EPL 2030: A Data-Driven Future: Football Dystopia or Beautiful Holographic Game?
The stadium is rocking. Excitement and agitation brim forth. Both sets of fans are in full voice. The respective coaching teams chew gum and check their watches. The players limber up. It looks like just another Premier League match on Saturday afternoon in the 2030-31 season. But not all is as it seems.
It is Tuesday morning. There are no fans in the ground. The faces and voices that can be seen and heard are holograms. And only one of the teams is real. The other is virtual, designed by complex algorithms that replicate the performances of every player of the last 15 years in the top five leagues in Europe.
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This is no battle for three points. It is a trial match to test the potential of prospective signings. There are no scouts in the stands. Instead, a team of analysts are watching and recording every movement each human player makes. Another team watches screens intently, learning how those playing for their futures below are coping with the stress of the competitive situation, how fatigued they are and whether an injury is imminent.
It sounds like fantasy, but something like it could soon be a reality. Football is on the brink of being consumed by a scientific and technological revolution.
"It is not as far-fetched as it sounds," says Brian Prestidge, the former head of analytical development at Bolton Wanderers. "The technology is coming. Certainly you'll have managers bring players together on a Tuesday morning on a training ground and then run a virtual program which puts them back into the action of the Saturday just gone to ask, 'What could you have done differently here?'"
Premier League academy players could undergo a raft of examinations, identifying their future strengths and weaknesses to decide whether they have a career in the game.
The transfer market could also be transformed, as clubs would have a lot more information about what they're getting for their money.
For some, it is the natural, exciting next step for a sport in which no stone is left unturned in the desperate search for the next Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.
For others, it is a bleak prospect. Is this football's future dystopia, where players are little more than robots taking instructions from scientists and mathematicians? A Minority Report for the beautiful game, where careers are ended before they have even begun because "computer says 'No'"?
The data-driven talent identification of footballers is an industry, albeit one in its infancy.
It was only 15 or so years ago when football clubs would employ a chief scout and a handful of deputies to scour the globe for the Next Big Thing. Those scouts would report back to the manager after four or five missions to check on whether the player would be the right fit for the club. Then the boss, or their assistant, would hop on a plane to have the final say.
The most detail they might have gone in to would have been to check with friends and family about whether the footballer lived a healthy lifestyle, while those in the know in the game would have been canvassed to ask if he was a "good lad" in the dressing room.
Slowly but surely, analysts are replacing scouts. And the days when a player would be signed purely on the back of a recommendation from a wizened old sage who had sat in almost every stand in the top echelons of the continent are long gone.
Today the thirst for numbers, data and algorithms to find that small gain that can be the difference between qualifying for the Champions League and being an also-ran is a multimillion-pound business.
Rob Carroll is Ireland's leading independent sports performance analyst. He has spent over 10 years working closely with elite sports teams and athletes to push their performance to the next level. He runs the popular website TheVideoAnalyst.com.
"Analysts use the numbers to narrow down the search," he says. "Before, it was word of mouth, and you'd get on a plane, go and watch the game and then report back. Now, they're sifting through data to ensure they don't have to scour the world. They'd narrow it down to 30 centre-halves instead of 60.
"They have performance criteria to pre-screen. Wages, cost of fee are obvious ones. But it could be tackling, heading, clearances, defensive pressure."
Carroll says that defensive metrics are mostly about position rather than what a player does with the ball. In possession, he says, the data is vast.
"In the last 10 to 15 years in the top five or six leagues in the world, everyone knows what player A or B is going to do when he gets the ball," he says. "Somebody would be able to tell you how many times Rooney has touched the ball in the opposition half in his whole career."
That somebody is probably someone like Prestidge. He was involved at the beginning of the shift in the game, working for nine seasons at Bolton Wanderers. Years before his disastrous moment as England manager, Sam Allardyce, the innovator obsessed with data and the advantage it can provide, was Prestidge's boss.
Allardyce and Prestidge were a football version of Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta of Moneyball fame. The Oakland As, faced with a tight budget, had to find a way to outsmart the richer clubs. Bolton had to do exactly the same, and they defied expectations—instead of scrapping for survival, Allardyce built a side that finished as high as sixth and qualified for Europe.
Indeed, Allardyce left the club when his ambition to push for a Champions League place was not matched by the board.
"Sam would empower and encourage others to be like him," Prestidge says. "And he would not only innovate behind the scenes, he would take those innovations in to everyday practice and matchday."
It was Prestidge's job to manage the transition to a future-thinking club. This ranged from direct communication of insights through video, radio and data visualisation to the coaching team, to creating engaging learning environments for players at the training ground.
