Luton’s data drive and how it helped pluck Pepple from Canada

The signing of Aribim Pepple is the latest success in Luton Town’s data-assisted approach to player recruitment, and while it’s only part of the puzzle, boss Nathan Jones says the club can now scour more of the globe for new talent. 

This week, the Hatters finally confirmed the capture of the 19-year-old hotshot that has been at the club for a month but had been setting new records in the Canadian Premier League with Calgary FC, where a goal in each of his first five league games turned heads this side of the pond. 

At 19 years old, Pepple has been signed with the help of data and with a view to the future, but hopefully the not too distant future. 

“He’s not a development player, he’s a developing player, really,” said Jones, who has substantially improved his firepower this season with the signings of Cauley Woodrow and Carlton Morris, both from Barnsley. 

Having plundered the Canadian Premier League, there’s now the challenge of fitting Pepple in a squad that also boasts the striking talents of Elijah Adebayo, Harry Cornick, Admiral Muskwe and Cameron Jerome. 

“It’s whether we keep him in the squad, and he gets games in the development team, but trains with us, or whether we loan him to get game time, because he’s been used to playing first-team football,” said Jones.

“We wouldn’t want to curtail that, but he also needs tidying up in terms of certain stuff, which is what happens at 19. We’re in a good place with it. There’s no rush with him but, obviously, we’d like to get him up and running and producing as soon as possible.”

The manager added: “He’s at the right age, the right athleticism and character so we’re looking to bring him in to develop and then get him into our first-team. 

“He’s got a lot of work to do yet because we’ve got real competition and every striker we go for now, a lot of them don’t want to come to us because they don’t feel like they’re going to play. 

“We have to keep that conveyor belt going, we have to safeguard the future of the football club and we will do that by good recruitment.”

It was only 18 months ago that Town looked to League Two to find last term’s top shot, Adebayo. Two weeks later and to less fanfare, but arguably more long-term significance, Luton announced that Phil Chapple and Jay Socik had joined the club’s scouting set-up. 

That’s not to say there wasn’t interest and curiosity in those appointments, particularly as the latter built up a strong reputation for data and statistics on his popular Twitter handle @blades_analytic. A year ago, Jones praised the impact that Socik’s work had on last summer’s transfer business, while Mick Harford explained that the data analyst had a role in the transfer for Adebayo.

And while, this summer, club legend Harford has returned to his chief of recruitment role, there are only so many man hours that he and his team can spend on the road and at games, trying to find the next under-the-radar superstar. The lower leagues have been a key supermarket for Luton but Canada, you’d assume, may have previously been a little out of Harford’s purview. Not now.

Explaining Luton’s interest in Pepple, Jones said: “We have tracked a lot. We’re big on data now as well so anyone that is flagged up is then watched, we cant watch everyone because we haven’t got the manpower, so what we do is identify a lot by data, get them watched and have more information on them and then we back that up. 

“We’re not looking in every country, but we flag a lot up data-wise, so they have to be respectable.

“We’re not really looking at the moon or anything like that. He’s (Pepple) got a British passport so that helps in terms of family upbringing, so that helps with getting visas, so we don’t just look anywhere.

“We flag a lot of data up. Once we get good data then we investigate and we’ve got better resources now to have a little look at that and flag one or two up.

“The gamble is not huge for us, but it’s a real good investment, we can’t waste that.

“We’ve done it before with Aaron Jarvis, for example, in terms of taking one from non-league and taking them really early and thinking we’ll get real development out of that.

“And Aaron Jarvis is having a career. He didn’t quite have a career at Luton, but was definitely worth it as we’ve helped someone on his way.

“He came from Basingstoke, now playing for Torquay, but has had time in the league at Scunthorpe and played games for us, so we’ve been doing it for a while, it’s just probably a little bit more prominent now.”

Canadian Premier League director of football Oliver Gage shed some light on the thoroughness of Luton’s approach, telling the league’s official website: “Different clubs all have different processes.

“Luton immediately wanted loads of data on (Pepple); my background is in data, and my contact (at the club) is all about data, so we work with them on his playing data, his physical data from training and games, stuff like that. Other clubs are just like, ‘send us some video’.

“Everyone’s a little bit different, but generally it’s like, we go to 20 (clubs), maybe you get five semi-interested, give them what they need and that narrows it down to two or three after they’ve seen what they need to see.”

Data may have helped Luton spread their net wider in terms of recruitment, but Jones is clear that its use is only part of Town’s toolbox. 

“It’s an identifying process,” the manager said, adding: “To get manpower, the old-fashioned way, to get people on the ground to spot (players), you’d only cover a certain part of the country or the world. 

“So to open up greater avenues, you have to be able to identify certain things, and data does that. We don’t sign anyone from data. They flag that up, it’s one of the first points of call. Or, if we see something with our eye and think, we really like him, then we ask for the data to back that up. 

“Now, what you see with the naked eye and data could be totally different. I tend to sign a lot of people that I know, that I’ve seen or have got a real good experience of. 

“Those I haven’t, then it’s good to get, one, the data to flag stuff up and, two, opinions from others, when they watch them. Then, by the time it gets to me, we’ve got real good people – Phil Chapple, Mick Harford, Jay Socik – who have put in the hours to say, ‘these are worth having a look at’. 

“Then it gets to me and my staff and we make a decision. Nothing gets done off data, it’s just an identifying thing and then opinions back that up. It’s a decent process.”