Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

17 16 Master class buying the players at the right moment and of course, building teams by making the right decisions. Chris Loxton: There were two elements with that vision. Number one was to just improve the understanding of the game globally, but you also wanted us to use data analytics and technical expert observations to try and improve the viewing experience for the fans as well. Arsène Wenger: Today fans want to be informed. Everybody has opinions and I’m convinced that demand will increase. We have a good opportunity here during the World Cup to get the fans to participate better in the competitions. Chris Loxton: I’m sure you didn’t arrive to FIFA over three years ago, having never used data before. Tell us a little bit in your career, why was data so important and when did it really start coming to you as part of your skill set? Arsène Wenger: At Arsenal, we started first in the year 2000 to use physical data. And in 2011, I brought in a company from Washington, that was specialized in data. I thought, we have no money anymore because we built the new stadium, so we have to make quicker, cheaper decisions. I thought that every player before he is Arsène Wenger: We at FIFA are happy to be associated with Aspire and with the Qatar Football Association. I have come here many times and have seen the quality, the rationality of your work, and I must say I was deeply impressed. When FIFA asked me to join them, I came out of 40 consecutive years of coaching and being on the ground every day. I found myself every day in an office with four walls, with Steven Martins with me. We were thinking, how can we improve football in the world? I looked at the First World, at the Second World. I didn’t find any inspiration. But we decided to see first, how does football in the world look? What are the strong countries? What are the weaker countries? We analyzed football in 205 countries, and we came out with one big conclusion that there’s a huge correlation with the quality of the education and the results of the first team. For example, the 20 best FIFA ranked nations were the 20 countries who had the best educational system, identification of talent, development of training program, quality of coaches and integration in the first team. The countries who did that the best were the countries who had a better FIFA ranking, and there are countries where nothing happens. So, how can we change that? Our thinking was on three different levels. The first was we try to develop a talent development scheme all over the world, to go into every single country to develop youth programs with our own coaching and create excellence centers in every country from 12 years onwards. We also wanted to create an under 17 World Cup every year. The second way of thinking was to develop an analysis of the competitions to see what the trends are in modern football. How can we explain better why teams win and lose? How can we explain better why individual players perform well or not? Chris Loxton is leading that and will explain later. The third way to improve football in the world was to create a free online training center for everybody to access. So, on these three levels we created a way to hopefully develop football in some countries. Our talent development scheme is called “Give Every Talent a Chance,” but it is not the case today. And we have a huge responsibility at FIFA to change that. So, let’s go into what is the subject of today, Chris. Chris Loxton: Exactly, which is making an impact with data. Let’s drive down and drill down a little bit more into what you actually wanted us to do when you joined FIFA over three years ago. Arsène Wenger: What I wanted to do is to analyze and explain better what is happening on the football pitch. I believe that the expert of football is linked with his inner feeling and has to make the decisions. I did that for a long time. Unfortunately, I made wrong decisions as well. But, I thought, with the help of science, maybe I can make better decisions. Science helps us to understand better the world we are living in and help us to perform better. That’s why I believe what we want to create is a combination of the eye of the expert, with objective measurements of what’s happening on the football pitch, and the two together help the experts to make better decisions. The expert has to keep the priority of each judgment. You can, for example, have an outstanding performance of a right winger and would say this player is absolutely outstanding. With my eye of expert, I can say yes, but the left back on the other side was very poor. So, I want to see if he performs again in the next game at the same level. We wanted help to make better decisions by recruiting, Arsène Wenger