficult and the problem is they focus so much on the detail that they probably make more errors because they’re not up to the tempo. It works hand in hand. You’ve got to assess it in a realistic time frame. If you expect young kids to come in and kill it straight away it doesn’t work like that. It’s about understanding where they’re at. It’s an exciting time for young players because there’s a lot happening and there’s a lot of talented players out there.”

How does he get to the bottom of what makes them tick? “That’s the job of the leader and coach, to find out what triggers them – what are the words or the phrases or the visuals that they need? The funny thing is that it sort of happens organically by just going up to a player and asking, ‘how did you find it?’ Some of them will say ‘yeah good, no problems’ and you know they’re the ones that you probably have to back off and give them more visual info. And during a session, you might go and ask a player ‘how did it go?’ and it’ll start a discussion with you and you work out, ‘OK, maybe I’d better show her some visuals, we’d better just get down to the heart of a couple of bits and pieces’.

“I think that’s one of the most important jobs in modern sports leadership. Just to understand what communication level is needed to affect the player and what they want. They’re all different. Some are on the pitch learners, some of them just don’t get it and need visuals on the computer screen drawn, some of them don’t even want to be spoken to.”

The growth of the women’s game has seen the demands on the players away from the pitch increase concurrently. “We’ve got all these things now which, unfortunately or fortunately – I’m not sure where to go with that one – is starting to take precedent, starting to take focus off what our core work is and that’s why there’s this return to football. ‘Is that related to the way we want to do things? That’s not related to the way we want to do things. Let’s park that and get back to what we need to do’. It’s a difficult one because we don’t know where all this other stuff is going.”

Nevertheless, Montemurro wants Juventus to be in the vanguard. “I hope the game continues to innovate, I hope we coaches continue to innovate, be creative and challenge each other and I want to be challenged by coaches, I want to be challenged by everyone around me, and I hope we keep challenging each other instead of being a little more guarded about what we do.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece, the conclusion to our soccer series, looks at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts. You can read Part 1 on the growth of digital video here and Part 2 on how access to physical data has improved here.

Playermaker’s very first client in the United Kingdom was Fulham FC. This was a big get: Fulham had recently earned promotion to the Premier League for the 2018-19 season.

But there was a problem. Just two weeks after implementing the shoe-worn sensors, Fulham called Playermaker and said, “Your data is not reliable. It’s bad data.”

Someone from Playermaker’s team paid the club a visit where the Fulham coaches conceded that the day was “generally okay but look at this player: it’s abnormal. There’s no way he has so many touches and that he’s dribbling like this.”

“We’re looking at this, and the data is legit,” recalls CEO Guy Aharon of 16-year-old Harvey Elliott’s preternatural ball handling. “And he became the youngest player ever to play a Premier League game.”

Harvey Elliott’s impressive data from Playermaker’s shoe-worn sensors was initially thought to be a glitch.

The world of soccer data is evolving rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital video, the growing accessibility of physical data inputs and now the introduction new devices and datapoints. Sensors such as Playermaker—which proffer physical data and, in a first, also metrics evaluating technical skills—are gaining a foothold in the scouting process, even if there’s a requisite learning curve to make sense of this new information.

Other new areas of information gathering include analysis of biomechanics using only smartphone cameras from AiScout and JuniStat, the democratized collection of physical data from SkillCorner and Track160, and the application of advanced algorithms to assess a player’s fit in varying tactical styles from SmarterScout and StatsBomb. Even the evaluation of the evaluators is being considered by thoughtful organizations such as 360 Scouting.

Players are getting more control of and context from their data from apps like BreakAway Data, which seeks to help prospects gain commensurate scouting interest for their talent. Presenting more true markers of talent helps minimize the need for multimedia skills in crafting highlight reels in hopes it reaches the right evaluator.

“Contrasting those is a very manual process, and making yourself stand out is based on selecting some good clips and being lucky if the right person looks at it,” says Ben Smith, Chelsea Football Club’s Head of Research and Innovation who also heads BreakAway’s international business. “But data has the ability to genuinely actually contrast you to people in a way that gives you, I think, a much higher percentage opportunity of actually being seen because it’s a marker of talent, rather than creativity in how you put together a CV or a visualization of who you are.”

Global soccer already suffers from the chasm between the haves and have-nots financially, but the gulf between clubs using advanced methods of scouting will contribute to the talent gap. The existence of scouting innovation doesn’t necessarily mean widespread adoption.

“People would be shocked if they saw the behind the scenes of Europe in terms of the way these clubs are run, not just from an operational standpoint, but from a sophistication,” says Jordan Gardner, Co-Owner and Managing Partner of Denmark’s FC Helsingør as well as an investor in England’s Swansea City and Ireland’s Dundalk FC. “So many decisions on recruitment are still made like, ‘I’m gonna go call my buddy, who’s an agent.’”

* * * * *

Data paired with video leads to visibility

Every year, the Reliance Foundation Young Champs, a five-star residential soccer academy in Navi Mumbai, scours India for the best 12 year-old players, offering them five-year scholarships to live and train at the academy. It’s a multi-pronged process of scouting trials all culminating in what’s a life-changing opportunity. Nine of the 10 players in its first graduating class two years ago received contracts to play professionally in the Indian Super League.

