Senior vice-president of innovation at Stats Perform Brad Griffiths told Sky Sports: "I think there are two foundational things when it comes to recruitment with data: you need scale and consistency. The scale enables you to look in a very broad market and the consistency is absolutely key. The game looks very different in different competitions: the way teams shape up, the tempo of a game and things like that. You can then rank the leagues against each other and build that into some of the AI modelling to benchmark players.
"You can then create a profile for a player you're looking at and [load] all players in the world that match it. You might not know lots of these players - particularly from smaller leagues you haven't been monitoring. As you move through the football pyramid, what teams are really interested in is value and affordability and getting players at a younger age when they have high potential and things like that. So these tools are really powerful - enabling you to get through that global football database and hone in on some players that may be of interest, which you can then take into the rest of your recruitment process."
