Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

21 20 Chris Loxton: We built the language but then we realized actually to collect this level of information, we needed to do things slightly differently. Typically, football data collection sets are created by one or two analysts. They’re watching one team or they’re watching the whole game. That only allows them to capture data of when the player has the ball at his feet. We have a slightly different model. Arsène Wenger: We have people who collect the data of one player only. You see the number of people who collect data, but each guy here follows one player. That allows him to see when he’s on the ball and off the ball as well, because that’s something that interests us, and we are precise in collecting the data and precision is something that is very important. Chris Loxton: When we’re training our football analysts, we always say, if they do a good job, they shouldn’t know the match score at the end because their job is to watch that one player. If the ball is at the other end of the field and they’re on a center back, they shouldn’t be watching the game. They should be focusing on their one player. So, we spoke about the off the ball movements. We know for a typical player, the average time a player is on the ball in a game is one minute 49 seconds. Arsène Wenger: Yes. But when you consider the movement off the ball, you will see that the time increases much more and that’s quite interesting. On average a player was on the ball for one minute 49 seconds, but when you consider his movement off the ball, he was involved in the game for five minutes and 22 seconds. That means the time he’s not on the ball, that is the time dedicated to offers to receive or to make movements in behind the defenders. It’s an interesting number because it changes a lot and I believe it’s something that is very important to consider for the intelligence of the game. The quality of a team’s play is certainly linked with the quality of the offers to receive. Chris Loxton: We have three times the amount of coverage of a player’s performance than we’ve ever seen before, but we are also observing a hundred percent because we have one analyst watching one player for the whole game. All 32 teams at the FIFA World Cup later this year will have access to this data set. Arsène Wenger: They will find out maybe things they don’t know about their players. They might change their team considering some of this data that will be made available for them. Chris Loxton: Let’s talk a little bitmore about what we’re planning to do at theWorld Cup itself. We said at the start, your vision is to combine technical observations and football data analytics together. We have now our technical study group being formed, what do you expect from this group during the World Cup? Arsène Wenger: What I expect is to analyze the trends of the game. It will be very interesting because you have the whole world together and so it is always amazing to see how everybody copes with the evolution of a game. We need to be able to analyze that and we are able to analyze that individually as well. Our technical study group is a team of experts who are here today. They analyze the game and then we get the data, put the two things together to analyze the competition and make it available to everybody. Chris Loxton: For the first time as well, the data for obviously our analysis, but also for the teams, will be available within four hours of the final whistle. Arsène Wenger: We have seen the impressive team that analyzes and collects the data. Four hours after the game, it’ll be available to all the technical people of the 32 teams. Chris Loxton: Let’s use Luca Modric as an example. We awarded him the Golden Ball in 2018, which is part of the responsibly of the technical study group. We have his data from the seven games he played in the 2018 World Cup. Arsène Wenger: This is interesting because when you go deeper into it, he offered to receive 65 times and he got the ball 45 times. This is quite high because it’s not always the case. We have his offers to receive during the whole World Cup. Receiving in behind it was 11 times. So, he is not a player who runs behind much. Of course, he’s a play maker, he played a lot between unit one and two. That’s between midfield and defense Chris Loxton: A key for me is receiving the ball on the inside of the team shape is more difficult than the outside because you have players coming from both sides. We see here 162 receives inside. Inside of the team shape means central, outside is on the flanks. You always spoke about having that open body position. This is also how we want to try and identify which players are great, and of course on the FIFA training Center, try and then use that to educate which players are doing things very well in certain positions. Arsène Wenger: Yes, he’s a specialist to receive the ball inside and to rotate forward. In the modern game, the rotation on the first touch has become absolutely vital. We realized that the players who have that flexibility of the hips to rotate on their first touch have a vital quality for success. We had a meeting with the French Federation, and they analyzed that as well with their young players. The players today, especially in midfield, with that capacity to rotate quickly and change direction are the players who are the most successful in the modern game. Chris Loxton: We’re here to talk a little bit about data. One of the new data sets we will have at this World Cup is limb tracking. We have 29 points of each player, 25 times a second. It’s going be used for semiautomated offside which is an innovation at this World Cup, but we actually also have the capacity from a technical perspective to use that as well. Let’s have a look at one of the other areas which is line breaks. You already explained how lines are formed and Ivan (Bravo), you talked about algorithms. We have some fantastic data scientists that have put together a line detection algorithm so we can detect which players are in which lines. It’s not position specific. Usually, a fullback is deemed as part of the defensive unit but if he’s just delivered a cross in the opposition attacking third, he’d actually at that stage be part of the attacking unit. Arsène Wenger: What is interesting about Modric is he has 24-line breaks per 90 minutes, that means his vision forward is very good. When he gets the ball, he has that vision to play through the lines and the skill as well to do it. When you see the distributions breaking lines, it’s 38% of his balls. For midfielders today that’s very high. You can break three lines when you play midfield, most of the time, what you want to break is the line that is in front of you. That means offer the ball to the strikers who play behind the midfield. That’s where he played 104 times, by breaking one unit. Two units can be the midfield in front of you and the defensive line, that can be a ball over the top. Three units is when you come deep as a midfielder and play the ball over the strikers, midfielders, and defenders. Chris Loxton: For our purpose, we are looking to try and identify key players in key positions. But for the 32 teams at the World Cup, all this information will be available for them as well to use, even their opposition analysis. Arsène Wenger: You will have a lot of work to do after the games, my friends, to analyze well the stats that will be delivered to you. I believe it will be a very good opportunity to be more efficient and to prepare better for the next game. For example, we measure the distances between the lines, the distances between defenders and strikers. At the Arab Cup in November, we realized that teams that had the shorter distance between defenders and strikers were the teams who went further in the competition and the two teams in the final had the shortest distance. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but when you have two or three teams, you think there’s something there. It makes sense as well because you think they run less; they are more compact. They win the ball easier cause there are more compact as a team. We measure the compactness of a team as well. We want to explain why a team wins, why a team loses and where are the weak points of a team. You realize as well that one of the modern weapons is the number of receptions behind the defensive line because the teams play very high to press. So, the teams who have more receptions behind the defensive lines are the teams who score the most goals. Chris Loxton: We’ve seen that in every competition we’ve had the luxury of this data set to analyze so far. It’s quite a good correlation between the offers and the receptions behind the defensive line and the scoring opportunities created. Arsène Wenger: We have two sets in this explanation individually and collectively that will be available. If we give you the stats and you have no runs in behind the defensive line, you can worry because everybody’s compact today. So, these stats are very important as well to help you to understand better why you win and why you don’t win. Chris Loxton: We had that example there from Luca Modric, who we gave the Golden Ball to in the 2018 World Cup. We were at the U20 Women’s World Cup in Costa Rica last month, and we have the responsibility in every FIFA tournament to award the gold, silver, and bronze boot for the top scorer, the gold, silver, and bronze ball for the best player of the tournament and the golden glove as well. It was interesting because we had some data that maybe helped to inform that decision making. Arsène Wenger: Yes, it was a tournament that was of exceptional quality with the final between Spain and Japan. Overall, we had to decide who will be the player of a tournament. We had Hamano, Gabarro, Oyama and Yamamoto Yuzuki.