Deportivo

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. Nacho Lourid. Image: Deportivo de la Coruña. 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… Signature of one of the players. Image provided. “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. Detail of injuries of a youth player. Image provided. Image provided. 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. Image provided. Image provided. Image provided. An example of what Nacho commented in the training phase. A first-year cadet team (14/15 years old) and its players who are divided into four large groups based on their level of maturational development: “survivors”, “sufferers”, “competitors” and “leftovers”. Image provided. 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 … Read more