When the pandemic struck, however, RFYC had no ability to go see any young players in action. It sought help from a small London-based startup, AiScout, which uses Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking computer vision technology to assess the physical movements of players.

From May to December, RFYC invited youth players to complete drills through the AiScout app. That helped whittle down the player pool to 400 who were invited to a regional trial. Eventually, the academy signed 19 players; AiScout was not the sole factor, of course, but 16 had participated in the virtual trials.

AiSCOUT is an AI-based platform that pro clubs are using to scout and develop amateur players based on uploaded data.

“Reliance Foundation actually found four players that weren’t even playing organized football,” says Richard Felton-Thomas, AiScout’s COO and Director of Sport Science. “They were just in rural areas, so scouts wouldn’t naturally find those anyways. That was a great test for the mobile phone as a system.”

The genesis of the app can be traced to the experience of Founder and CEO Darren Peries. After his son was cut from Tottenham’s academy, scouts from other clubs began calling him for more information. Peries had nothing to share outside a few mobile phone videos of varying quality.

“It just baffled him: here was a multi-billion pound industry,” Felton-Thomas says. “How can we sign a player for 100 million at 21 years old when, if they’re 18 or less, we’ve got almost next to nothing on them?”

Digital video was growing more available, but its analysis can be hindered when there’s limited information about the opponent and the level of competition. AiScout, a member of FIFA’s innovation program, entered as a source of objective data by tracking 21 points on the body, benchmarking the abilities of players at every level and every league and computing a National Rating Score.

Amateur players can upload videos and data to trial for a Premier League club.

Two Premier League Clubs, Burnley and Chelsea, have been involved as early partners. Just as Tonsser began assembling showcase teams based on user-submitted videos, AiScout used its data to select 24 players to compete against Burnley’s U18 academy team; the game ended in a 2-2 draw. An additional four players were deemed exceptional and invited for weeklong trials at Burnley. Across the entire soccer ecosystem, more than 20,000 users have submitted information to AiScout with 64 players who have been trialed, signed or recruited.

“The nature of talent development can be a bit random,” says Chelsea’s Smith. “So if we can have a technology to work at scale across vast areas, then that our scope and our reach is potentially very substantial.”

JuniStat is a Russian-founded app now based in the US and Chile that seeks to do the same, with a user base of 40,000 users, mostly from Eastern Europe and Latin America with a strong growth market in Africa. Co-founder Gleb Shaportov says there are now 21 pro clubs using the app with most of the players between the ages of 10 and 15.

Shaportov says JuniStat validated its technology with the Russian Football Union and has started the process of doing the same with Fifa this fall. “Directly from the smartphone, we can detect the skeleton of the player, and based on thousands of kids of the same age in our database, we are immediately tracking their performance. We get complex raw data from them, we analyze it and then we present the results to the user in an easy to understand and usable way.”

AiScout is working to create a mobile performance lab with additional technologies to gather physical data and is working with Chelsea as an R&D partner on cognitive testing and psychometric awareness. “Attention, spatial awareness, vision, or speed of processing—these types of things that you can, let’s say, ‘footballize,’” Felton-Thomas says.

The AiScout app is free for players, while scouts and clubs subscribe for access. Felton-Thomas says the mission is to create “an access-for-all, objective approach to talent identification,” no matter one’s hometown or finances. Results in the app can help secure a tryout or invitation to a showcase. “You’re going to have to prove yourself from there,” he says, “but we can get that visibility.”

* * * * *

Playing style metrics key tool for teams

Thiago Almada began playing for a local soccer club in his native Argentina at age four. He made his professional debut at age 16. By the time he was 18, in March 2020, and starting for Vélez Sarsfield, an AI-powered service called SmarterScout had flagged his Premier League potential, noting his skills in retaining the ball, winning ground duels and scoring.

Interest from major European powers in the Premier League, LaLiga and Ligue 1 all followed, with Manchester United and Manchester City among those reportedly in hottest pursuit. Almada instead opted for Atlanta United, signing for an MLS-record $16 million transfer fee.

A similar trajectory followed Almada’s countryman Julián Álvarez, whose performance at River Plate drew attention from the SmarterScout platform and later preceded a move to Man City. His data drew a “pretty stunning” resemblance to that of superstar Kevin de Bruyne and, the analysis concludes, “why Alvarez may be a better fit in the Premier League—and especially at Manchester City—than his physical attributes might suggest.”

SmarterScout is the work of Daniel Altman, a Harvard-educated economist who has been a soccer analytics consultant for Premier League and MLS clubs. The fully-automated platform ingests event data from 60 global leagues, enriches them algorithmically and then evaluates how well a player would fit in another league.

This type of data application is showing dividends at all levels of the sport. Popular analytics provider StatsBomb has more than 150 client clubs from the Champions League on down to the fifth division of English soccer—but it has fewer clients at the lower level than before.

