REPORT: Tottenham make new Football Insights appointments
Yesterday at 06:07 PM
The data revolution continues
Results in recent weeks have driven increased scrutiny of Tottenham Hotspur's transfer activity over the summer. With a lack of depth made painfully obvious by the current injury crisis, the recruitment done through the summer could largely be seen as a (short-term) failure, with many of Spurs' targets poised for bigger things but potentially not ready to make an immediate impact.
Some recent appointments, however, give a little context to that window. It turns out that Tottenham's data and analytics team hadn't been fully built yet, with two key appointments being confirmed only in the last month. Back in May, Spurs advertised for three roles reporting to the newly appointed Head of Football Insights and Strategy, Frederik Leth (pictured), as Johan Lange worked to modernize Spurs' scouting and recruitment to give the club a much-needed leg-up in the transfer market.
We now have information on two of those, with Tottenham appointing Pawel Kapuscinski to the Lead Data Engineer role, and Sasha Satikova as Lead Data Scientist. The third vacancy, Lead Scouting Insights Analyst, also appears to now be filled with a private LinkedIn profile carrying the title (which unfortunately prevents us from garnering any insight as to the third appointee).
On the face of it, both Kapuscinski and Satikova appear excellent hires. Advanced analytics is really still somewhat in its infancy in the football world, but both have extensive experience working in sporting endeavors and football specifically: Kapuscinksi worked for Zelus Analytics over the last few years, an organization focused on building sports analytics platforms, and held prior roles at Polish clubs Rakow Czestochowa and Warta Poznan, as well as Burnley; and Satikova has been at City Football Group as their Senior Data Scientist for the last three years.
Many of you may not know, but I work in this area for my day job (not football specifically, unfortunately), so have probably a bit more than cursory understanding of the breakdown of these roles - though how the three operate can vary depending on the organization. Of the three, the Data Engineer moves the needle the least for me - as typically it's a very technically focused role, with understanding of football more a bonus than a core component. To put it in simple terms, the engineer pulls data from different sources, cleans it up, mashes it together, then stores it in a way that enables the data scientists and analysts to perform extensive analysis.
The Data Scientist and Insights Analyst on the other hand tend to have a strong need for understanding of their chosen fields. The scientist role focuses on longitudinal, exploratory analysis with a goal of producing statistical measures and models to help identify key metrics and performers. Remember xG? That's a product of data science. The analyst can then utilize these models and measures and present them in a way that other people in the organization can then act on - the charts you see on fbref would be one such output, and that person might then present some key targets based on those data. Both of these roles work really closely with the engineer, as HOW the data engineer goes about moving the data around is driven largely from requirements and logic identified by the other two roles.
These are genuinely quite exciting hires. Because the football analytics world is largely lacking maturity, securing personnel who are not just excellent at working with data but with specific, first-hand footballing knowledge immediately allows the club to get started on the front foot. It's likely there will be scope as well for research and innovation, potentially generating new metrics to try and identify future targets and get ahead of the curve (and rival clubs) in building the squad.
It's going to be fascinating to see the next steps the club takes in this space, and the potential impact to Spurs' activity in the January transfer window.
