Category: Recruitment

Where are they now?

  INTRO With the new season underway, I thought it would be fun to look back at some old blogs and see where some of the players that were highlighted as interesting are now.   There’s some good ones, and some less good ones, but it’ll be fun.   Unfortunately, the copyright police have been […]

Finding the Next… Virgil Van Dijk

INTRO Blog number 3 in the “finding the next…” series and it is the guy. The guy I have had the most requests and messages about writing a blog on. And with his recent injury, it seems even more pertinent to attempt to find the next… Virgil Van Dijk. If you haven’t read the previous […]

Finding the Next… Fabinho

INTRO If you haven’t read my previous blog (https://analysisid.com/finding-the-next-jack-grealish/), I recently introduced a simple 3 step approach to recruitment. The idea is: you decide the type of player you want, use a machine learning model to highlight players who are stylistically similar from a statistical point of view, use another data tool to see which […]

Finding the Next… Jack Grealish

INTRO Recruitment is an area of particular interest to me. It’s here that data can have an enormous impact and the potential payoff is huge. Everyone wants to find the next Riyad Mahrez for £350,000. Data and data models cannot perfectly predict future performance or identify world class potential but what they can do is: […]

Using Data to Find Players Who Could Be Great in Another Position

Can we find the next Alphonso Davies? INTRO I’ve always been interested in players who could potentially excel in another position. Player recruitment is all about find good players for good value. The opportunity here, is to find players who are undervalued in their current position but could be of considerable value in another. Anyone […]

Finding Arsenal’s Next Centre Back Part 2

Filling the gaps in data analysis with traditional/video scouting INTRO I wrote recently about the search for Arsenal’s next Centre Back using data (check it out here: Click Me). I will refer to that quite a lot in this piece, so probably worth a read in advance. Naturally part 2 of this process, and what […]

Finding Arsenal’s Next Centre Back

A dive into the data to see if we can highlight some interesting CB options for further scouting. ————————————– INTRO “Arsenal need better defenders” feels like a phrase that has been around since the dawn of time. In reality, it has probably had some credence since Sol Campbell left the club in 2006. In came […]