Identifying Future Stars with Statistics

Brighton and Hove Albion FC paid £4 million for Moises Caicedo in 2021 and then sold him for £115 million to Chelsea in 2023, Brentford FC signed Ivan Toney for £10 million and sold him for £40 million, and Liverpool took a bold gamble on former Premier League “flop” Salah, paying up to £43.9 million to acquire him from Roma, and not only was he an instant hit with them, he has gone on to become one of the all-time undeniable Premier League and football greats.

With each of these clubs, these stories are not one-offs, and the key to these has been their obsessive focus on statistics, especially the underlying data points that tell whether a player would perform better or the same within specific contexts. Even if you’re not involved in football scouting, you can also use underlying statistics during sports betting to astonishing effect.

Why Stat-Based Scouting is Vital

Statistics have always been important in football; goals, assists, and passes are all common statistics that have long existed in the beloved game.

However, scouting is opportunity discovery. The earlier you do, the better for your team. And to do that successfully, you must go deeper than the casual fan sees.

In the past, scouting was purely based on observation and the “eye-test”. Clubs relied on networks of scouts, relationships, and trust. If a scout was trusted, their recommendations would rank high. But at the same time, this meant that talent scouting was limited by geography, and signings of unproven talents were often gambles.

With statistics-based scouting, however, clubs can reliably:

• Discover talent in lesser-explored markets, which they can acquire, develop, and turn over for much higher profits — this is a profitable business model for small clubs like Brighton and Brentford.
• Conduct proper risk assessment of how players will perform within their systems and the peculiar challenges of their local leagues, instead of splashing the big bucks and then throwing it up to chance — this is vital for bigger clubs who almost always have to pay a fortune to acquire talent, and who need players that can immediately slot in and deliver in title challenges for them. 
• Identify hidden gems before they explode — football is an associative sport. This sometimes means that players can have amazing underlying stats, but be lacking in end-product due to the environment (system, teammates, roles) that they play in. By looking at the stats and properly quantifying them, teams can steal gems from under the noses of their rivals and place them in better environments that will cause them to explode.

Some Common Key Metrics for Evaluating Talent

Since clubs started adopting statistics-based scouting, there has been an explosion of underlying metrics in the game. Some have yet to justify their broad relevance, but others have become so reliable that coaches and managers at the highest levels of the game now even mention them casually. Here are some of those underlying statistics by broad roles:

Attacking Players

These are common underlying stats that are used to scout strikers, wingers, and attacking midfielders.

• Shot-Creating Actions (ScA): This metric ranks the player’s involvement in moves that result in clear goalscoring chances, even if they were not the ones to give the final ball (assist) or take the shot.

• Dribble Success Percentage (%): This stat shows the ability of the player to beat their marker.

• Expected Assists (xA): This measures the quality of chances that the player creates, which lead to shots by their teammates.
• Expected Goals (xG): This measures the quality of shots the player takes. It tells how well they take the chances that fall to them, but it also shows how often they get into good positions to receive the ball for goalscoring opportunities.

Midfield Players

These include defensive midfielders, central midfielders, and attacking midfielders in some cases. Here are some common underlying stats for scouting them.

• Progressive Passes: This measures how often they move the ball up the pitch to their teammates (toward their opponents’ goals). Typically, progressive passes move the ball, up to 10 meters toward the opposition’s goal.
• Ball Recoveries: This shows how much the player is willing to fight to regain possession after the ball has been lost or contested. This involves going for loose balls, and intercepting passes.

Defensive Players

These include the central backs, the fullbacks, and the wingbacks. Here are some common underlying stats used in scouting them:

• Defensive Duels Won: It’s usually represented in numbers and percentages, and it shows how often the player can stop opposition attackers from getting to their goal without committing a foul.

• Tackles: This shows how much the player can be relied upon to win the ball from opposition attackers or get the ball out of play.
• Aerial Duels Won: This shows how often the defender makes contact for the ball when he contests for it in the air versus an opposition attacker. In this instance, even if he wins a foul, he is considered to have won the duel.