That brings us neatly to Barcelona, a club that houses the game’s foremost minds in developing research, leading to the acclaimed Innovation Hub in 2017, which shares its knowledge on analytics, health, nutrition, high athletic performance, and all other topics related to sports plus the impact on society. Yet for all the advancements and brainpower of their data team, celebrated and sponged off in the industry, La Liga’s giants seem to eschew the use of statistics to undo a muddled recruitment approach.
In 2015, powered by generational talents from their academy and having won a fifth European Cup, Barca could have afforded any player in the world and were generating more than enough funds to construct future great teams. Now, they are a club over £1bn in debt that scramble in the dark for Arsenal and Wolves off-cuts at the dead of the transfer window. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Adama Traore were signings to kick sizeable problems down the road, rather than solid stylistic solutions to a bloated attack that is managing just 1.52 goals per league game.
They were moves driven by desperation and financial gymnastics rather than smart analytics. How exactly Barca steered themselves into such trouble is multi-faceted, and former president Josep Maria Bartomeu’s use of five sporting directors in six years deserves special mention, but a major juncture was Paris SaintGermain activating Neymar’s £200m release clause in the summer of 2017. Barca’s data analysts had suggested two primary targets in response, with the aim of fortifying the team long term and making them home of not just the world’s best player, but the future heirs to that throne: Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland. Both starlets were then even offered to the club, who turned down the opportunity without much consideration despite all the research work. Mbappe — heavily pursued by every major side in Europe already at that point – was viewed as too raw and unproven by the hierarchy.
Haaland, meanwhile, was labelled a player at odds with Barca’s pass-andmove model yet they are now desperate to land him over Manchester City. The chance of a formidable refresh was spurned, and instead, extreme money flooded out for Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho and Antoine Griezmann — with only the first of those still at Camp Nou against the club’s will. Those were just the headline missteps, enveloped by bad business after bad business. Barca’s foresight to compile a stellar analytics set-up only to ignore it in an area that is desperate for a data-driven approach is maddening. Liverpool’s head of research, Dr Ian Graham, is known to joke with them about this: all those tools, all that waste. The Merseysiders ended their threedecade wait to be English champions, conquering Europe and the world enroute, with large credit owed to their surgical transfer strategy powered by cutting-edge research.
If financially mismanaged Barca want to rise again as a true powerhouse, dumping an ad-hoc purchasing policy influenced by politics, ego, prominent agents, and senior players will be paramount. Key to that is leaning on their research team, but they’ve already ceded the head of the department, Javier Fernandez, to Zelus Analytics — a company intending to be the world’s best sports intelligence platform. The Independent has learned that top European clubs — at least two from England — have been circling to pick off the rest of Barca’s data scientists with the promise of more empowerment. President Joan Laporta and co. probably won’t flinch at that prospect – and that would be another dire mistake given they need to find the edges to navigate away from their financial shambles.
As David Sumpter, author of Soccermatics, previously told The Independent: “A lot of teams have people in who crunch the numbers, but they aren’t actually maximising the talents of those people or willing to do so. “There’s still some distrust and also problems around the kind of people who have an influence, like agents exerting too much control at clubs.” Barca have the right minds to steer them back to the top, but they need to stop plugging away to the soundtrack of the wrong voices amid a backdrop of competing interests. There is no other route to ending the looped feeling of Gerard Pique’s assertion that no matter how much is spent – over £1bn between 2014 and 2019 alone — “every year we were a little bit worse.”
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