Last season, three of the four clubs in England’s fourth division, League Two, to achieve promotion to League One were all clients of StatsBomb. A fourth team reached the playoffs but narrowly failed to advance.

“We were told at some point that that would never happen: it’s too far down, they won’t want to spend budget on that,” StatsBomb Founder Ted Knutson says. “And obviously I’m a CEO and I’m a salesperson of this stuff, but the fact is, that surprised me.”

From those clubs on up to the Champions League clients, everyone receives the same data. “They get offered the same stuff,” Knutson says. “It’s a bit of a democratization of data science.” StatsBomb’s platform helps to make bespoke additions to a roster, helping avoid what Knutson has described as clubs building a “Frankenstein monster of a squad.”

He adds, “It’s not just counting numbers of how many tackles did this person make: ‘Are they positionally correct on a regular basis? Are they used to playing in a high line because we need guys that are comfortable in our tactical system that we’re definitely not going to change? We have this manager for another three years—we really like him—so we want a center back that fits in with him, as opposed to us going out and finding what we thought is the best center back in the market.’”

Firms like SmarterScout and StatsBomb are building on top of event data, a record of key moments in the match that are typically relegated to what happens around the ball: shots, passes, tackles and so forth. The tracking data that encompasses player speeds and distances is much harder to come by, which is where SkillCorner has found a niche extracting that dataset from broadcast.

“We’re still very much at the top end at the moment, but we have a lot of interest coming from academies,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “The challenge when you get to that part of the market is the way that the video is filmed, the way it’s captured, the way it’s shot, is inconsistent compared to the professional level. Once you get into the academy structure, the position of the cameras, the vertical height, the horizontal distance from the field, the type of the cameras—is it manual operator or is it going to be smart cameras, Pixellot or Veo or Spiideo? And it’s just so much variation.”

SkillCorner is working on adapting its algorithms to meet that need while also teasing an evolution in analysis that will eclipse that information. Neilson says his team is developing its own set of next-level analytics to quantify defensive pressure on the ball, field awareness, the ability to find open space and more.

“To be honest, this is more important than physical data, because this is really about gaining intelligence and decision making,” Neilson says. “It’s not just the legs and how much they run. It’s the brain behind the athlete as well. And I think this potentially is the next big breakthrough for scouting and recruitment.”

* * * * *

Using video and data to scout the scouts

A decade ago, Marco van der Heide was an attacking midfielder for Cambuur, which at the time competed in Netherlands’ second division. Over parts of two seasons, van der Heide scored four goals in 16 matches, but a bad concussion prematurely ended his professional career.

When he had recovered, Cambuur hired van der Heide as a video scout, specializing in opposition analysis. The head coach then joined the staff at AZ Alkmaar—best known in the US as the club Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane has advised and invested in—and brought his former player with him.

On the side, van der Heide began collaborating with Sander IJtsma, a surgeon by day and proprietor of data-driven soccer analysis site 11tegen11 by night. Their video and data skills were a good combination but, noting the demands of IJtsma’s occupation and his interest in growing more quickly, van der Heide started his own video scouting company, 360 Scouting. And he set out to change the way the industry hires its evaluators.

“A lot of clubs still, very strangely, select scouts for their club because most of the times they are players who used to play at the club,” van der Heide says. “This is how I came in at Cambuur as a video analyst, but after that, I also showed that I had the required quality. But I wouldn’t have had this opportunity if I wouldn’t have played the club—which is good for me, but actually kind of weird because they should be selecting just on quality.”

To build out his startup—which currently has two clients, Cambuur and a Champions League participant he’s unable to divulge—van der Heide developed an application that explicitly told candidates that there was no need to send a résumé or cover letter. All that mattered was completing a video assessment. Initially, 350 applied, which got trimmed to 50 for a second assessment.

“Then there was the moment to ask them who they are, which age they are, et cetera,” van der Heide says. Among the six he eventually hired after eliminating the noise and bias of the process were a 41-year-old teacher and father of two and an 18-year-old student.

360 Scouting is now beginning to pivot from consultancy to platform. Van der Heide has continued his hiring practices to find local scouts who can do video and live scouting in four leagues this season: Poland, 2.Bundesliga, LaLiga 2 and the Eerste Divisie, the second division in the Netherlands. He hopes to grow to 50 leagues within three years using a network of quality, local scouts even if many are hobbyists.

“If clubs are finding people to scout players, then they’re also looking for undervalued talent,” van der Heide says. “So why wouldn’t they apply the same intention to finding the scouts themselves?”

* * * * *

Evolving data requires patience

Even when a club is willing to invest in data, it needs requisite patience in the process, too. Gardner, the owner of FC Helsingør in the Danish second division, says the minimum timeline for seeing improvement is two to three years. That was especially true at the club he purchased, which he described as having “basically no scouting infrastructure at all.”

“What’s interesting in the European soccer space is, with the promotion and relegation system, you can have an organization that is like a Single A baseball or even a summer league baseball team, and you have a couple of good years, and all of a sudden you’re in the majors,” Gardner says. “The infrastructure and the way the club runs is doesn’t catch up fast enough.”

