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How data is pushing Twitter scouts and bloggers into football's big time

<span>Photograph: Steven Paston/PA</span>
Photograph: Steven Paston/PA

Last week Jay Socik got a new job. As head of recruitment analysis at Luton Town, he will take responsibility for providing the manager, Nathan Jones, and his team with the data to sign the players to help continue the Championship club’s impressive, thrifty rise up the football pyramid. It has also meant a change to his Twitter account; a new, clean-shaven profile picture and the use of his real name.

It was through Twitter, as @blades_analytic, that the Sheffield United fan Socik made his name in football. It was also how he became a leading example of why the popularisation of analytics – the interpretation of data on every pass, shot and tackle on a football field – is transforming the game inside and out.

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“I suppose I’m from this generation of Twitter scouts,” Socik says. “We came from having social media platforms where we voiced opinions or wrote scout reports or did statistical analysis. Everyone knows it’s been changing for years, from the stories of Brentford and Liverpool, but even at a lower level now there’s so much tactical writing, scouting reports, graphs. It’s just taken off on a whole new level.”

Socik’s tweets about United as they rose up the leagues gave an insight into a club whose success wasn’t covered much in the traditional media and certainly not with the depth and curiosity that Socik provided daily. Often led by data or video analysis, his work led him to be approached by Peterborough’s chairman, Darragh McAnthony, then later to join a recruitment consultancy, Market Insights. Two years on, he’s at Luton.

“There has been a massive influx of people doing public work, be it on social media or writing blogs who have now been swallowed up by clubs,” Socik says. “I’m one myself and I could reel off 10, 12 examples in the past 12 months. Right now club staff are educated to know about data but the level to which they understand it, because they’re so busy with everything else, is not the same. So I think we will continue to see more and more paid positions going to people who are out there doing the work on social media. It’s where the expertise lies right now.”

When it comes to signing players, clubs want data analysis because it works. That’s especially true in the time of Covid. “Even without the pandemic, we’d reached a point where the bulk of the work can be done prior to seeing players live,” Socik says. “I think clubs have learned there’s other ways of doing things to the traditional approach and when you add the pandemic into that – which means you can’t go to games – you need to look at football in a different way.”

Socik is a model for peers who hope to move into professional work but he’s also inspired others to add “analytic” to their user name and start publicly parsing football statistics for fun. The availability of data has attracted a new type of person to think, write and post about football.

Dan Altman is an economist who used to write columns in the New York Times on globalisation or wealth taxes. He says it was boredom with the cyclical nature of his profession that made him choose to “buy a bunch of data from Opta” and get into football analytics instead. He did so with striking success, his first consultancy role being with the City Group (the parent company of Manchester City), where he built a model for measuring the style of play they wanted to replicate across their network of clubs. Later he went in-house at Swansea and DC United, where his data convinced the owners to make a big transfer move.

Wayne Rooney in action for DC United in 2018
Wayne Rooney in action for DC United in 2018. Data played a part in his arrival at the MLS club. Photograph: Brad Penner/USA Today Sports

“One of the last things that I did for those clubs was to make the case for Wayne Rooney’s transfer to DC United,” Altman says. “A big part of that was the ability to adjust his performance metrics for the Premier League to an MLS standard – to try and simulate how he might perform in that league. He came to DC United midway through the season when they were at the bottom of the table and just about to move into a new stadium, and he hit almost all the numbers exactly.”

Not surprisingly, Altman is proud of that calculation and the ability to compare performances of players across different leagues is a core part of smarterscout.com, an advanced analytics platform he created. There is a paid-for professional tier, where Altman notes a rise in interest from English clubs in South American leagues since the advent of Brexit (not just Brazil and Argentina but Colombia and Peru). But the site’s free tier is as important to Altman, he says, because of a wish to popularise analytics more broadly.

“I thought that the only way that they were really going to become part of the mainstream was to let fans, fantasy players, all the way to professionals at clubs and agencies really get their hands on them and see what they can do,” he says. “I’m really interested in breaking open the black boxes. I don’t think people will really trust and understand these tools until they’ve been able to see how they work.”

As a New Yorker, Altman has been familiar with an analytical approach to sports all his life. “Without the example of American sports, it would be more difficult to make the case for the integration of advanced analytics in football,” he says. (Socik notes that the rise in analytics in English football corresponds with a rise in American investment in its clubs.)

England plays a sport that is as statistic-heavy as anything from the US, and Ashwin Raman grew up in India first and foremost a cricket fan. Indeed he started watching football purely to apply an analytical eye to matches. But the 17-year-old from Bengaluru, who is a recruitment consultant at Dundee United, is the kind of diverse appointment that the popularisation of data in football has made possible.

Dundee United defending against Rangers in February 2021
Dundee United, defending here against Rangers this month, are using a 17-year-old from Bangalore as a recruitment consultant. Photograph: Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

Raman is enjoying a moment of fame, with his job at the Scottish Premiership club having attracted a burst of media attention, including a feature on Newsround. But the teenager – who is still studying for his exams – is disarmingly modest. “I think the fact I was a cricket fan, I had a head full of numbers,” he says of how he got into analytics writing. “I was that 13-year-old who spent his time on the internet looking at blogs by middle-aged men.”

Among the pieces Raman is proud of from his early years on the futebolist (subheading: “Ashwin Raman’s extremely nerdy blog on football”) include “A Look at Graham Potter and his exciting Ostersunds FK” and an analysis of how Lucien Favre’s Nice managed to outperform the analytic metric of expected goals. “I really enjoyed working on that and I think I did quite a decent job, except that I ended up being wrong,” he says. Both were written when he was 13.

What is striking about Raman is not just his prodigious, intercontinental success, but his enthusiasm. He is not evangelistic, he speaks clearly of the limits on data’s ability to tell you everything about the game. “The average footballer spends 58 seconds on the ball out of 90 minutes,” he says. “Most event data captures what’s happening on the ball, not a player’s movement off it, or their body positioning, which obviously affects the play. People talk about data being objective, but it’s not. Consistent is a better word.”

It has become commonplace to frame the advance of analytics as hastening the decline of the traditional scout, the triumph of data over judgment. Socik, Altman and Raman reject this zero-sum game. They are equally clear, however, that analytics are bringing a new audience to the game, a group of people likely to affect how it is watched and played. “It’s not just the data or the observation,” Raman says. “I think in general where football is going is towards diversity.”