Thoughts From a Young Analyst

As someone who one day hopes to be a sporting director within professional football, it is important that I gain an incredibly deep understanding of how the game of football works. As someone who only played at the recreational level, I am choosing to approach my footballing education from an academic perspective, through the route of performance and data analytics, and eventually progressing to becoming a sporting director.

I have been fortunate enough to work at a USL Academy for the last 6 months as the club’s analyst, where my primary responsibility is to work with the U19 academy team. It has been an incredible learning experience for me, really stretching me to learn and stretch myself as a professional in the industry.

Today I would like to share a few of the lessons and takeaways that I have learned over the course of my first six months as a video performance analyst, and how I plan to keep educating myself as I continue my career.

Most analysts don’t start their career out at a “top of the line” football club, where they may be able to afford what is considered to be industry standard equipment or software. Many clubs at the grassroots or lower league level typically rely on camera systems like Veo or trace to do their analysis, and subsequently thus only capture match film, and not really do proper analysis. This is because these in camera analysis units identify various game moments, and then provide the raw clips for players to review.

In my personal experience, we have a club veo camera, in which we film our games, but I want to provide proper analysis to the other members of our technical staff. Because of our lack of resources to do “proper analysis” I had to learn pretty quickly to think outside of the box and get creative with providing data to my head coach. My head coach is someone who values data and analytics, and I want to provide these opportunities for him to use data and analytics to help our team. Because we are a lower league club, we do not have all the money in the world to spend on things like SportsCode, proper cameras, or data visualization software. It has meant that I have had to learn to think outside of the box in order to provide these important KPI Metrics for our team. Because Veo will codify the various clips taken during our games into various phases of play, I will go through each of our sections of clips and then I will watch them and turn them into statistics, whether that be shots on and off target, changes of transition, goal conversion, and attacking and defending set pieces. In order to find these statistics, it results in me watching clips and crunching numbers. Not having access to a software such as Hudl SportsCode, where reports are produced automatically for you has taught me the importance of coding my clips myself, learning programming languages like Python and working on producing data reports for technical staff review.

Becuase I new very little about analysis when I started my career as an analyst, I had to teach myself quite a lot, and more importantly learn from some incredible minds within the football analysis field. I first approached my learning with becoming familiar with what we had available at our club. I quickly learned how to use a veo camera, and the analysis software that came with it.

To me, what was important was being able to break away from the basic analysis offered by Veo, and provide more in depth insights to our technical staff. It has been a six month learning process, and I am just now figuring out how to provide these insights. These performance analysis insights are are the exact same regardless of the level of the game, whether from grassroots to professional.

One thing that’s really important to me in my personal life is learning from people who are more knowledgeable than me in the various facets of my life. In terms of performance analysis, it is no different. I took to social media and LinkedIn to seek connection from various analysts in the professional game. I’ve been able to learn from analysts who work at the senior national team level, MLS first teams, NWSL, USL and many other leagues around the world. One of the things that was most notable between my experiences and their experiences is that in its simplest form, analysis is the same regardless of what level of football you work at. We are all working to diagnose problems within the teams that we work for, and provide statistical and analytical support solutions to improve our squads. These conversations with my colleagues working in the professional game have taught me how I should continuously keep learning. First and foremost I can always improve my knowledge of the game of football and secondarily improve other skills such as programming and data visualization.

I have zero social life. (it’s something that I am trying to change haha) Because I have no social life, I spend all of my freetime watching football, and learning as much as I can. If you ever were to come watch me during a match day, you would see me on the bench with my extra large Moleskine notebook, writing notes. What goes in these notes are various things that I see during the game, quotes from my head coach on instructions that he gives to our squads, tactical insights discussed and a myriad of other things. These writings have gone into my notebook for me to review later on and further deepen my footballing knowledge. I also am involved during the training sessions that I attend, to further gain an understanding of not just a tactical side of the game, but also the technical side.

I’m also trying to teach myself how to code. There are great resources available on the internet for learning how to code from a sports analytics perspective. I’ve only done like an hour of code so far, but I have been able to write a program that will figure out goal conversion rate. I see the great potential of utilizing code in sports analytics, and I am wanting to continue my learning to expand my knowledge as an analyst.

One of the most important lessions that I have learned is the importance of trying something new. Over the course of my young career, I’ve had loads of ideas, and a good portion of them have turned out to not work, or serve the purpose in which I have intended. Making these mistakes taught me to get back up, keep going and try something new.

Additionally, I learned how important it is to create content. In a day and age where personal brand and having a portfolio is everything, I have seen the importance of writing articles and creating content. Because I have chosen to create content, I have been given additional avenues to continuosly educate myself on various subjects within world football. I am working on articles related to tactical and match analysis and the moneyball recruitment method popularized in professional baseball, but seen in football from clubs like Brentford FC.

Although my performance analysis career is young, I have learned a great deal so far. I’ve been able to make continuos improvements in my own workflow, and learn a great deal from industry professionals who’ve become friends and mentors. I’ve gotten the opportunity to write about what I am most passionate about, and I get to do what I love for a living. I’m grateful for the journey and I look forward to whats to come.