Coaches have not always valued, or even tolerated, performance analysis.
In August 2005, Simon Wilson, an analyst at Southampton, was giving a pre-match briefing ahead of their Championship game away to Luton Town. It lasted too long and there were technological issues, but pertinently Wilson stressed that 40 per cent of games were decided by one goal. Southampton got beaten by a 91st-minute Luton winner.
Afterwards, Southampton manager Harry Redknapp said to Wilson: “I’ll tell you what, next week, why don’t we get your computer to play against their computer and see who wins?”.
More recently, there was former Germany and Bayern Munich midfielder Mehmet Scholl labelling Domenico Tedesco one of many “laptop coaches” when he was at RB Leipzig. Scholl, on live television, added that “they teach kids to fart 18 (tactical) systems in reverse, but they have never played at the highest level and have no idea how top professionals feel. These guys are not interested in human beings.”
Scholl is without a club and at 52 is yet to manage a senior first team. Tedesco, meanwhile, is 38, has managed Schalke, Spartak Moscow and Leipzig, and is now Belgium head coach, having replaced Roberto Martinez after last year’s World Cup. Naturally, Tedesco brought his own staff to the Belgian job, but did keep one member on from the previous setup — Luke Benstead.
Benstead is, in his words to The Athletic , an “assistant first-team coach (performance analyst)”.
If that looks like two job titles rolled into one, it is. Benstead explains that he “focuses on working on the training pitch, supporting the other two assistant coaches and the head coach, supporting (the) delivering of training, still working with the analysis department and supporting the connection between the analyst room and coaching room.”
Benstead worked under Martinez for three years at Premier League club Everton and joined up with him again for the 2018 World Cup, where Belgium finished third. It is one example of a growing trend of analysts becoming a core part of the coaching staff and moving with their colleagues to different teams.
The standout is Peter Krawietz, a former chief scout at Mainz, where he met Jurgen Klopp in 2001. He has been Klopp’s assistant at Borussia Dortmund and now Liverpool.
GO DEEPER
Football’s next technological frontier: Blurring the boundaries between coach and analyst
Aaron Briggs, Niko Kovac’s assistant at Wolfsburg, followed him there when Monaco sacked Kovac on New Year’s Day in 2022. Briggs, a graduate in sports coaching, was an analyst at Monaco. His background started in academy analysis at Blackpool, Preston North End and Manchester City, rising to first-team level at the latter.
Richard Bredice was Vincent Kompany’s lead analyst at Anderlecht and now holds a hybrid role with him at Burnley, taking responsibility for set-piece coaching, after they won the Championship last season. Kompany appointed Piet Cremers, a former Manchester City and Brentford analyst, as a first-team coach this summer.
Mark Leyland was an analyst under Eddie Howe at Burnley, in the Championship, just over a decade ago and rejoined him at Newcastle United in December 2021 after almost eight years as Klopp’s analyst at Liverpool, a period which included winning the Premier League and Champions League. He became coach analyst at Newcastle, a role advertised with 11 primary roles and responsibilities and as much about curating relationships with coaches as it is conducting opposition analysis and creating presentations.
Jonathan Hill, who has a similar academic and academy analysis background to Briggs, was Scott Parker’s analyst at Fulham and then Bournemouth. They got both clubs promoted to the Premier League. Hill became Parker’s coach analyst at Club Bruges in December last year, a project which lasted just 67 days and 12 matches — the other side of a double-edged sword where analysts go with the head coach.
Speaking to The Athletic , Hill says “I find it, to be honest, really hard to describe my role, certainly with Scott anyway, because — it sounds ridiculous to say — I feel like it’s the art of being proactive in being reactive.
“You have to constantly have everything prepared, so you can react to that situation. So I know, we’ll play on a Saturday, say we win 2-1, not a great performance. I know, come, maybe Sunday morning or Monday, when he rings me and goes, ‘Right, let’s review the performance and have a chat about it’, I know what he’s going to say and I’ve already got those clips.
“Whereas if we don’t have that relationship, suddenly, Scott would go in on a Monday and be like, ‘Right, what have the analysts got for me? Yeah, that’s not what I’ve seen, that’s not what I want. It’s not what I believe’. So you either can’t do a meeting or you have to do it yourself.”
