The Analyst Behind Manchester City’s Rapid Rise (Part 2)

15 january 2013

This is the second part of a two part interview with Gavin Fleig, Head of Performance Analysis at Manchester City Football Club.  Part one can be found here.

Zach Slaton (ZS): When people talk about sports in general they often use the term “analytics” interchangeably with the term “Moneyball”, which is specifically about finding hidden talent on a limited budget.  We know City has spent a lot of money on players to build up its squad, but you also can’t “buy stupid”.  How do analytics play a role at such a large club that spends money like City has over the last few years?

Gavin Fleig (GF):  First and foremost, Moneyball was a huge success story at Oakland.  I think it’s often a term used wrongly in football.  It’s one that’s thrown around to put everything under one roof.  For me Moneyball really is a concept that at that time was about undervalued talent and breaking down a sport into its analytical components to really understand what winning baseball games was really about.  It’s not one size fits all for me.  It’s about work that involves smart decisions and the use of data and information that historically hasn’t been available or where decisions had been made previously around subjective assumption and people’s experience.  Of course that still has value, but every club is different.  The way you use your data and information is fit for purpose.

I think at Manchester City you touched on the way in which we’ve built our squad.  There has been a lot of money to spend.  Now, undervalued talent was the focus of Moneyball in baseball in that particular example.  Moneyball here would be about how we have used and continue to use our resources to find better players, identify the differences between those players, how they will fit into our model, and how much value they will bring to our business as well.  Our focus in the last three years therefore has not necessarily been finding undervalued talent, although that is an extremely important element of our future going forward given our business desire to operate within our means, invest smartly and of course financial compliance.  But in order for us to get the club from where they were to where they are now in four years it required a certain level of investment in the top players around Europe.  I think we’ve done that successfully.

ZS: In your interview with Howard Hamilton at the Soccermetrics blog you mention the diversity of your performance analysis talent that covers the youth development program.  How do you recruit for this job?  If someone were looking to get into this field is that considered an entry-level job, or do you put people directly into senior or first team roles?

GF: That’s an interesting question.  There’s been a real boom in recent years in the UK with universities running courses around analysis, and there’s already a single-minded direction that says, “If you want to work in analysis you need these qualifications or this level of experience.”  It really isn’t like that.  Within our department we have such a huge, diverse skillset in our staff.  We have people working in our youth development structure who have been teachers and coaches in their background.  Their skills are really about working with players one on one and developing them.  We’ve then developed some of their analytical skills so that they can take advantage of the technologies required.  Ultimately, their sports science background allows them to understand where analytics and objective information can support player development.  We’ve got people who have been purely coaches before, and they’ve moved into a role where they’re now supporting our team’s pre-game preparation.  There’s myself who has an analytical background from a university perspective and game knowledge through coaching.  I am not a statistician, nor would I ever claim to be a statistician, but I am getting there.  We identify gaps like that and we then work with people who do understand the deeper statistical models and how they can get the best use out of the data you’ve got.

There’s no really set path to me.  I think every club will be slightly different. I know a lot of the clubs across the Premier League have models where performance analysts come through university programs.  They have experience from lower league clubs or volunteer experience, and they work their way through the ranks.  We’re in an industry now where every Premier League club has full time analysts.  Every Premier League club has a performance analysis department.  Actually it’s now even in the Championship and League One, we’re starting to see the emergence of performance analysts at every football club.  Everyone’s route into that is different, and it ultimately depends on the club’s value they place on that as a discipline and the skills they’re looking for in those people.