📚 ⚽Upside: Book of the Month: Football Intelligence, A Hands-on Guide to Maximising Your Investments in Data, By Mathieu Lacome & Eva Murray.
Julien Blin
We hope that the year 2023 is off to a great start for you. This week we are profiling a new book called Football Intelligence.
Football Intelligence is a pragmatic and comprehensive guide to help sports organisations make the most of their investments in data and analytics.
Is data not necessary for sports clubs to build and protect a competitive advantage?
It is. There are large, often overlooked, and untapped opportunities among the data a club can access. Today, these are collected by leagues, publicly available, or readily accessible through sports data companies with commercial offerings.
This creates opportunities on and off the field: Sustainable strength within individual athletes, teams, business functions, and the ever-important connection to fans and supporters.
This book offers practitioners and decision-makers guidance to develop robust football and data strategies, design metrics, and systems to monitor the progression of the club and execute key projects. This book helps you make the most of your technology stack and bring out the best in your analytics team, while creating targeted communication plans.
Eva Murray's background is in data analysis, visualisation as well as community building within the technology industry.
Mathieu Lacome built his career in sports, covering multiple roles in football operations before moving to leadership ones in analytics and human performance.
Why they wrote this book?
They searched in vain for a comprehensive guide addressed to data professionals in sports.
An obvious need existed for something to bring together leading thinkers from the industry to focus on applications of analytics at a more strategic level in football. A book that describes how to communicate data and information to any organisational stakeholder.
They want to give you guidance for your strategy and decisions around data.
They want to help you implement data-informed decision-making in your organisation by manoeuvring stakeholder expectations and day-to-day realities. Let's evolve how you and your organisation work with data in a new, disruptive direction.
Many clubs are using data to develop a competitive advantage. Despite Moneyball's1 success as a book and movie being almost two decades old, when so many people still connect data and sports with Hollywood film production and not with daily realities, we have a problem.
The sports industry's maturity and progress for the next decades come from well-defined data strategies and clear roadmaps. Lessons and recommendations in this book are for everyone who works with, analyzes, and consumes data regardless of industry or expertise.
If you work in sports, many examples will feel familiar. If you work in banking, retail, or any other traditional business sector, they're confident you will enjoy the sporting examples and case studies we use. You will also get a glimpse behind the scenes of professional sports while observing our best practice in data science, analysis, and visualisation.
They discuss different technologies that build the foundation for data capture and analysis at the team and individual athlete levels. In chapter 5, they share their recommendations for how you can:
Maximise return from investments in technology;
Navigate the technology landscape with confidence;
Build the knowledge to choose the right solutions for you and your organisation; and
Communicate the club's approach to tech and how it supports strategic objectives.
🔥Upside Chat: James Murray, Chief of Staff, AC Milan (Serie A) and Non-Executive Director at the Scottish Women's Premier League.
Upside chat: Fabien Allègre, Chief Brand Officer at PSG (Ligue 1).
Upside Chat: Eddie Jones, the head coach of England National Rugby team.
Upside Chat: Sebastien Audoux, head of Digital Sports Content at Canal +.
Upside Chat: Padraig Harrington, a world class European professional golfer and former world's #3.
⭐Upside: Top 12 Emerging Sports Performance Startups to Watch in 2H22
🔥 Upside Chat: Dave Hancock, CEO, Apollo (Leading Athlete Management Systems (AMS) vendor)
⭐Sports Performance Roles & Best Practices (Head of Performance, Head Athletic Trainer..)
🔥Upside Chat with Top Sports Performance Execs (NBA, NHL, MLS) on Load Management, Mental Health, Technologies.