Hill sees this alignment as the relationship’s biggest strength, and something that has been curated over six years together, back to when Hill was an analyst at Spurs and Parker was coaching their under-18s team. They know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Hill says that other coach analysts may have a different role, but it is his personal preference for Parker to always deliver the presentations and analysis.
“Because I’ve spent so long with him, I instantly know,” he says. “For example, one of the hardest times of analysis is half-time. So I’ll know, just from watching the first half, he’s going to want to show this clip or that clip, because we’re going to make these changes. Whereas if Scott went into another club without that person (analyst), a lot of the things that you want to do, you maybe can’t do, or can’t do initially. And it takes a lot more work.”
𝗚𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘀.
Here’s a bit more from half-time last week 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/NJLa7RqVQP
— AFC Bournemouth 🍒 (@afcbournemouth) May 11, 2022
In the past two seasons, Arsenal, Chelsea, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Hull City, Swansea City, Forest Green Rovers, Oxford United, Swindon Town, Newport County (as a work-experience placement) and Dundee United’s academy have all recruited or promoted someone into a coach analyst role. That list includes teams across all four professional English tiers, and into academy level too.
Sammy Lander is a ‘substitution coach’, formerly with AFC Wimbledon and now a consultant to various clubs. It is a particularly niche coach analyst role, but in an era of five substitutes per team per match, more stoppage time and a high proportion of goals in the last 15 minutes of games, it is important.
Speaking to The Athletic, Lander says his position “connects two high functioning departments that are related in many ways, and helps create more layers to a process”. Wimbledon are in the fourth tier of English football and he adds that, at lower levels of football, “sometimes we have the data and insights but we don’t know how to effectively action it to gain advantage — I believe this role can help bridge that and helps bring the data to life”.
This season is averaging over 1,200 recorded ‘touches’ (these really mean on-ball actions) in a Premier League game. Clubs can watch matches, teams and leagues from practically every country in the world, and in many leagues, do so using multiple camera angles.
Coaches are oversaturated with information and increasingly complex metrics — which are often incredibly rich in value but overly mathematical — which becomes so much harder to use effectively. This means that a coach analyst who can not only find the golden nuggets but play a significant role in translating them into tactics, practices and team/player development plans is immensely valuable.
Hill is conscious that ever-shortening head coach tenures will make it difficult, particularly for upcoming coaches, to establish relationships with analysts who could follow them to several clubs.
Lewis Bush is an individual coach analyst for Swansea City’s professional development phase players — those aged 18-23. Before this and alongside his undergraduate degree, he worked with Allan Russell, the England national team’s former attacking coach, in his one-to-one coaching business, and then held a coach analyst role in Finland’s top tier.
He explains the differences in fulfilling this role between first-team and academy level, primarily, the “winning side of it compared to development. When I was in Finland, we watched a lot of games, three to four games of the opposition, between me and the assistant manager.
“We still spend time analysing the opposition (at Swansea), but not in as much detail as that, because we’re principle-focused. We’re looking to develop individual players, instead of maybe a team to win games.”
Swansea, now a Category 2 academy with former Category 1 status, have their under-21s in the regionalised Professional Development League, a tier below Premier League 2. Last season, they finished third, just a point behind Bristol City, in the final play-off position, but were top scorers (80 goals in 28 games) and saw under-21 players Azeem Abdulai and Joel Cotterill make their senior debuts in the Carabao Cup.
“We’re always looking at the players’ IDPs (individual development plans). What are their strengths? How can we make them better? What things do they need to improve on that might be a barrier? Then the unit sessions and analysis are about building relationships between players and their specific roles,” says Bush. “That’s when you’re able to have an impact with the things you’ve identified in the analysis to make real improvements.”
In addition to his role with the men’s first team, Benstead is head of coach development and methodology with Belgium. They have “created a new style of play and methodology in the youth national teams,” he explains.
“We have (a) consistent playing style, principles of play, training methodology and football vocabulary,” he says, “to maximise our time” with limited international windows.”
