Guardian: Manchester City to open the archive on player data and statistics

Their s**t worked in the playoffs Premier League…

Until now, data that costs all Premier League clubs a small fortune each season has not been widely available or at least widely accessible to the public. Baseball may have been revolutionised by Bill James’s sabermetric findings from the late 1970s onwards, leading to Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball and now a film starring Brad Pitt, basketball coaches make tactical decisions based on live data during a game, but developments in football have largely remained in-house.

As Gavin Fleig, the head of performance analysis at [Manchester] City, explains: “Bill James kick-started the analytics revolution in baseball. That made a real difference and has become integrated in that sport. Somewhere in the world there is football’s Bill James, who has all the skills and wants to use them but hasn’t got the data. We want to help find that Bill James, not necessarily for Manchester City but for the benefit of analytics in football. I don’t want to be at another analytics conference in five years’ time talking to people who would love to analyse the data but cannot develop their own concepts because all the data is not publicly available.”

Fleig’s full-time department alone consists of four analysts attached to City’s first team and six analysts working at every level of the club from Under-21 to Under-9 level. As he conducts a tour of the office, one analyst is dissecting an Under-18s game against Chelsea. Ensuring the next generation is following the football strategy of the first team is paramount, although the data is not simply to educate young players on the way up. Far from it.