A soccer team has 3,285 days to turn a child into a professional player. From 10 to 19 years old, more or less, this is the estimate of those responsible for the quarries in Spain. Nine years in which the majority of adolescents end up falling by the wayside, change course, find other motivation, see that they are unable to reach the sporting elite and focus on their studies.. So few that every detail is key to its development. Every week, every minute they spend in the sports city is taken into account to maximize their potential as much as possible. “The club revolutionized the universe of transfers with a different scouting system that created a school and currently the key lies in innovation and technological development,” he adds.
The new footballer, more studies and less “broken toys”: “It is no longer normal to suspend and reach First Division”
In the José Ramón Cisneros Palacios Sports City one finds some of the most promising youngsters in national football. 321 players followed and analyzed down to the smallest detail. 100 GPS devices that are distributed according to the training schedules of each category, 1 video system to record the main course sessions, 10 portable recording systems so as not to lose attention to the exercises that take place in all fields.. “It was difficult for us to adapt to technology”, they admit to the Sevillian team, but nothing is understood without it anymore. “We record training sessions and matches and transform the data into analysis to create our own metrics and report the performance of each player.”
One questionnaire, 25,000 responses
But, what data can be collected and analyzed from a player, for example, 13 years old? The answer: everything. We changed to Sevilla, a European team, for Racing de Santander, for example, a historic player in the Second Division, and we found the same depth in the statistics. “We analyze all the training sessions and give a score to all the variables. From the fry to the juvenile. All the injuries, physical data, statistics of each training session, nutritional values, type of exercise…”, lists Álex Fernández, one of the managers of the Cantabrian team's youth system, to this newspaper. In El Sardinero they calibrate everything under a project called 'Player 360'. Among all the tools, one stands out: “All the players fill in a comment from time to time about how they are, what they have slept, fatigue, muscle load, etc.. We accumulated 25,000 responses, that helps us a lot when it comes to analyzing the player and our work,” he sums up.
In Valladolid, this questionnaire is daily for the 200 children who are part of the Pucela youth academy. “We measure body composition, we make individualized plans…. There is an assessment of all the players and we create individual objectives for them, with a weekly monitoring program”, says Javi Torres, coordinator of processes of the Valladolid youth academy.
Example of a statistical card of a match. THE WORLD
Within the Impulse Plan promoted by LaLiga, each club must prepare a technological development plan and reach the minimum objectives detailed by the organization. “If the clubs grow, LaLiga grows,” says Juan Florit, director of Sports Projects for LaLiga. For this there are many platforms: 'Football ISM' or 'Catapult' for medical data, GPS and physical load evaluations; 'Power Bi', 'Nacsport' or 'Cinfo' for tracking and eventing, which are those statistics based on the actions that take place during the exercises; 'Ligen' or 'Wyscout' for scouting work.. A summary: “I am not going to sign anyone just for the data, but I am not going to sign anyone without the data,” explains Elías, who coordinates a tool at Sevilla that collects more than 1,000 variables.
In Nervión they have created their own tools such as 'AIFootball', for the work of sports management; 'AiScouting', to optimize the work of the scouts; 'AiRadar', “a tool for detecting early talent”; and 'AiTracking', to track youth squads from the club who went to other leagues and can leave some percentage of sales in the future. “The data must be focused on the development of the player, not only on his purchase or sale in inferiors or in the first team.”
The objective? Create the largest number of profiles for the first team and for professional football. Because LaLiga, financially besieged by the Premier in recent years, has realized that it can only grow from its foundations: its youth system. “Our goal is that 20% of our staff is from the house. That gives us savings in transfers, in salaries and offers us a feeling of belonging”, explains Miguel Calzado, director of the Betis youth academy. “And in 4 years, the ideal is to make at least one sale of a youth squad to generate that economic surplus value that allows us to continue growing,” he argues. On the other side of the city, the message is similar. “What we want is for each player to be worth many millions more in two years,” says Elías. And for this, the Holy Grail : the data.