Making the use of data more accessible could ease that prospect. For now, data analysts are still typically required to mine spreadsheets to find value. Bringing it within the realm of a coach’s expertise is an essential next step.

“Data, certainly across football, is making an interesting transition where it’s getting closer to performance and so performance practitioners rather than data specialists are starting to take more meaning from it,” says Smith of Chelsea and BreakAway Data.

Playermaker’s data captures a player’s foot-to-ball interactions including ball touches.

The earliest adopter of PlayerMaker in the US was the University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer program. Coach Randy Waldrum says he understood it would take a few years to develop proper context for the metrics. Incidentally, the overall quality of the program has improved considerably, so the baselines keep evolving, too. The shoe-worn sensor, which provides physical and technical data, helps solidify what he’s seeing and, at times, can serve as a tiebreaker between two players.

“We now have a pretty good system in place and a pretty good file on what the average distance is players should be covering per position, the kind of touches that are required,” Waldrum says. “We can even get into some of the positions, whether it’s more right foot or left footed—those kinds of things.”

When PlayerMaker launched, it sold only to professional clubs and college teams, but when the pandemic struck in March 2020, several clients asked about obtaining individual units that its disparate players could use for training. Aharon, the CEO, told those clubs, “Yes, sure, we can.” Shaking his head, he hung up and called his COO, “Hey, this is something I just committed to that we need to deliver.”

“For us as a company and as an industry,” Aharon says of the pandemic, “it shortened what could happen in three, four or five years from now and it happened in a few months.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores how access to physical data has improved in soccer scouting. The next article will look at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts.

Two days after Arsenal routed Everton in its final fixture of the 2021-2022 Premier League season in May, the pitch at Emirates Stadium was back in action. Arsenal’s first team players had scattered for the summer break, but 22 unsigned teenagers—17 boys, 5 girls—gathered for drills and scrimmages in front of the club’s academy coaches.

Each of these young players had been invited for the tryout based on data collected by a small sensor suspended between the shoulder blades in a black compression harness. This GPS device from STATSports carried Arsenal branding and enabled anyone who bought the device, which retails for $350, to vie for a spot in this showcase.

Players were judged on the data collected by the Fifa-approved wearable carrying the GPS transmitter, accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. They produce 16 metrics including a bespoke Pro Score, all of which are shared with Arsenal staff and can be compared in the accompanying app to anonymized data of current Arsenal academy players. This provides an incentive for users to train and exposes a Premier League club to potential talent that may have been overlooked.

While the ease of access to digital video has aided scouts in making subjective evaluations of prospects’ playing ability and style, the growth of GPS devices in the consumer and youth markets is helping objective physical data be incorporated into that process—not as the sole determine factor, of course, but as another vetting tool.

“Just to make clear, obviously, the ability to play football is the most important aspect of any player who plays for Arsenal Football Club or any football club in the world,” says Barry Watters, the head of sports science at STATSports. “Even if they’re technically and tactically very good, are they physically capable of performing at the top level?”

This marked a major evolution in scouting standards. Sport scientist Chris Barnes currently consults with Catapult and Uefa but previously worked with several clubs, building what some consider the first sport science department in the Premier League when he took on that role with Middlesbrough in 1997. He notes a clear rise in the adoption of objective data in scouting and recruiting over the past 15 years, which was not the standard practice for decades before that.

“The way that traditionally recruitment was performed, certainly in the UK, is you would have a troupe of middle-aged or elderly men in oversized coats who would stand on the side of a field and make some paper notes on players,” Barnes says. “And if they created sufficient interest in the coaching staff, eventually one of the more senior people would go, and it would be done so subjectively.”

The leading GPS brands have made entreaties in the consumer market. STATSports makes its Apex Athlete Series wearable—with and without Arsenal branding—and Catapult tried first with its PLAYR device in 2018 and then with Catapult One in 2021. Other smaller brands, like Sports Performance Tracking, FieldWiz and SoccerBee are also available.

The Catapult GPS device is used in academies to measure a player’s performance across load, speed, endurance and position.

At the upper levels of the sport, league-wide data-sharing agreements are common. What’s collected by optical tracking systems Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU, Hawk-Eye and the like are disseminated freely within the clubs of the top leagues. There’s less cutthroat competition at the academy level, so Barnes says there’s some degree of informal data sharing.

But getting one’s hands on that physical data has been “very difficult, historically,” says AS Monaco Technical Director Laurence Stewart. “I’m a big believer that some information is better than no information, as long as we understand the right context around it. [It’s] definitely more difficult the younger you get, and there’s less coverage and sort of openly available information on the younger players.”

* * * * *

Chris Barnes had never stepped foot in Nigeria until he reported for his first day of work in December 2020 as Sports Science Director at Vandrezzer FC in the second division. There, he introduced Catapult’s PlayerTek device, with Vandrezzer touting itself as the first club in the country to use a GPS tracker and to have a sports science department. It also added Veo’s AI-powered cameras. All of the national teams in the African federation, CAF, have been using GPS for a few years—first FieldWiz and now PlayerTek—piquing the interest of the professional clubs on the continent.

