Nathan Jones admits that data and statistics have helped in Luton’s recent transfer business, though it’s not the Moneyball approach apocryphally attributed to Brentford’s recruitment, but a mixture of old-school and modern methods to try to give them an edge over their rivals.
Twitter was abuzz with excitement this week with the announcement of two new additions to Town’s recruitment set-up, with the capture of Phil Chapple, a former player for Cambridge, Charlton and Peterborough and more recently chief scout at the latter two clubs Valley. But it was full-time addition of football data analyst Jay Socik that was pushing people’s buttons.
The 30-year-old has made a name for himself charting the rise to the Premier League of Sheffield United, the club he supports, from a numbers perspective via his popular @Blades_analytic Twitter account. Though he then got contacted by Peterborough owner Darragh MacAnthony and became a consultant and was doing that while still in his day job as an engineer.
Having worked as a recruitment analyst for MRKT, the Hatters had been tapping into his talents on a freelance basis for the last year, a relationship which has helped the club recruit Jordan Clark, Rhys Norrington-Davies, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and, most recently, Elijah Adebayo.
“We’ve tapped into that,” said boss Jones of Socik’s expertise, adding: “Jordan Clark came up high on the data, but he also came up high on the fact that we’d seen him play for three or four years. So, it’s a no-brainer for us.
“Dewsbury-Hall came up on the data, but I’d watched him 10 times live. No brainer.
“Norrington-Davies, was slightly less on the data, but I’d watched him and felt that we could improve him and we could get a load out of him. It proved the right one.
“In terms of Elijah, we’ve seen him he has something different, and he has real good data, but we’ve watched him, we’ve seen him, and we think he had something different.
“It’s been in use for the last four or five signings in terms of what we’ve done, but we also trust what we see with our eyes. Someone once told me, ‘always trust what you see with your see own eyes’. So that’s a good thing.”
Of course the use of data in football is nothing new. Though he’s often perceived as an old-fashioned manager, West Brom boss Sam Allardyce was an early adopter in his Bolton Wanderers days.
Premier League champions Liverpool now use analysts in their player recruitment, while Championship side Brentford have often been accredited with employing the Moneyball approach, first pioneered in US baseball by Billy Beane at the Oakland A’s.
That’s where the franchise enjoyed success in using stats to find and sign undervalued players to such an extent that their tale ended up as a Hollywood film, starring Brad Pitt.
The Bees’ approach has been somewhat debunked as a straight replication of that method, but their track record in identifying, developing and then selling on players for many millions of pounds has been there for all to see. Luton even lost Andre Gray to them back in 2014.
But Luton’s recruitment announcement this week would suggest they’re developing their own take on data analysis, mixed with some more traditional experience. Certainly, the club already has talent-spotting staff, not least in Jones and former head of recruitment, turned assistant manager, Mick Harford, to name just two.
Jones said: “I don’t mind the phrase ‘old-school’ because I’m an old-school manager like that. I like to get out to games, I like to watch players, I’d like to see for myself what we could be potentially getting.
“You see a lot more than just data with what they do on the pitch. You see their body language, how they interact, their movement off the ball and those are things that you think, I can harness that.
“Whether it’s old-school or due diligence, we’ve never signed someone just off data. You have to look at them and see how you could affect them, because if somebody has fantastic data but comes in and it’s not the character that we want then we don’t sign, because we have a formula and a process here.
“It’s not old-school, we call it due diligence and we’ve got someone as assistant manager and first team coach that like to get out to games and like to have eyes on players. “Then that’s backed up by a fantastic eye in Phil Chapple and it will be flagged up and backed up with the data side of what we do. So, we’re coming at it from all angles and, with all that. Hopefully there won’t be too many mistakes, as we haven’t in the past.
“It’s interesting to think, ‘it’s data and we’ll Moneyball it’, but people use data in a lot of different ways. I’ve been at the club went Brighton used it heavily, in terms of the chairman there. It flags stuff, but if I then went and flagged up a player but didn’t have the data to back up what I was telling them, I then had to justify why I was flagging up someone like that, so there’s a process and that’s what’s good.
“If I want to sign a player and I’ve seen him and seen him and seen him, but the data doesn’t back it up, then will have a conversation with the chief exec and Jay and find a way to either say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and there will be a rationale behind that.
“It won’t just be, well, Nathan Jones wants to sign a player and he gets what he wants. It’s never the case here. We’ll recommend and usually we’ve been right but it’s a club process that the chief exec sets, and we follow out.
“Every time a Jack Stacey comes about, or a James Justin comes about it’s not one person, it’s a number.”
As recent as Tuesday night, Jones was highlighted the financial hurdles the Hatters have in front of them, when competing in the Championship.
Cardiff loaned Liverpool’s Harry Wilson and he scored a stunner to see off Luton in a 2-0 defeat. But while the Town manager acknowledged how such a signing would be out of his side’s budget, he affirmed that he doesn’t want budgets to be part of the conversation, as he wants to “push boundaries”.
The club has already worked to progress their new stadium at Power Court, while developing their academy. Include in this picture, this week’s backroom additions, this is all evidence in real time of Town putting the building blocks in place to ensure bank balances aren’t the be all and end all for future seasons.
“We have to be different in what we do,” says Jones, adding: “We have to get in early on signings because we are financially at a disadvantage. Sometimes that isn’t a disadvantage because, alright, we don’t shop in the same supermarket as a lot of the Championship sides. We can’t do that.
“But what we do is, when we do get those ones, we get hunger, we get people that are usually on their way up and that’s what we want to do.
“We’ve always liked hunger, athleticism and quality here and now we’ve got to go again because this is a new league and we don’t just want to survive in this league, we want to thrive in this league.
“To thrive and to push boundaries on our budget and what we do, takes a heck a lot of work, but that’s our next goal.
“We are hopefully establishing ourselves with another year in the Championship and then we want to go one better than just establishing ourselves.
“We want to push a few, we want to surprise a few, we want to shock a few. That comes with work, recruitment, confidence and all the things we do on a daily basis.”
Indeed, you will have seen photos and videos of most footballers these days training with GPS tracking vest on and club’s these days know exactly how far players have run, for example, and all of these data points also contribute to how managers manage.
Jones said: “Any stats you get just back up what you see with your own eyes. If I look out there and I think Jordan Clark hasn’t run around today in training – which never happens by the way, in fact it’s the polar opposite – then I will see that with my eyes. But I will then go and get the GPS data that can back me up and then say, ‘is everything OK with you because you weren’t as you have been?’
“That’s what data does. Data might tell you, for example, Glen Rea hasn’t run around a lot in that game, he’s only done 8K (kilometers), but we might have won the game 2-0, because he’s been very efficient. So, you use the data along with what you see.
“It’s the same with when you sign a player. If you look at a winger and think, he doesn’t get past 11K, so that doesn’t class as us. We want a winger to be up, down and pressing with 11K.
“But he might be an aside that sits off and doesn’t have to go after a team. And when he gets it he might be efficient that he links and just as little bursts and delivers real quality.
“Now, on the data side, you might say, ‘he doesn’t do 11K, so he doesn’t tick our box’, but you have to take into consideration what you see with your eyes and what team he plays for and so on.
“So that’s where data comes into it. It’s not pure, and it’s not exactly everything we do, it’s just a back-up tool to the final decision-making process. And it’s another string to that final decision-making process – and it’s a good one.”
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