No club in the world has the human structure to be able to truly monitor every young talent that debuts and emerges anywhere in the world. Considering, therefore, that the vast majority of football entities plan their sporting model based on acquiring young talent, training it and making it grow in order to be able to finance themselves in the future with a sale to a higher level team and/or league, anticipating competitors by detecting new talent is a fundamental part of the process, even more so after the crisis situation that has caused the Covid-19 since the beginning of 2020. If resources are fewer, ingenuity and anticipation make the difference.
As we have explained in this and other texts, our work as a consultancy designed around data and its multiple applications focuses on creating different possibilities halfway between a club and its needs to reduce time, costs and uncertainty and expand its talent detection capabilities. And among them, we have alerts and notifications to monitor the talent that is starting to stand out in professional football. Our Alerts tool allows us to know and make available to our clients, in an automatic and updated way, which players debut, settle and stand out in their clubs in their first steps in professionalism.
A good example is that of Kayky, recently signed by Manchester City, who had been hugely superior in the U-17 Brasileirao played with Fluminense, a club with which he now plays regularly in the first team. To detect this type of case, there is nothing better than a tool that anticipates. To explain it, nothing better than a concrete case to check how our Alerts functionality behaves.
Let’s imagine that a club is looking for U-20 players, regardless of position, who have made their debut in the Brasileirao since 1 January, the most important league in South America and where opportunities are given to very young players, being one of the great ‘hotbeds’ of world football. In this request we can filter different aspects in order to know what impact the players are having.
The tool will alert us, at different levels, of the progress of the player within the first team plans, or what is the same, of his adaptation and growth to a new level of demand that can give us new clues to intensify the surveillance of the player in particular. Thus, we will be able to know, within a chosen period of time (15 days, 30 days, 60 days, etc.) and among many alerts that we can select for each club, if the player has made his debut, if he also adds a specific percentage of minutes, if his effectiveness in front of goal is positive or if he has experienced an increase in the ‘Driblab Score’ in the last four matchdays, a score that measures performance through multiple metrics and that we recently analysed in another post of our blog.
In this way, we can find out which young talents, anywhere in the world, are getting on the radar of professional football and in what way (debut, total minutes, increase in performance).
We are Driblab, a consultancy specialized in football analytics and big data; our work is focused on advising and minimizing risk in professional football decision-making in areas related to talent detection and footballer evaluations. Our database has more than 180,000 players from more than 180 competitions, covering information from all over the world. Here you can learn more about how we work and what we offer.
