https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... a-analysts
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/spor ... .html?_r=0
Here are some of the more controversial quotes.
Toward the end of Park’s first season at Arsenal, the 2011-12 campaign, two of the club’s executives approached Wenger, the team’s seemingly immovable manager, with a proposal. Throughout that year, Arsenal had engaged the services of StatDNA, a sports analytics company based in Chicago. The arrangement was based on exclusivity; Arsenal had paid around $250,000 to ensure that StatDNA would not provide insights for any of its rivals. There had been some skepticism among Wenger’s back-room staff about the value of that deal. Now Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s chief executive, and its head of business development, Hendrik Almstadt, wanted to do something even more radical. Rather than making sweeping promises, they focused instead on what analytics might have helped Arsenal avoid. Almstadt, the driving force behind the plan, picked out Chamakh and Park as high-risk signings that a more empirical approach to recruitment would have averted.
StatDNA’s database is now Arsenal’s database, so if Wenger wants to sign a defender, who is, say, 6ft 4in, an excellent reader of the game and an accurate passer, one push of a button will bring up the best options in world football.
Andries Jonker, Arsenal’s new academy head, said in September that the club’s “scouting must be restructured all over again”, while Gazidis has noted that “analytics makes decisions more robust”.
When Wenger mentioned a talented young wing at Spain’s Real Sociedad, he was told that his metrics were not overly impressive. Wenger smiled, and remarked that he would be keen to see how the player, Antoine Griezmann, now one of the most coveted strikers in Europe, had developed.
Lol.It is also more in depth. StatDNA focuses not only on individual offensive output, but on defensive metrics, too, factors that are difficult to code. One measure at Arsenal, for example, assesses how frequently defenders make errors: failing to spot an opponent running past them, or losing a one-on-one duel.