Vandrezzer had a pair of precocious talents, defenders Felix Oloye and Samuel Edoho, that began attracting outside interest from clubs in Denmark and Poland. The longstanding challenge of scouting across countries and leagues has been finding a way to compare contexts of league quality and physicality. That’s where the PlayerTek GPS devices played a role: both players exceeded the physical requirements of the European clubs, although the transfers ultimately fell through for other reasons.

“They wanted the training data that we’ve got on these two young players before they make a decision as to whether they’d take them on trial. So it really was at the center of the recruitment process,” Barnes says. “What the Danish and the Polish teams were interested in was essentially tempo or intensity. So, within the games themselves, they’re looking at what we would call a relative data—can they can they maintain high-intensity actions, accelerations, decelerations, sprints, and repeat them consistently over a period of time?”

The enterprise optical tracking systems such as Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU and Hawk-Eye have been available in top leagues for several years with data-sharing agreements so that each member club had access to everyone else’s match data.

Increasingly, such systems are trickling down to smaller leagues. Second Spectrum, for instance, reached a deal with the Danish League in October 2021 to install its solution not only in the first-tier Superliga immediately but also in the country’s second division in the near future. Similarly, the recent MLS deal with IMG Arena includes a provision for tracking to extend down to MLS Next Pro next year. And companies like Track160 have entered the market to offer more affordable alternatives.

In the absence of in-venue cameras, companies such as SkillCorner are generating similar datasets of physical performance using only broadcast video. Liverpool was its first customer, and now it culls footage from 50 global leagues to retroactively produce tracking data, which clubs can then import to existing systems such as Catapult’s SBG MatchTracker and Hudl’s Sportscode.

“If you’re looking at a player in Uruguay, historically there was no way to get data on that player,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “Well, guess what, now we’ve got SkillCorner tracking data, bring it into SBG and you can really understand that player and the decisions they make, their movement profile, how they respond to different triggers, different situations, how aware are they of their teammates and X, Y and Z.”

To date, SkillCorner primarily works at the top end, informing clubs’ decisions in the transfer market, but it is working to adapt the product for different video sources to accommodate lower tiers, such as academies. Compatibility across systems so that video and physical data can be reviewed in tandem is important, too.

“We see a very similar thing happening in human performance as we did in recruitment a few years ago when we acquired Wyscout, which was more and more match analysts were moving from just analyzing games to recruiting players, and they were using the same tool sets,” Hudl SVP of elite sports Sam Lloyd says of acquiring Wimu, the wearable tracker used by FC Barcelona, the Spanish national team and all of Liga MX. “So it just made total sense for us to have both tool sets under the same umbrella and make them easier to use.”

Youth soccer players were given the same tech as the pros, and if their stats were high enough, their data could get them recruited to academies.

StatsBomb is an analytics provider that has devised its own proprietary metrics, combining computer vision techniques with some manual input. It serves more than 150 team customers while ingesting data from more than 90 leagues, helping create those league benchmarks.

“Part of it is baselining the whole league and how physical something is, so that you know, ‘Where can we recruit from?’” says StatsBomb CEO Ted Knutson. “That’s something that scouts always talk about, ‘Oh, that’s a physical league, so they’ll do fine here.’ And you get proxies for it. But you won’t need proxies anymore.”

Before Track160’s entry into the US market, the Israeli company held a number of focus groups, using its system to track players and then sharing that data. Many of the young players immediately started getting competitive, comparing top speeds and other metrics. The parents were all eager to garner more exposure for their children and, in time, they’ll be able to make relevant comparisons and projections.

“They’ll be able to benchmark players between the same age group, same gender, compare it to other regions,” says Track160 CEO Eyal Ben-Ari. “They could even tell the player, ‘Look, if you want to play in the Bundesliga 3, that’s the level that you’d have to get to. And if you want to be recruited to Division I in the US, that’s the threshold.’ Eventually, we’ll see more of that, but that will require some time to collect historic data.”

Barnes used to work at West Bromwich Albion of the Premier League when they used event data from sources such as Opta that quantified matches based on granular detail of shots, passes and touches. Barnes and the WBA data scientists created models based on their own clubs’ wearable data and the event data to find, say, the best fit at right-side midfield for their tactics. It would share percentage matches and also, crucially, compute financial value of the players to guide the targeting of realistic options for a smaller club. But that had limitations.

“The biggest challenge you’ve got as much as anything else, though, is probably 90% of the meaningful event data is when you’ve got possession of the ball, and that’s probably great when you’re trying to recruit midfield and attacking players,” Barnes says. “But of course, a little bit more difficult when you try to recruit defensive or strong defensive midfield players. But here’s where, if you can access the wearable data—and it’s becoming increasingly possible with league-wide deals because then it’s shared—you can actually build timestamped and time coded pictures, which will give you information related to events.”

* * * * *

The largest undertaking in elite development soccer is beginning this fall. US Youth Soccer, a nonprofit affiliated with the national federation, announced plans for its new Elite 64 league, which will include 64 boys teams and 64 girls teams at each of six age groups for teenage players. Assuming 23 players per roster, that’s roughly 17,500 soccer prospects from Bangor to Burbank, all competing for national trophies and recognition.