He started in 2005 working as head of academy analysis before progressing to the first team, for which he eventually became head of analysis. There, he delivered analytical support to coaches, sport-science teams and players. He was also responsible for a football first: developing an analysis-driven TV production suite that would allow analysts to have an impact during a match. All the top clubs in the world now have something similar.
"Back in the day, you had scouts who just gave reports. Then, 10 years ago, they were analysing videos, and then they added data to that," Prestidge says. "It's got to the stage where performance analysis and recruitment analysis are the same—both trying to establish strengths and weaknesses in opposition, their own players or potential players. And when we're talking about the future, we'll definitely see each and every club merging these two into one. That's actually already happening."
The analysts are getting smarter. Instead of relying on generic data—such as shots on target, possession statistics or heat maps—from companies such as Prozone and Opta, they are creating their own metrics and building algorithms to fit the club's philosophy and tactics. It is this approach that could be described as a brains race.
The club or analysis department that successfully marries the two will have that crucial edge, and Prestidge says the clamour for the best analysts should be as great as for the players themselves.
Data analysts are valuable, certainly, but it is hard to picture one landing a Wayne Rooney-sized contract.
"There is no doubt that this department, merged between recruitment and data analysis, will be almost as important as the management and coaching team," Prestidge says. "The manager absolutely has to have a guy heading up that department who is at the top of his field and who he trusts.
"Clubs are creating their own metrics. They might say, 'We want players who have ability to carry the ball certain distance in certain time and finish with a cross or shot.' Now they are looking way beyond on-the-ball action and looking at position when a team is countering down one wing. Where is the central midfielder? Is the full-back within a certain distance to stop the cross?"
Prestidge says there was an analytical aspect to "almost" all signings at Bolton, from video analysis to the exploration of medical histories, player availability, performance metrics relevant to position and the proposed role of players within the team.
The loan signing of striker Lukas Jutkiewicz in 2014 was a case in point. Scouts, managers and his club, Middlesbrough, deemed Jutkiewicz to be underperforming during the 2013 season.
"Through a combination of tracking player movement, analysis of the goalscoring positions Jutkiewicz got himself into and knowing how we played, we were able to establish the expected goals: a goal every 150 minutes," Prestidge says. "We knew he'd be a good match for our style."
Jutkiewicz scored seven goals in 20 appearances, about a goal every 213 minutes.
Leicester City are another club that has tailored metrics to tactics and player recruitment. Their edge, as the BBC's Danny Murphy pointed out, has been to group players who play a certain way. They are statistical oddities, as most Premier League clubs make far more, far shorter passes. Leicester waste little time getting the ball as far up the pitch as possible.
This wealth of data could be used to create a virtual match with holograms, either on the training field or at the stadium. Analysts will be capable of crunching numbers to test players and squads against the Leicester or Barcelona of the day, or to put a full-back or centre-half through his paces against a Messi or Riyad Mahrez.
Of course, the match is not fluid. Holograms cannot tackle or be tackled, so if a player gets too close or dithers in possession, then play is stopped. The virtual match is about assessing position and speed of foot and thought against the best.
"We are interested in how coaches can make better use of practice time to create a learning environment which promotes skill development," says Dr. Mark Williams, head of the Department of Health, Kinesiology and Recreation at the University of Utah.
An expert in motor control, cognitive expertise and elite performance, Williams knows what makes athletes tick. He has worked for FIFA, UEFA, the Football Association and the Premier League on the science of talent identification.
"We know that factors like fatigue and anxiety greatly impact on how we process information and perform technical skills," he says. "So how do we create a training environment which extends and mimics competitive environment?"
Technology will come more to the fore with the enhancement of virtual reality. In 10 years' time, the PlayStation of today will be immersive, so even for entertainment, kids will be playing against Messi. That has direct implications for providing feedback to and training players.
"You're never going to get away from the need for real-life competition, so the use of virtual has a role, particularly with anticipation and decision-making, because it recreates that environment," says Williams. "The virtual allows crowd noise and some of the other stress factors—a penalty kick, for instance. It's much more useful than a practice pitch."
If replicating pressure is a challenge, then what about understanding it? Metrics and algorithms can tell an analyst in precise detail what a team or player is likely to do with and without the ball, but the great unknown has been decision-making.
Tony Charge says he has the answer, thanks to analysis that will revolutionise the revolution, if you will.
Charge is a global leader in behavioural analytics. His company, Sports Wizard, is not interested in shots on goal, pass completion rates or tackles won. It focuses on what is known as applied qualitative analytics (AQA). For the layman, this means measuring behaviours, actions, patterns, momentum and decision-making.
To put it another way, Charge is capable of telling a coach or manager: "Sign this player because he is able to consistently make the right game-changing decisions."
