Deportivo has built a system to know how much the player they already have is worth

A few years ago, the Depor A question was asked that seems obvious but that almost no one in Spanish football had taken seriously: is it possible to gather everything a club knows about its players in one place? Not the goals, not the assists, not what appears on Transfermarkt. All.

From the vertical jump that a cadet records on a strength machine to the subjective assessment of a veteran scout after watching a game on a rainy Saturday in Becerreá, province of Lugo. From the history of injuries to the psychological alerts of a 14-year-old boy who has been angry for five training sessions.

The answer was to build it themselves. The result is an internal platform without a commercial name. They call it, without much ceremony, “the Dash,” which functions as the club’s digital nervous system. Nacho Louriddirector of Deportivo’s analytical and sports technology department, describes him with an ambition that he does not hide: “I call him, maybe he is a little ambitious, like a ERP sporty”. Perhaps with a play on words.

It’s not ambitious. It is exactly what it is. And the interesting thing is not the technology itself, but what it says about the real state of data analysis in professional football: that although clubs have embraced the data culture, the majority continue to work with fragmented information, dispersed between departments that sometimes do not speak to each other, with external tools designed for the scouting but not to understand his own players.

What the market did not offer

The starting point is a lack. Commercial football data platforms (Opta, Media Coach, Transfermarkt itself…) They are designed mostly for one thing: to help sign. They are tools of scoutingnot internal performance.

They provide competition statistics, but they cannot integrate what happens within a club’s facilities: GPS data from training, medical records, anthropometric evaluations, the maturational status of a youth, psychologist reports…

“What we never find is that these platforms are focused on performance,” explains Lourido. “Why? Because there is data that no external platform can have. It is our data, physical data, medical data, protected by law and collected by devices that we have internally.”

What Deportivo wanted to measure was something that sounds simple but that in practice almost no one achieves: the actual performance of a player, decoupled from the result. A team can lose 0-1 and have played the best game of the season. A striker can score a goal and have had an alarmingly poor physical performance. Competition data alone does not distinguish between both scenarios.

Everything a club knows, in one place

The platform connects all the club’s sports professionals. Everyone: trainers, physical trainers, medical department, nutritionist, psychologist. Each one feeds the database from their plot.

• The GPS that the players carry during training automatically dumps.
• The competition data comes from providers such as Opta or Olocip.
• The scouts’ subjective evaluations are recorded through their own mobile application.
• The individualized rubrics of the youth coaches are added to the profile of each boy from the time he is a first-year junior.

The result is a cumulative profile of each player that is not limited to what he does in games. When a technician or manager accesses the dashboard of a footballer, finds his performance in competition, but also his medical history, his physical evolution, his accumulated GPS data, the assessment of scouts and, in the case of the youth team, his career since the first years of training.

“When someone goes to dashboard of a footballer and his performance profile, it is very clear in all areas how that footballer is doing. On a physical level, on a psychological level, on a competition level, his medical history, injuries, everything.“, summarizes Lourid.

The dashboards adapt to the user profile. The sports management sees a general panorama; the physical trainer, overload alerts; the youth coach, the maturational evolution of his players. It is the same database with many windows.

Beyond xG

The most striking thing is not the obvious metrics expected by anyone who reads the Brand day in and day out, but also the variables that the team of analysts has been cooking up:

• Game initiative, which combines circulation rhythm and territorial dominance.
• Construction efficiency, which measures not only whether the team reaches the rival area but how it arrives.
• Passes allowed by defensive action: how many touches the opponent gives before you steal the ball.

A detail that says a lot: The platform contextualizes the data according to the moment of the partido. “The game plan is until you score the first goal or your rival scores it”, Lourid explains. The metrics distinguish between performance before and after the marker alters the dynamics. It is the type of detail that distinguishes a dashboard as such an Excel that has come to the fore.

In the quarry, the platform detects invisible patterns without accumulated data. “We had recorded data on players who are in the first team, who when they were cadets gave data on professional footballers. Efforts above 30 km/h… and perhaps the kid was 15 years old.” The club measures biological versus chronological age to decide promotions. A kid who plays below his maturity level receives a “survivor” profile. And you are not penalized for it, you are simply protected.

What the algorithm does not touch (on purpose)

There is a decision that indicates the maturity of the system. The psychological data exists (the first team psychologist eats with the players, travels with them, is on the field…), but they do not feed the re algorithmperformance. “It even seems frivolous to us that it enters an algorithm”, Lourid admits. Psychological data activates protocols, but does not move the needle in the rankings.

It is a position that contrasts with that of other clubs: Monchi declared years ago, when he was at Sevilla, that his next frontier was quantifying the intangible. Deportivo has chosen to maintain a clear border between the quantitative and the qualitative.

As for scouts, Lourido denies the usual story about the death of the human eye: “The algorithms of the AI ​​provider and the data that the scout “They coincide much more than people can imagine.”

Their assessments, processed with generative AI, are integrated as another data source, comparable to GPS. The platform does not replace the scout, it simply connects it to everything else.

Where it is noticeable: in the renovations

Lourido is cautious when asked about specific decisions. But there is one area in which it is unequivocal: “For renewals, transfers, what salary the player must have, this platform is basic. Transfermarkt has a market value that is unscientific. We know what that player is worth, because we are seeing his performance.” It is an asymmetric advantage, because the club that has its own data negotiates with more information than the agent who only manages market perceptions.

When asked about the future, counterintuitively he does not talk about more capable AI, talk about coaches. “It would be difficult for me to find a platform for scouting of coaches. There are 200,000 players.” The data to evaluate a coach exists: if he trusts young people, if he changes the drawing when he is losing, if his teams improve with the days… but no one structures them. In an industry that in the last decade has become obsessed with quantifying each sprintthe figure that most influences collective performance continues to be evaluated, above all, by intuition.

“The problem with football is that normally all the information is lost.” The Dash does not invent new information or predict the future. What it does is more modest and more valuable: prevents losing what the club already knows. Football is a sport where decisions are made in the heat of the moment and the result of the last match often outweighs the trend of the last twenty, so having a system that accumulates and structures all the available knowledge is going a step further than usual.

Deportivo’s historical maxim, inherited from the unforgettable Arsenio Iglesias, is “order and talent.” Lourido translates it to his field: “We organize talent also off the field.” With a useful tool, built from within, that does what it says.

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Featured image | On loan, Deportivo de la Coruña