A few weeks back, the Atheltic posted a compelling story on Bolton’s frantic 36-hour transfer bonanza, the result of a last-minute deal to purchase the club. In that short time span, 9 deals were completed--a feat nearly as miraculous as the club’s salvation itself.
Bolton are going to need a lot of miracles this season, however. They’re bottom of League One on minus 11 points and are working with a skeleton crew off the pitch.
Yet this paragraph, from that Athletic piece, stuck out to me:
The process of building a team on a budget began against the clock, with Monday’s 5pm EFL deadline looming.
Few of the modern tools usually available to clubs as they recruit were available. The financial crisis meant no analysts with bundles of data on targets or access to software such as Wyscout, a platform used by many scouts, agents and clubs for analysis. They had to do things the old-fashioned way, using their contacts at other clubs and agency and acting on instinct to sign players they had never even met in person.
How the hell do we get away from this idea that analytics is about software programs and expensive analysts?
I mean, this sentence might read as dumb, and for that I’m sorry. But this is another instance in which that fucking word—analytics—prevents clubs—or people who might be potentially interested in helping clubs—from realizing there may be evidence-based approaches to scouting players that don’t require reams of data to prove useful but also don’t mean you need to ‘act on instinct.’
Off the top of the dome here, you might consider:
Player age
Starts over the past two or three seasons
Injury record
Elo score of team relative to Bolton
I’m not saying this information is your starting position. When you have 36 hours to find a player, you’re going to require a network of connections to find who you need, by hook or by crook. But maybe you could at least use a few factors to rule out certain potential prospects from the off.
But let’s drop the idea either you have Wyscout and a paid performance analyst, or you ‘act on instinct’ to do analytics in the conventional sense.
I seem to be the only one out here who thinks real analytics isn’t made for the Man Citys of the world, but the Boltons, the very clubs staring down the barrel of the gun—that it is these clubs who will almost certainly get the most benefit from a more evidence-based approach. And I guess I’m the only one saying it because there is no money in helping out the Boltons of the world.