Belgium’s approach is unique, given their relatively smaller population and league infrastructure, compared to elsewhere in continental Europe — their senior-team players, male and female, are put through their UEFA coaching badges as part of their legacy development.
“By creating a common way throughout the age groups, he or she will experience the same style of play and principles of play,” says Benstead. “This way, as a player progresses through the system, the vision is consistent and this saves time for the coaches, allowing them to focus on the individual development of the player.
“(With) Playing out from the back, an example could be we always build up with a minimum of (the) goalkeeper plus six players under high pressure, and the player on the ball must also have a minimum of two passing lines when under pressure. We work off five principles of play per phase of the game.”
Analysis has grown in value as a department because football has become so much faster (ball speed and the number of passes), more intense (total and high-intensity distances) and more tactically complex.
Human memory is incredibly flawed.
There is a seminal 1986 paper where novice coaches were shown a game and had to recall “critical technical events”, and did so with just 42 per cent accuracy. That paper is dated now of course, but more contemporary research has found that even more experienced and qualified coaches can only recall up to 60 per cent.
Coaches increasingly accept these shortcomings, knowing that to critically analyse a game with accuracy, investment in analysis and analysts is essential.
Analysts offer “a different type of profile which can bring many strengths to a team of coaches. I think the diversity is good,” says Benstead.
Analysts, who almost always have not played professionally and instead found their way into the professional game through academic or academy routes, offer valuable different perspectives to those with a playing career. They will, through sheer curiosity, challenge conventional sporting norms and view football differently, usually less emotionally and more objectively (for better or worse).
“You do challenge each other,” says Hill. “His (Parker’s) experiences are very different to my experiences. I’ve worked with lots of different coaches, accumulated different things that they’ve tried. It just all goes into a melting pot.”
Bush holds a similar view, enjoying identifying details to “share them with the other coaching staff, who are doing the same. We’ll all come together and say, ‘We spotted this, what did you see?’. They might see different things, they might share the same view, but this constant discussion allows us to understand what the players need and the best strategy to help them.”
“Every coach I worked under really used analysis to the highest detail,” says Benstead, who as well as Tedesco was with Martinez and his successor Ronald Koeman at Everton, then spent a season with Jose Mourinho at Manchester United.
(Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Benstead was a Masters student in 2012, but by 2014 was working Europa League games for Everton. His single season with Mourinho, in 2017-18, saw United record their highest post-Alex Ferguson league finish (second), and finish runners-up in the FA Cup final and UEFA Super Cup.
He has found success in the role because “you know the ‘key’ areas of analysis you must cover to help transfer to the training pitch, and how to manage this when time isn’t always on your side in relation to preparation time between games” — the latter being particularly important for a national team.
Hill, who has been an analyst since 2011, says “the early years of it were observations rather than analysis. You’re going, ‘This is what the opposition do’. It’s very precise.
“Everything you would say or you would do, is fact. How I work is very much, ‘that’s the problem, what’s the solution?’. So you’re always going to the coaches, at that stage, they’re ‘4-4-2, here’s what they do well’. You’re not going, ‘What’s the solution?’.
“So over time, you quickly realise that what you actually want to do with the players is show them the solution, and gone are the days where that just happens on the training pitch. The majority now happens, ultimately, in a meeting room, via video, via data. That’s how you show the players, especially in the Champions League or a team in the Championship, you go Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday.”
Fulham played 15 midweek fixtures in their 2021-22 Championship-winning season, a campaign where they scored a record-breaking 106 goals but only beat Bournemouth to the title by two points. Fulham won 12 of those midweek games and only lost two, the best record in the league, taking 37 points from those matches.
“Those players that are playing regularly, they won’t actually do any sort of ‘real’ training on the grass — they might just do walk-throughs, very low level; it’s all focused on recovery,” says Hill. “The actual amount of information you can give them on the pitch is timed — you might have a 15-minute block to prepare for a fixture.
“Whereas physically, you can sit him in a meeting room and do whatever you want, because it’s not going to impact their ability to deliver a high-level physical performance. That’s where the importance of analysis has cropped up.”
In the space of 20 years, managers have gone from rhetorically asking analysts to play their computer against the opposition, to valuing their input so much that they take them with them to their next job.
That is some progression.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