"This isn't about identifying the best player using previous methods," Charge says. "If a team we are working with is 1-0 down with 10 minutes to go, we can tell the coach, 'Put this guy on from the bench because he's a decision-maker.' We can also tell him in relation to the other players on the field whereabouts he should play to increase his chances of making that right decision.
"So when you have this power, the possibilities are exciting. A coach might believe he has signed a lot of good players based on historic data or assumptions. But in fact he might actually have signed a lot of players who are poor decision-makers or poor under pressure. What if you take to the field with a load of poor decision-makers?"
In 10 years, Charge says all the top clubs in Europe will consider such analysis normal. Charge and Sports Wizard are already working with two Premier League clubs. Charge is coy when asked if one of them is Leicester City.
"Let's just say they're an interesting case study," he says.
The Sports Wizard team undertakes video analysis of players against a complex qualitative model with 100 examples of a player under pressure and then rates them around a behavioural profile between one and 10.
"Ronaldo is rated one, and you can play in the Premier League with a ranking as low as seven," Charge says. "But after that, you're really going to struggle."
Other factors that will impact on talent identification are the abilities to generate momentum and player intensity, commitment and energy—and how that all translates into cohesive and productive team performance.
"All this can be measured and will be," Charge says. "It will change the game as we know it."
But what other impacts could the drive for data and AQA have on the game? The transfer market is an obvious starting point. Experts in the field believe expensive flops will become an endangered species because of the amount of homework clubs will do.
Raffaele Poli set up the Football Observatory, a research group within the International Centre for Sports Studies, to analyse the game. Transfer values are a specialism.
"When you have teams in the future—and I mean all teams in Europe—rather than the select few at the moment who are able to analyse players from spatial awareness to eye coordination as well as fitting them in to their own unique programs, clubs will know exactly how much a player should cost," Poli says.
"Transfers will be more structured and more uniform because of data which says, 'He does this. He does that.' The market will adjust, and there will be close comparisons to players. The selling club will say, 'He is worth this amount.' The buying club will say, 'No, we will pay this because this player with very similar data cost this much less.'"
There will, however, always be competing sets of data that will attract and disenfranchise in the context of a club's culture—providing light for some and shade for others. The challenge for clubs is not to be subject to statistical whims. If there is a stat out there that proves they should sign a player, there will also be a stat that proves they shouldn't.
And there's another devil in the detail. Some veterans of the game have expressed fears about what an obsession with robotic players could do to a sport that, to the purists at least, should be about freedom and expressionism.
Sandy Byers is a scout of 26 years, 14 of them at Manchester United, where he worked under Sir Alex Ferguson. He knows he is a dying breed.
"Old-fashioned scouts like me are being replaced by kids with computer degrees who cannot possibly understand the game as well," he says. "They don't understand that it's not about what a player does with the ball or his position when he doesn't have it or the other huge number of stats they're preoccupied with. It's about how he reacts: What's his body language? Is he talking to players? Is he arguing with the bench or team-mates? You can't measure that on a spreadsheet."
This is true, although similar arguments were made in response to the sabermetrics story brilliantly told in Moneyball, about the numbers that crunched widely held myths in baseball. Down the line, analysts and scouts in that sport came to realize they could and should work together. When the two planets align, they are powerful.
Byers is not only thinking of himself; he is also worried whether players will be discarded too early.
"Progress is a good thing, but football has to be careful," he says. "What if it gets too clever? We know that it will be possible for injuries or weak spots to be detected earlier, so could that kid be chucked on the scrapheap just because there is a small doubt about his longevity? That wouldn't have happened in the past. He would have been given a real chance, and he might have made it."
Carroll, of TheVideoAnalyst.com, agrees. Football's infatuations are winning and money. When the tools are available to enhance their prospects of both, clubs could lose sight of developing the sort of talent that suits their standing.
"Football is obsessed with the next Messi," he says. "But why not the next, say, James Milner? For a club like Aston Villa, that should be a boost. It shouldn't be about what players can't do. Or who they won't be. That could hinder a generation of players."
Darrell Cobner teaches the next crop of analysts and coaches at Cardiff Metropolitan University, one of the leading centres for sports analytics. The irony is not lost on him that football could go too far down the path of producing athletes who no longer think for themselves.
"Football is a vibrant, free-flowing game," he says. "There is a concern that a lot of players will be doing the same thing every week. It could be a good thing in terms of results for the team that prepares best. But teams could just cancel out one another every week. Is that entertaining?
"Alternatively, could it go the other way? Instead of the player who ticks every data box, what about the player who no one knows what he'll do—where he'll pass, where he'll run or how he'll perform under pressure?
"The unexpected. Maybe that's what everyone will want in the future."
