Vice President of US Soccer | Co-Founder & President of Bluebonnet Data | Harvard Global Sports Fellow | Forbes 30 Under 30 & Sports Business Journal New Voices Under 30
This week's issue of my free soccer newsletter, Seeing the Present (https://lnkd.in/du9hAmwa), will explain why I believe the NWSL made a great decision in eliminating its college draft. To get an idea of the kind of analysis you can expect from STP, here's an excerpt from my most recent post on algorithmic thinking and how we applied it at NJ/NY Gotham FC to make scouting and transfer decisions: When I was hired as Assistant GM & Chief Soccer Officer at Gotham, I promised to bring a more analytical decision-making framework to the club (think Moneyball). But designing a robust analytical decision-making framework isn’t only about quantitative questions; it’s about approaching all decisions thoughtfully and methodically even before crunching any numbers. An algorithm simply means “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations.” With some very basic algorithms, we were able to exploit some of the structural weak points in the women’s game to our advantage—you can see one of them in the image below. It might seem too plain, but it’s precisely a set of instructions we followed regularly to produce a specific output. Of course, further study of the players we found through this algorithm with our scouts, data analysts, and coaches was crucial in determining whether we actually believed they would be a good fit for the club, but the method itself proved really effective as a first filter in helping us find promising talent in the transfer market. The main premise underlying the algorithm is this: If a player is good enough to play with other players who play for big clubs, then that player is presumably also good enough to play for a big club. Sure enough, this algorithm helped us in our decision to sign Bruninha, and it also allowed us anticipate that players like Victoria Pelova, Esmee Brugts, Tarciane, and Aline Gomes were ready to make the jump to the big leagues. If you enjoyed this inside look into how a soccer front office operates, make sure to sign up to receive future issues of Seeing the Present straight to your inbox: natgoldc.substack.com
Founder and Director @GlobalConneX
1wLove this Nathán Goldberg Crenier