City hope to start analytic revolution

From today Manchester City will make available on its website data analysis on every player in the Premier League last season, writes ANDY HUNTER

IT WAS once a tiny room on the first floor of Manchester City’s Carrington training complex, not much bigger than a broom cupboard, where successive managers from Kevin Keegan to Stuart Pearce and Sven-Goran Eriksson would field questions at close range from the press. Today, partition walls have been removed to house a team of full-time analysts who study every touch, turn and sprint made from the Premier League champions down to the club’s under-9s.

The world of data analysis has developed rapidly within football in recent years but not, City believe, beyond the guarded confines of its clubs. That is about to change.

Today City will make available through its website the data on every player in every team from every game in the Premier League last season. To the growing number of researchers, sports scientists and bloggers seeking new ways to measure performance and value a player, it is potentially ground-breaking. Until now, data that costs all Premier League clubs a small fortune each season has not been widely available or at least widely accessible to the public.

As Gavin Fleig, the head of performance analysis at City, explains: “Bill James kick-started the analytics revolution in baseball. That made a real difference. Somewhere in the world there is football’s Bill James, who has all the skills and wants to use them but hasn’t got the data. We want to help find that Bill James, not necessarily for Manchester City but for the benefit of analytics in football. I don’t want to be at another analytics conference in five years’ time talking to people who would love to analyse the data but cannot develop their own concepts because all the data is not publicly available.”

Fleig’s full-time department alone consists of four analysts attached to City’s first team and six analysts working at every level of the club from the under-21s down. Ensuring the next generation is following the football strategy of the first team is paramount, although the data is not simply to educate young players on the way up. Far from it.

Two years ago Vincent Kompany instigated a weekly review of City’s defensive performances with the analysis team. Every defender in Roberto Mancini’s match-day squad now spends 15 minutes before a game assessing the unit’s previous display, on topics such as transitions in play when City have lost the ball, their relationship with the midfield, defending crosses and recovering back.

“I would argue that having the best defensive record over the past two years is partly down to the reflection process the defenders have on a weekly basis,” Fleig says.

Work stations at Carrington allow every player to analyse a breakdown of their performance 24 hours after a game. Each has a specific development area to study too, if they wish. Gareth Barry, for example, can see how he protected his back four, his goal attempts and movement to receive the ball. A full-back such as Micah Richards can review one-on-one tussles, pass selection, positioning, recovery runs, supporting attacks, stopping crosses and running with the ball.

Today’s data launch is for a global community, however. Fleig has worked closely with Opta, one of the first sports data organisations to embrace analytics in football and which has given City permission to make the database available, in an attempt to support the analytical community. He explains: “The responsibility for developing analytics has always tended to fall on the clubs.

“The data has value, previously it has been kept in-house and behind guarded doors, but there is a recognition that clubs need to help this space develop. If it helps universities and gets the blogging world talking and coming up with fantastic ways of modelling performance, that is what we want. We want to engage with them.”