Data may not be revolutionising football as fast as in many other major sports but it is becoming “inexorable”, according to Gauthier Ganaye, CEO of AS Nancy in the French 2nd division and Belgian first division club Ostend, where he represents a group of Sino-American investors.

Julien Carrete: A few weeks ago, you said in an interview with French newspaper L’Équipe that "those who do not adapt to the use of data in football will die". That’s a pretty radical statement...

Gauthier Ganaye: We are the most popular sport in the world, the one that also draws the largest revenues on the planet. In football, some decisions are worth millions. Even tens or hundreds of millions of euros at the highest levels. And when you have to make choices at that level, you have to rationalise things. That’s where data matters. They can bring some rationality.

However, I see that football is the sport that is the most behind in this field! This is obvious when compared to the evolution of other major team sports. They have all followed this dynamic of data… Yet its arrival in football is inexorable. The future of the sport will have to take this route. Of that I am certain! It’s a matter of history. And this is especially true when we see the arrival of major international investors taking over the clubs. We can no longer continue to make investment decisions worth €20 million on the basis of two scouting reports...

We still hear more and more about these data in football. Some English Premier League clubs, such as Fulham or Brighton, are known, for example, to base their recruitment on the analysis of statistical data. In your opinion, what percentage of clubs actually use it?

Today, all clubs are using data on a small scale. For the past ten years, data have been used as a tool to help performance, by measuring and recording the data of its own players. On the other hand, the number of clubs that benefit from recruitment data is much lower. And to me, there’s still a difference between those clubs and those like us who have data-driven recruitment. That is to say, the latter is the starting point for the choice of our future players.

The human factor

So that’s your starting point. But is that the only factor you take into account? Or is the human factor also always part of the equation?

Usually when we explain that we are recruiting by working with data, we are called ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ or we are told that ‘computers make the decisions for us’. All this is probably the best proof that our way of working remains a bit abstract in the eyes of the general public…

Our only goal is to obtain, as I said, as much information as possible before making a decision. And these data are just part of the information. Then, of course, next door, we also always have a scouting unit and our scouts will look at the players we have an interest in. With data on one side, humans on the other, we have two complementary points of view. And I don’t see why we should favour one source of information over the other.

Over several years now, we have empirically developed and implemented our own system. A mixed model that works well and allows us to reduce our margin of error.

Concretely, what happens when you recruit a player?

Everything starts on the pitch. And more precisely from the style of play of our team. As we are perfectly clear on this, we know exactly which profiles [of players] we need. And which ones we need to recruit. That’s when our data comes into play. It allows us to look for certain specific characteristics related to those profiles.

Other data is also factored into the equation, including the data we need for the transfer strategy we’ve put in place. This is an important part of our revenue stream. We need to ‘develop’ players for resale in the market. And, at that level, we cannot afford, for example, to forget that a football player reaches his peak performance at the age of 26 or 27. So we have to recruit people who are not yet that age…

Going back to how we carry out recruitment, all the data that is encoded allows us to add one or more names than our scouts are able to view on the pitch. So, we never go to a random game. There is never a question of our scouting unit going “fishing” or turning up to a stadium without knowing who we are going to watch. This allows us to optimise the working time of our scouts. While having set up, via the data, a safety net regarding the quality of the players we are tracking. This avoids making major mistakes.

This is the way we have been working since last summer at our club in Ostend. And that’s also how it works at AS Nancy Lorraine for the next summer transfer window.

The data is therefore a decision-making aid. But in the end, in my clubs, there is only one person who makes the final decision: me!

How many championships do you cover with your data?

27. The main competitions as well as a few more exotic ones that interest us.

And the BGL Ligue, the Luxembourg top tier, is one of them?

No. We don’t have any data there…

Since you buy these data from a supplier, other clubs must also have them. Are there not ‘bottlenecks’ on the best players, on the ‘nuggets’ you want to recruit?

No. Simply because we are not all looking at the same things in these data. And then, it is not enough just to get them, install an algorithm and then press a button to uncover that rare pearl. That would be too easy (he smiles).

The important thing is the questions that our approach leads us to ask ourselves and the interpretation that we make of them. And not everyone comes to the same conclusions. I’m not saying that we don’t happen to be together on the same player. When we work in a similar way, it is possible that this happens. But honestly, it is very rare.

Business-like approach

The use of data for recruitment, the practice of 'trading’ players, … all this makes for a very business-like approach. And we know that the world of football loves tradition, as we have seen recently with the mass rejection of the European Super League project…

I take full responsibility for the ‘businessman’ approach. And I don’t think we should see this way of working as being opposed to the traditional and passionate side of football. Because every supporter expects, first of all, the leaders of his favourite club to manage it responsibly. And now, ‘trading’ is no longer exceptional for the bottom line of a football club. It has become a recurring thing. Like sponsorship or ticketing. If I take the example of the French championship, I see that practically no club can boast, today, of having a stable situation without selling some of its best players each season.

When you are a top European club, you can probably afford to see things differently. Even if they also sell players, they are probably the only ones who can agree to lose money… to earn it later. But the ones I’m talking about represent maybe 5% of European clubs. No more. In the other 95%, we must have responsible financial management and balanced budgets. And that means trading and selling certain items. We don’t all do the same job. (Editor’s note: he smiles).

This is a far cry from the legal training you received in Lille. Was it during your time as the head of Barnsley, then in the English third division, that this passion for data came to you?

Football has always been a passion for me. So, at the end of my law studies, I did an internship at my home, in the north of France, at RC Lens. In the end, I was there for four and a half years, as general counsel and then secretary-general.

However, I thought I could do more--that I could run a club myself. This is how I arrived, via a recruitment firm, in Barnsley in 2017. It was a club that already had an appetite for this area of data. It was one of the only ones that worked that way, and it’s something that we’ve developed more and more. Until becoming the trademark of this club that just missed out on promotion to the English Premier League a few days ago [they lost to Swansea City in the play-off semi-finals in May].

At Barnsley, you also met the “legend” Billy Beane, one of the pioneers in the use of data in sport. His success in baseball with the Oakland Athletics was immortalised in the film Moneyball, where he was portrayed by Brad Pitt…

Billy is still a shareholder of Barnsley. And he has helped the club take many steps in this area of data. He saved us some time. He had already worked on how to transpose the model he had set up in baseball to football. Especially in the Netherlands with AZ Alkmaar. His knowledge in this field of data allowed us to avoid making many mistakes.

This article was first written in French for Paperjam and has been translated by Delano