Clubs won't embrace change unless they believe there is a problem
Or, five questions clubs should ask themselves...
One of the things I’ve been harping on over the past six or seven years of writing about soccer analytics is that the divide in modern football is not between the Hard Men and the Data Geeks, but between Competence and Incompetence.
This is probably impolite of me, I know, but if you’re reading this, I’m the preacher and you’re the (very small) choir.
What I’m trying to get at is that the challenge today isn’t somehow finding a way to crow more physios, technical directors and data analysts into football for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses, but to get clubs to begin thinking about the general way they do business, how they make decisions, and whether these decisions are ultimately in the best long-term interests of the team.
In doing so, team executives may discover they need to add a particular role from the range of options available today, or they may not. But that decision should have a rationale beyond “other clubs in the league are doing it.”
But this still raises a question: how do you get this process of introspection started in the first place?
The problem in some quarters of football is some clubs don’t think there is a problem at all. Or rather, they believe the only problem they need to be concerned about is relegation or unexpectedly poor performance, and that the best solution to this problem is sacking the manager. Rinse. Repeat.
There is no simple formula for this, but addressing this challenge is ground zero for anyone interested in some sort of data analytics renaissance in club football. Because if a club doesn’t focus on developing a process, they either won’t hire any new roles, or they will without having any clue how to integrate these roles in the process, and eventually abandon them altogether as they mysteriously fail to produce any tangible results.
Rather, I think the way to break the Cycle of Incompetence is to encourage clubs to ask themselves five questions and answer them honestly:
If, five years ago, we had asked ourselves where we aimed to be in five years, how would we have responded?
Does our current situation align with our answer to Question 1?
Where do we aim to be as a club in five years?
What would we realistically need to differently, based on our currently available resources, to better ensure we get there?
Have we tried these ideas before and were they successful?
The idea here is to force a club leadership to break the cycle of the day-to-day grind and to think about their long-term goals, how to realistically achieve them, and whether they have tried similar ideas in the past with consistent success.
Of course, the answer to Question 4 might be ‘We don’t know,’ and that’s a very good thing! Because this will at least force a team to look at an example of another team that has set ambitious goals and managed to achieve them.
In fact, there are probably no bad answers. Perhaps a club answers ‘get better players’ for Question 4. Well, how do you do that when you have a budget comparable to most of your other mid-table competitors?
Okay then, forget better players. Maybe you believe the trick is to then hire a manager good enough to make mediocre players into world-beaters. Well, how do you do that without hiring the same mediocre list of familiar names that everyone else is? How will you refine your search?
So at least here a club is forced to think expansively about where they’ve come from and where they’re going. And in a golden age of autodidacts, where there are many searchable examples not only of clubs who have managed to put into place winning, long-term strategies but now whole companies dedicated to Competence in modern football, clubs have many resources at their disposal to begin thinking about their overall process.
But none of this can happen unless they understand there is a problem in the first place. Winning that battle, as far as I’m concerned, is vastly more significant than explaining the basic concepts of statistics to a vice chairman.