Each participant will receive both qualitative and quantitative data, from USYS partners ProScore and STATSports. ProScore uses its own evaluation metrics to assess key moments of the match while STATSports will be providing the same GPS technology that the Arsenal invitees used. In this case, instead of being tethered to just one pro club, the users can share their data with any college coaches or pro scouts.

“That’s where we can see the consumer product overall going as well—the ability of the individual user themselves to be able to share that data with whatever third parties they want, be that scouts or coaches so that they can see what they’re physically capable of,” says Watters, the STATSports sport scientist. “They share everything else already. They share video reels, they share anything. There’s a lot of data.”

This remains a largely new frontier for wearables in the US, so building appropriate benchmarks will take time for each MLS academy and college program to gain an appreciation of what they’re looking for and what physical output is appropriate. “So that we can see what good looks like, but it all must be put in the context of the type of team they play for,” says Watters, adding that eventually the STATSports app can use those recommendations to serve as a “virtual coach” for players without access to top club programs.

“Most actual high schools don’t have the budgets to do that, [but] lot of the youth clubs do,” University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer coach Randy Waldrum says of GPS device. “It’s not where it needs to be yet, but we’ve certainly—over the last five, six years—seen it start to grow.”

US Soccer signed its own major partnership with STATSports back in 2018 to incorporate the devices through the federation, including the youth national teams. The US Soccer High Performance Director at the time, James Bunce, previously held that role with the Premier League and was a proponent of bio-banding, a concept of grouping players on teams based on physical maturity and age rather than sorting strictly by birth year.

GPS devices can help play a role in determining those selections, along with other inputs of physical data. US men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says that his pool of players are receiving regular assessments from his own staff and their respective club staffs to formulate a holistic view of each athlete.

“Everything. Body screens, motion screens. The breadth of data that we’re collecting on these players is pretty impressive,” Berhalter says. “Not only that, we’re working together with their clubs to import data from what they’re doing at their club level into our system. So we can piece together where a player is at physically when he comes into camp.”

Over in the UK, STATSports outfits Rising Ballers FC, a youth club for unsigned players. Several of its alumni have gone on to sign with pro clubs and academies where there’s greater maturity of physical data. That’s where the Premier League and other overseas circuits are ahead, Barnes says, because the academies have been “running in a structured way for 15-plus years.”

New avenues of entry remain possible, such as through Arsenal’s partnership with STATSports. Of the first 22 players to trial at Emirates, none has yet signed, although one of the female players continues to be closely scouted and the Arsenal staff says it saw “flashes of brilliance” from the prospects.

“For us, the golden ticket obviously is if someone does get picked up,” Watters says, “but I think even the ability to allow these end users to be able to get in front of these people was absolutely brilliant and all the kids and everything loved it.

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores the growth of digital video in soccer scouting. The next article will look at how access to physical data has improved.

Grêmio, a soccer club that plays deep in southern Brazil, is annually competitive in the country’s top division, but it struggled through its 2021 season. Playing in front of paltry Covid-capped crowds, Grêmio finished in 17th place, allowing its most goals in a decade and suffering relegation to the second division.

Those top-line results, however, obscured a hidden talent. A hemisphere away, French Ligue 1 side AS Monaco received a midseason alert about a young Grêmio defender. A one-named wunderkind named Vanderson, who plays right back, was starting and logging significant minutes at the age of 19, while contributing tackles, pass interceptions and goals on some brilliant free kicks. Such production triggered an alert within Wyscout, the Hudl-owned scouting service widely used in pro soccer.

AS Monaco employs a scout in Brazil, but it’s a massive country that was still contending with Covid travel restrictions. The scout couldn’t get there right away, but the club had access to plentiful data and video resources to some preliminary vetting before the AS Monaco scout—and, subsequently, Technical Director Laurence Stewart—got on a plane to see Vanderson play in Porto Alegrense.

“That’s an example of a player that it would be a lot more difficult for us to sign if we’ve not been able to do a lot of that prior work [before we travel] and see them play in different contexts and in different scenarios,” Stewart says. “So we have quite a diligent process that we have to go through, in a way to tick as many of the boxes as possible before we look to recruit a player.”

Monaco ultimately completed a $12.1 million [£10.4 million] transfer for Vanderson in January and, by February, while still four months shy of his 21st birthday, he became a regular starter on a club that finished third in Ligue 1.

The recruitment of Vanderson is a perfect case study of modern digital scouting in soccer: a quick, data-infused process to sign a young talent.

“What is becoming more prevalent after the pandemic, after Covid, we’ve seen that a lot of organizations are shifting their demographic of players that they recruit, so the average age of players recruited is dropped,” Stewart says. “What that does is brings a pressure around there being a time sensitivity to the way that you work.”

The global pandemic gave clubs a rare respite long enough to step back and re-evaluate processes, all while cutting into revenues from diminished match revenue. One trend that accelerated as a result was the speculation on younger players. Stewart says the window to evaluate prospects has shrunk, on average, from two seasons to one and now, at times, only half a season.

