Sam Allardyce recalls the time around the turn of the millennium when statistical and video analysis came to the Premier League. Analytically minded teams had a substantial advantage over others before match-preparation tools grew in popularity.
In the nearly 20 years since, it’s gone from innovative to mainstream to inundated, but the benefits remain in matters of methodical proficiency. Now more than ever, it’s about streamlining the process to reach conclusions faster and implement the findings into training earlier.
That’s exactly how STATS plans to revolutionize football’s analysis process this summer with the launch of STATS Edge – a search and analytics application that leverages artificial intelligence so clubs can find specific game clips and analyze complex patterns with speed and accuracy never before possible.
“Video clips are massively important. Short bursts of information. Not just on (your own players), but also what we do on the opposition pre-match and post-match,” Allardyce said.
“If you talked about ’99-2000 when statistical analysis came in, you could gain 5-10 percent because not everybody wanted it, not everybody wanted to use it, not everybody had it. So it was much easier then to gain a bigger percentage advantage on how you applied that to your team. But now it’s like everybody’s doing it and the gains are so small now, but those small gains are so important.”
