Football clubs across the world, at all levels, invest heavily in player recruitment. They assemble entire teams of backroom scouts and analysts — some, like Chelsea, even employ multiple sporting directors — who work around the year to produce transfer shortlists for every position.
But when it comes to hiring a new manager or head coach, there is no such framework. Decisions on those appointments are often made by a handful of people at the top of a club: an example is Manchester United’s leadership duo of Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox, who picked Rúben Amorim to succeed Erik ten Hag and are now mulling the prospect of giving Michael Carrick the job full time.
Meanwhile, Real Madrid take things to an even greater extreme: There are voices that carry weight in their selection process, but ultimately what president Florentino Pérez wants ends up being the outcome. Yet more teams across the leagues and around the world are embracing data and analytics as part of their searches — much like they would for players.
“In the last 10 years, player recruitment has been through an evolution to better balance out combining data and expertise,” Edward Sulley, Hudl’s Director of Customer Solutions, tells ESPN. “The head coach and manager recruitment space is going through that same kind of evolution right now.”
There’s a problem, though: It’s seriously expensive. Sulley, who worked for Manchester City for 11 years across performance analysis, research and innovation, lays it bare: “If you’re hiring data engineers, you’re talking perhaps $200,000 per person, plus all the infrastructure, software and data sources … it racks up fast; you’re talking well in excess of $2 million per year in operational costs.”
Some clubs want to embrace analytics in their managerial searches, but baulk at…
