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Introducing the loan manager
There’s an interesting bit on ‘loan managers’ in top-flight football up on The Athletic, a role meant to oversee a club’s loan strategy and to keep track of loanee progress.
It’s not a position you hear about often (or at all in all honesty), in part because loans are the less sexy element of club transfer strategy. There are few stories less appealing than a young player you’ve never heard of who’s taking a season to play in Hartlepool to work on their corners or whatever. Even less interesting is the guy whose job it is to make sure they’re doing okay.
But the article is nevertheless very revealing. Not only does the role of the loan manager incorporate analytics in the form of specific benchmarks and KPIs set for players to achieve while on loan, it’s also an excellent example of a modern practice that genuinely benefits players.
That’s because loan managers not only keep closer tabs on their players through monitoring what one hopes are (but probably aren’t) repeatable, predictive metrics on player development, but they also work to ensure those players are psychologically ready to make a move from a Premier League club to, say, a League Two side.
This is particularly interesting in light of how often we’re told modern football with its glut of new roles and new tools for oversight has dehumanized players, reduced them to a series of numbers on excel sheets. This isn’t the story we’re told here by loanee Jack Bamby:
“It’s a good thing they are in touch with players more now. Why wouldn’t you do that? The old-school way of doing things, even with things like pre-season, the way you treat people, now we are seeing football modernise for the better.
“Give me feedback, good or bad. Let me know what I’m doing wrong and what I’m doing good. A lot of managers and youth-team coaches I experienced would give you the cold shoulder.”
For all the talk of how modern football has lost its human touch, creating a role with the responsibility of overseeing the progress of footballers sent hither and thither to get some playing time and work on their skills seems like a fairly humane thing to do. What’s more, and this is an area I’ve long said I want to see more of in football, it’s a role that doesn’t reify players, view them as finished products in need of ‘warming up’ rather than professional development.
But this also points to what I think is a significant blind spot not only in football analytics but sports analytics as a field.
Are professional footballers a finished product?
One thing the article doesn’t touch on, but a reason why I suspect why clubs used to have a far more hands-off approach in the past in loaning players, is because of the assumption that once players reach a certain age they are ‘finished products.’ What you see is what you get, so the essential part is to make sure you know exactly what you’re seeing. If a player is on loan and they get good, well, then you know they’re good. If they can’t adapt and they disappear, you know you’ve got a dud on your hands.
This logic matches the scouting culture that still permeates the game, an approach that I believe is continued in the work of analytics in the present moment. Again, this is the idea that a player’s skill is a fixed thing that will decline with age and injuries but is otherwise static.
The rise of the loan manager role reflects that smart clubs know they are more likely to produce a first-team-ready player if you provide them adequate support and monitoring while out on loan. But I think, and I’ve said for a long time now, that it’s bizarre there is not an entire wing of analytics devoted not to identifying predictive metrics or marks of decline, but better ways to produce first-team players. So this would mean looking at questions like:
How can we identify a player’s potential to improve?
Are there ways we can use player data to better optimize one-on-one training to produce tangible improvements?
Can we class a set of positional best practices based on role, position or some other typology?
This work is difficult, unproven and perhaps more reliant on physiological science, which would raise the skillset required to develop it further.
But the fact we barely even talk about this kind of work is extremely odd to me. Why do we continue to treat players like finished products? It’s not like there isn’t’ a precedent in transforming great players into elite players through better training. It seems absurd that we would invest in tracking technologies and better transfer models and not look into a way a club might take far better advantage of the transfer market system, while also benefitting players who may only need the right training and encouragement to go from good to great.