Time-Efficient Data Driven Football Electronic Scout

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the diffusion of digital technologies within the football talent scouting process. A qualitative exploration based on open discussions and unstructured interviews with professionals involved in the football system (coaches, scouts, players’ agents, etc.) provides insights about how new technologies are used for recruiting athletes. The findings, which are mainly in the context of Italian football, indicate a cultural and generational gap in the use of new digital tools that creates a mismatch between young promising athletes (demand side) and “senior” team professionals (supply side).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

APPROVAL PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWELDGEMENT

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1      BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

• AIM OF THE STUDY
• OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
• PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
• SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
• LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
• PROBLEM OF THE STUDY
• TYPES OF SPORTS SCOUTING
• RESEARCH QUESTION

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

• REVIEW OF TALENT MANAGEMENT IN THE NEW MEDIA ERA
• EVALUATION OF PLAYERS BY SCOUT
• HOW TO BECOME A SPORTS SCOUT
• HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF NIGERIA’S SPORTS
• SPORTS PLAYED IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER THREE

METHODODLOGY

• SOURCES OF DATA
• EMERGING DIGITAL PLATFORMS FOR TALENT SCOUTING IN FOOTBALL
• THE ANALYSIS OF A “SOCIAL PLATFORM” FOR FOOTBALL TALENT SCOUTING
• CATEGORIES OF MOTIVATION FOR USING FB PLAYER
• CHALLENGES AND CONSTRAINTS OF USING NEW MEDIA TO RECRUIT FOOTBALL PLAYERS
• CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
• REFERENCES

CHAPTER ONE

1.1                                                        INTRODUCTION

The importance of talent scouting as a crucial mechanism for recruiting the best performers for professional teams is well known both in sports science (Abbott et al., 2005; Durand-Bush, & Salmela, 2001) and sports management literature (Brady et al., 2008; Taylor, Doherty, & McGraw, 2008).

Several sports organizations rely almost exclusively on human expertise for the process of talent scouting. In disciplines such as football, especially within the Italian context, it is still believed that domain experts (coaches, managers, and  scouts)  can  effectively  convert  collected  data  into  usable  knowledge. In other European and American contexts, the sports industry has a longer tradition of collecting statistical data, especially in baseball and basketball. In recent years, new technologies (software for player analysis, player position tracking, multimedia online databases, etc.) have offered additional advantages, such as predicting particular player matchups and/ or forecasting how an athlete might perform under specific conditions.

Moreover, by making the analysis of players’ actions faster and more tactical, these platforms facilitate the flow of information sharing and enable clubs to downsize their investments on talent selection.

In spite of the increasing proliferation of new media tools¹ in the sports sector, there is still a lack of scientific knowledge about the role and impact of new technologies on the talent scouting process. Indeed, sports-related studies have explored the use of new media and social media², especially regarding how sports clubs manage these means to build brand awareness and image (Wallace, Wilson, & Miloch, 2011; Waters et al., 2011), fans’ motivations for interacting through social media (Stavros et al., 2013), and how athletes use communication applications such as Twitter (Pegoraro, 2010) and Facebook (Sanderson, 2013).

Analytically framed  within  the  sports talent  management  approach (§ 2), the research is based  on  a qualitative methodology (§ 3). An initial exploratory investigation was carried out through open discussions and unstructured interviews with professionals involved in the Italian football system (talent scouts, coaches, sports directors, etc.). These open talks, combined with an extended analysis of online search engines, have provided us with a general idea about the most popular digital platforms used in the field of football for the recruitment of players.

Among the web-based tools that emerged from our analysis, we selected a specific and brand-new social network for football talent scouting, founded in 2014 in Italy. Access to this network’s user database enabled us to identify the main features (§ 4.1) of people registered as members of this sort of online football scouting community. A web content analysis (Hastie et al., 2001) of this social network was also developed in order to understand the main motivations for participating in this kind of social platform (§ 4.2).

1.1                                                     AIM OF THE STUDY

The main aim of this work is to design a time data driven football electronics scout and to increase expertness of the local league players.

1.2                                               OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

At the end of this work, student partaking of this work shall be able to:

1. Analyze the comparison capacity of each player using digital platform.
2. Design a web play display for players.

1.3                                                PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The purpose of this work to investigate the digital technologies used within the football talent scouting process.

1.4                                           SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The importance of scouting offers football clubs with several distinct advantages:

1. Checking for player’s capacity in local leagues to increase their chances of players being incorporated in international leagues.
2. Global reach. Scouting allows clubs to cast the largest possible net to find players from all around the world.

• Cheap players. Players from lower leagues can be available at cheaper transfer prices, and command smaller wages. In particular, a talented cheap player can help a football club to progress in a league, knockout cup competition, or into continental cup competition, potentially even ahead of other clubs with superior financial clout.

1. Specialist tactical advice. Scouting opposition matches allows clubs to build up a knowledge base about opponents that club coaches would otherwise not have the time and resources to research on their own.

1.5                                                 SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

A player scout typically attends as many football games as possible to evaluate targets first hand. Scouts who wish to identify promising young players typically attend lower-league club games, where their talent can be compared to older peers, or under-16, 18 and 21 international tournaments. Scouts may also receive tips from agents, peers and club colleagues.

1.6                                                PROBLEM OF THE STUDY

The problem of scout is that if they are not properly trained to do this work they can ignorantly make wrong choice of players.

Also, both employed and un-employed can do the work of a scout. With this, there will be chances of having unprofessionalism in the scouting work.

1.7                                             LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

In order to be more intelligent and accurate, a scout must well train and experienced footballer.

1.8                                                       TYPES OF SCOUTS

A football scout attends football matches on the behalf of clubs to collect intelligence. Primarily, there are two types of scouts: player scouts and tactical scouts.

Player scouts or physical scouts evaluate the talent of footballers with a view to signing them on a professional contract for their employers. Some scouts focus on discovering promising young players and future stars, others are employed to run the rule on potential signings. While smaller clubs might only scout within their own country or region, larger, richer clubs can have extensive international scouting networks.^[1]

Tactical scouts assess the matches of upcoming opponents of the club and prepare dossiers for their teams’ tactical preparations. Instead of identifying talent in these matches, the scout assesses the team and each individual player to identify the relative tactical threats and weaknesses in the opposition. Tactical scouts are typically full-time employees of clubs as their knowledge and findings are considered precious to clubs.

1.9                                                  RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In light of these premises, this study is focused on the use of digital technologies within the sports supply chain. Specifically, the research questions to be investigated are as follows:

1. Which types of new technologies are the most diffused in the scouting of football talent?
2. Are professional football teams using new media to identify and recruit new players? If so, how?
3. What kinds of opportunities are offered by these tools, both for athletes (demand) and scouts (supply)?