Getting players younger allows a mid-sized club to reap the benefits of a few productive seasons before, as the player reaches his prime, transferring him on to a mega club for an increased profit. Prospecting earlier also lessens the financial risk. It’s little surprise that one of the other rumored suitors of Vanderson was Brentford, well known for its hearty embrace of analytics.

“We have to be agile and ready to know our assessment and know our profiles in a shorter period of time,” Stewart says, “so that’s where we need technology to help us be more intensive in that process.”

The pandemic forced teams to embrace online scouting

Victoire Cogevina, a former player agent and now the Founder/CEO of Gloria, began the company a half-dozen years ago with an intention of using the app to aid scouting. She’d partner with leagues who would subscribe to gain access to new recruits. The idea, she says, was that the players matter most, so if you build a product they want to use, the clubs and leagues will follow.

Before the pandemic, the foothold data analytics had gained in the tactical decisions of many elite clubs has been well documented, but that embrace lagged behind in scouting, which largely remained a bastion of older, more subjective methods. (Gloria has since pivoted to a larger purpose, serving more as a social and community-drive app centered around the beautiful game with grand plans to become titular sponsor of the new women’s league in Spain.)

“The pandemic was this kind of a slap in the face for clubs understanding that a vital piece of their business, which was finding new talent, and also a vital piece of their revenue share [from transfers] was something that they can do in a much more efficient way than they had done,” she says. “And they were so closed off because, by the way, in 2018 when I was speaking to clubs, they thought I was an alien.

“I remember having conversations with clubs that were forefront, big brands—obviously smart in their decisions—and they were very much against the idea of online scouting. And when you told them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be just a few years when you’re going to change your business dramatically. They were like, ‘No.’ They had a ton of excuses around it. So when the pandemic happened, immediately I got a ton of phone calls from all of those clubs that I had once been in their boardrooms and offices and, ‘Hey, remember what you pitched me? What are you doing now?’”

For a national federation like US Soccer, whose remit is to monitor professionals across the world and millions of youth players across a sprawling country, the centralized collection of video and data at its headquarters in Chicago has become essential. Men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says he can keep tabs on his player pool—collecting video and performance data—for every match they play, no matter the league or country. Much of that infrastructure helps scout the players.

“Very similar,” Berhalter says. “We’re able to watch our youth teams through the platforms that were created that houses video, but also youth scouting, sharing methodology—all that stuff, technology makes it a lot easier.”

Some clubs shifted toward digital scouting more organically than as a result of the pandemic. Two years after Monaco won its first Ligue 1 championship in 2017, the club finished 17th, staving off relegation by a mere two points, and churned through managers like a tipsy tourist burns through chips at the Monte Carlo poker tables. In 2020, Monaco modernized, investing in data, a new training facility and key hires, such as Stewart, Sporting Director Paul Mitchell, and two key US Soccer Federation personnel, Performance Director James Bunce and technology guru Tyler Heaps. The club is now significantly younger and more fit.

Monaco has been a fairly prolific spender since a new ownership group took over a decade ago, but the trend lines toward data, video and youth can be seen throughout the sport. Hudl SVP of Elite Sports Sam Lloyd says that, historically, recruitment was the product of scouts and agents. But now a “golden triangle” has emerged, and “data is as important as scouts and agents,” he says, noting that the Wyscout usage skyrocketed during the pandemic.

Wyscout provides data regarding performance, patterns of play and tactical strategies for coaches, teams and players to analyze.

“The biggest change that’s happened because of Covid is it’s mobilized the much smaller organizations to become literate with data and data scouting,” adds Lloyd, noting that the bigger clubs were already investing significant resources in the practice. Tools like Wyscout narrow the funnel of players for more targeted scouting trips. “The rest of the football pyramid,” he says, “it’s opened up ways in which they can scout not just from where they can drive to in a single day.”

Tonsser gives scouts access to larger pool of players

Four years ago, a group of teenage strangers gathered in Paris. Each was summoned on the merits of the videos and stats he had uploaded to a Danish soccer app called Tonsser, borrowing the local nickname for a gritty, high-effort player who maybe succeeds in spite of some technical deficiency. This group—from disparate backgrounds and no experience as teammates— played a Paris FC youth team to a 2-2 draw.

That result was “very motivating for us,” recalls Tonsser Co-Founder and CEO Peter Holm. It led to a more formal showcase program called Tonsser United, an ever-changing roster of previously overlooked players who would gather and compete in tournaments against organized club teams.

“That started actually as an experiment, maybe to challenge ourselves bit,” Holm says. “It was more like a question, ‘Can players from outside the academies, found through an app, compete with established academies?’”

With a user base now of 1.4 million players, mostly aged 13 to 19 and living in Europe, Tonsser subsequently entered a squad in the Vinci Cup, an under-15 tournament later that year. A photo advertising the event shows the logos of all 16 participants, including the storied crests of European powers like Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, FC Porto—and a turquoise circle with a soccer ball centered the middle, a logo looking like it had been hastily selected from a clip art catalog.

