An international Association view

A depressing fortnight in many respects for Irish soccer can be summed up by one media story over the last week – Irish senior manager Heimir Hallgrimsson will monitor Irish player performances at club level using his laptop & video data package, instead of going to watch some games live.

This story aroused emotions among fans, and others. Had we beaten England and Greece, would this have been an issue? Is the new manager adopting different work approaches for a wider overview of player performances for now?

This wasn’t the standout Irish soccer story for me, however. This accolade goes to the naming of the Irish U15 Boys’ international squad for their upcoming matches. And it ties in nicely with a brilliant talk I attended last week called “Exploring player potential using data” by Mark Carter.

The Availability of Youth Player Performance Data

For a variety of reasons, many youth soccer clubs & operations delve into video/tactical analysis spheres without digging down into the data available from their match video footage. Failure to dig deeper can be due to:

• Lack of time for coaching/analyst staff to collect the data,
• Lack of tagging resources/ability to collect & interpret the data,
• Lack of finance to afford a narrow software-only package.

For every tripod & camera or live-streaming solution at a youth match, 1000s of individual player performance data outputs & insights are within reach of coaching staff, players & parents on a game-by-game basis. Unfortunately, these player-pathway-changing outputs go uncollected and unused in the main. The impact of not embracing this level of data analytics can be felt across many competitive youth levels, but none more so than at underage international levels.

Assessing Youth International Player Potential

Across a wide geographical region where many players of interest can be playing at the same time & there are not enough Talent ID eyes available to watch each player live, the ‘working smarter’ attitude must be adopted.

Working smarter = embracing performance data analytics

Being from Ireland, I’ll use a LOI Academy example - the MU17 on any given Sunday.

Can your international setup genuinely admit to having a clear performance picture, over a season and beyond, on 300+ players? At one age-level?

From a player monitoring POV, this level of player performance coverage, poorly planned, can lead to:

• Over-reliance on subjective reports, often without standard,
• Players falling between the cracks with no Talent ID staff watching their game and/or,
• A huge weekend cost to the Association around travel expenses, Talent ID salaries etc.

Failure to embrace data can often lead to what Bill Gerrard calls “informational efficiencies”; meaning Association figures could be using outdated information, imparting strong biases around players or even a ‘pack mentality’ around player development/ability.

Player Development Impact factors

The subjective Talent ID/scouting approach will include biases (whether conscious or unconscious) and defeats any chance of creating & benefitting from longitudinal datasets, which Mark Carter suggests are essential in our understanding of player development.

Across youth age-levels, there are many factors that can impact a player’s development; maturation, increasing training time as they progress, increasing training years etc, minutes played per season as age-levels progress etc.

Shouldn’t those tasked with helping to develop the best young players at underage international level be aware of all these datasets, along with objective performance datasets when assessing & developing players for the international game?

The Solution – Soccer Intelligence

• Imagine having every single player performance data point, backed up by video clips, on every underage player of interest at international level?
• Imagine using that data over the course of a season & beyond, even benchmarking current players against players that have passed onto older age-groups?
• Imagine being able to embrace predictive data analytics over time and assess how to enhance players’ development pathways, instead of asking “how far they will go?”
• Imagine what the impact this level of data output & insight (within touching distance once the games are recorded) can have on an underage international setup?

Our Soccer Intelligence – Association data solutions are multi-faceted & flexible; allowing Association users to develop the platform around what they want to see from a data POV on their elite-youth players.

They can also roll this information out to players & their parents by adopting our Soccer Intelligence – Player app for all monitored players.

In the LOI Academy MU17 example above, Association users can:

• Overview 300+ players’ performances on a given weekend from their laptops (what Hallgrimsson seems to be doing now),
• Embrace objective player performance data outputs & insights as they want to see them (ie. certain playing styles in specific positions).
• Ultimately progress the underage international setup using data at club-level and across the international squads also.
• Enforce a standard around Talent ID and player monitoring, massively reducing the potential for biases & the willingness to look at short-term performances as a measure of long-term potential.

Youth soccer clubs, leagues and underage international soccer setups...objectively monitoring your players' performances over the medium & long-term has immeasurable benefits & is far more attainable & interpretable than imagined. Our targeted Soccer Intelligence data solutions across coaching staff, players, parents and national Association setups offer the clearest, objective overview of youth player performances & development pathways anywhere in the youth space. 

For more information, please reach out to our co-founder, Colin Brett, at colin.brett@playerstatdata.com