Tonsser United acquitted themselves well, winning or tying its first several matches and drawing distinction for its surprise performance in the tournament recap, noting how the players all met each other on Thursday before playing four matches together on Saturday.

The concept of the club has continued, with a new roster each time, and Holm reports that 40% of its alumni have gone on to sign with professional academies through this alternate route, at least in part because of this new exposure.

“That helped us incubate the idea of how can you create a concept of a football club that is born out of values, born out of a vision, rather than born out of geography,” Holm says. “Because football clubs today, they have a stadium, a physical presence, and usually you have fans out of legacy, because where you are born or you fall in love with it from afar. What we wanted to create was a more of a concept of a football club that anybody can support because they want to support the underdog.”

A product like Tonsser helps players at the beginning of their scouting journey. While the use of Wyscout and other tools are used to identify a match with a single pro prospect like Vanderson, Tonsser works in the reciprocal: select a whole roster of players higher up the talent funnel and make it easier for scouts to see a larger pool. It integrates with national federations to ensure player identities and data quality, but an integral part of its methodology is to seek the “wisdom of the crowd” in which peers vote for those who turn in the best performances, Holm says.

“That’s really the trenchant analogy that we use for football,” he adds. “So instead of asking the coach or experts in football, we flip it to the community to help them generate data points.”

The app has been in the market long enough that some professional stars used it in their youth, most notably Erling Haaland, Manchester City’s newly acquired prized striker. Holm quickly notes that “we can take no credit” for helping the upward trajectory of his career, though “it’s just fun and inspiring that he’s used the app,” but there are a few case studies where Tonsser seems to have played a role.

Frankfurt’s Jesper Lindstrøm was a heavy user as a teen. In four years, he went from Tonsser’s Player of the Season to Bundesliga Rookie of the Year. After a friend played a match with the Tonsser United showcase team, a young French player named Alexis Kabamba downloaded the app and fared well in a friendly. That led to a contract with Ligue 1 club Stade de Reims and subsequent appearances with France’s U17 national team.

“My experience is that so many players that we don’t know just fall off the edge of the cliff, for one reason or another, because they don’t have the opportunities, they lose motivation, think they’re not good enough,” Holm says. “They don’t have the right environment to bloom. And that really what we’re trying to provide with Tonsser United. There’s always a second chance.”

Affordable video opens more global opportunities

Some aren’t afforded a first chance. Africa has been underscouted, but the proliferation of quality, affordable video—and the platforms for distribution—is granting the continent’s players more exposure. Lloyd says Hudl has begun contracting more frequently to record tournaments and then upload the footage to Wyscout.

Hudl’s focus camera was installed at Rio Tinto Stadium, home to the Real Salt Lake soccer club.

After Hudl shared video from a tournament in Cameroon, for instance, and club scouts were able to compare the analysis with the benchmarks of players already in their academies. Several then flew to Cameroon to recruit those young players. The same was true for some matches in Zambia, which led to interest from elite clubs like Villarreal and Porto.

“There’s more justification for the travel expense, whereas sending a scout on a whim to Zambia—it seems crazy, doesn’t it? Who’s going to do that?” Lloyd says. “But if you’ve watched him five times, you’ve got the data to verify he’s above and beyond what you currently have. That becomes an easy trip, doesn’t it? Because now it’s, ‘Let’s get him before these other teams work it out,’ rather than, ‘I hope to go and find a good 15 year old in Zambia.’ That’s not a good trend.”

Chelsea FC star midfielder Kevin de Bruyne, a recent Premier League Player of the Year honoree, sponsors his own youth tournament, the KDB Cup, in his native Belgium. The event already invites many of best U15 players, gathering them for elite competition—and easy scouting. But whether it’s due to Covid or budget concerns, travel still isn’t easy for everyone, so the KDB Cup began a two-year partnership with automated camera company Veo to provide coaches and players match analysis and broadcast the matches for free to 104 countries.

There are several AI-powered camera systems in use—Veo, Hudl Focus, Pixellot, Spiideo, PlaySight, Trace and more—but more manual efforts remain the norm.

“Some of it is automated capture, but the vast majority is still one guy standing on a scaffold with a video camera,” Lloyd says. “Times haven’t changed that much, unfortunately, but the automated capture is definitely making it more easy and more available.”

Wyscout users can view related videos for a team, player or game as well as download clips and make their own analysis.

Longtime UConn men’s soccer Coach Ray Reid, who won a national championship in 2000, used to employ video and scouting services such as InStat and Wyscout was the beneficiary of several impact recruits from Europe he otherwise never would have recruited. Kai Griese and Bjorn Nikolajewski arrived from Germany, and Mateo Leveque matriculated from France. Reid calls Leveque—the 2021 Big East Freshman of the Year—“one of the best guys we’ve ever recruited.”

“It helps you figure out if you want to go there, if you want to fly to France to see a young man,” says Reid, who recently retired from coaching and became a Senior Strategic Advisor for optical tracking company Track160. “It’s a good first step.”

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