Modern Soccer Coach Podcast

Are You Wasting Possession From Throw-Ins? With Jaymes Monte (StatsBomb)

Gary is joined by Jaymes Monte from StatsBomb to discuss the role of attacking throw-ins including:

Is there a difference between a long throw and a possession throw?
How can we measure the effectiveness of throw-ins in different areas of the pitch?
Why are Arsenal better than Man City at throw-in efficiency?

And much more!!

You can read his article on Attacking Throw-Ins: https://statsbomb.com/articles/soccer/measuring-throw-in-success/

Check out MSC coaching content: https://www.modernsoccercoach.com/blog

Duration:: 46m
Broadcast on:: 19 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

We are in Champions League, man. That was my name. Dilly-dilly-dong, come on. [inaudible] Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. It's a sharing of -- I'm so sorry for this! [cheers and applause] I will move it if we beat that move it. This is the Modern Soccer Coach podcast with Gary Kurnee. [cheers and applause] Hello, coaches. Welcome back to another Modern Soccer Coach interview. This week, we are joined by James Montet at Statsbaum. He's written a brilliant article, and this is a great topic on throw-ins. Highly, highly recommend you check out the article. And we'll put the link below. And we're going to talk about the data around throw-ins. Are we potentially missing an opportunity with possession-based teams to get more from throw-ins, not necessarily just a long throw? Brilliant topic. Hope you enjoy it. Please give it a like. Please subscribe. Please give it a rating on iTunes as well. It would mean a lot. Thank you so much for the support. Please check out the resources on ModernSoccerCoach.com. Here is James and Joy. James, thanks so much for joining me today on the Modern Soccer Coach podcast. Really, really excited to have you on. Thanks for having me. I look forward to it. Yeah! We had Thomas Gronemark on a few years ago, but it wasn't specifically around data and throw-ins. So this one is of an article about an article that you did on Stats Bomb. And I'll make sure I put the article below. And I urge everyone to read it. It is coach friendly. It's not just about numbers. You've done a great job, I said. You're writing is very, very good. And it kind of appeals to the coach. So let's talk about this. And my opinion is that, yeah, it is overlooked quite a bit. Even mainstream media, as we've gone to watch a game, XG, possession numbers, all those figures come up. Never, ever, does throw in percentages. Does throw in what numbers? Nothing comes up. Why do you think that is at this stage of the game, whether there's so much of it? I guess it comes out of my head. They're generally one of a bad phrases. They're kind of throw away parts of the game. You kind of throw in, you get a ball back and play. And let's get on with what we're doing, type of thing. Whereas, I think we're seeing more and more with this involvement, evolution story of set piece coaches and that's emphasis on that side of the game. Now we're starting to see teams take more interest and buy more. Set more time aside and training to work on things around set pieces. Obviously, corners and free kicks probably dominate that. But then the throw inside of it is coming into more and more now. Yeah, yeah, it is a fascinating aspect of kind of the growth. Something that you touch on in the article is, which I actually, to be honest, never thought of from a data perspective, is this aspect of possession versus, you know, the Rory DeLap direct throw. I'll refer to Roy DeLap 100 times in this interview just because that's where my head goes. So can you talk a little bit about how teams and how you kind of objectively measure throw in success? Is it a goal? Is it the first ball being received? Or how deep would you go into this? Yeah, I think that's kind of what I was trying to get to with the crux of the article is not, if we're throwing specifically things like throw in, like creating a chance immediately from them is not necessarily always the primary goal. Within a game, if you're looking to quantify a game by data, you use XG, you use short, you use the final score, as a data point for it's quite a clear outcome that you want to achieve. Which I think when it comes to throw-ins and you get a bit more nuance, not everyone's trying to do the same thing from throw-ins. So the point of the article was just trying to highlight that there's many ways to quantify success from a throw-in. So some teams will generally want to just throw into the box and create a chance from the throw-in. Others will want to get the ball back into the regular, the regular sort of set up open play phase of play. So I think, yeah, it's about before you measure whether you're being successful at throw-ins, you need to define what success is to you from a throw-in. And then from that, you can start building a framework around your analysis to then say, "Okay, we're doing this better this game than we were this game and we can monitor things over the season." Hmm, I think the article does a really, really good job in that and kind of provoking you as a coach to think, as you say, a little bit deeper beyond defining, again, where your head goes probably in the last few years has been someone on your team who has a long throw. And immediately, a coach would get excited about that there. But there's levels to that. And I think the article does a really good job in that there where it's like, "Okay, so you need second balls, knockdowns, positioning and aspects like that there." In terms of that long throw, can you talk a little bit about what you've kind of saw with the research, with the traditional Roy DeLab throw? Yeah, I think that one of the big takeaways from, because I kind of went in the right in the article, quite blind about throw-ins to an extent, around outcomes and what happens. There's a clear, if you've got a guy who can launch it into the box, or a woman who can launch it in the box, then there's definitely an upside of the transcreation and the XG creation that you can get from that. And I think if you've got that, if you've got that tool, it'd be silly not to use it to an extent. It's not to say every time you get the ball and attack them through in the final throw, you have to chuck it in the box. And it's not as simple as just chuck it in the box. But I think if you've got that in your arm rate, it makes sense to at least try and maximize that. Do you know what's funny? And it might just be a bias, or it might just be my point of view that I look at the world. But when you have a long throw, personal the long throw, again, everyone gets kind of excited and sees that as a massive opportunity. And if you didn't have that, it would be a lot harder to score from that kind of traditional attack and throw in the final third. But people don't really spend the same amount of emphasis on the corner taker quality, where they think, all right, we'll do the routine. But you don't actually look at the service. How much of it do you think goes down to? And this is a really broad question, so apologies. But how much of it do you think goes down to that piece of the patterns off? Like how much do you need a system around the target player, the knockdown, the movement, all those other variables as well? That's an interesting question. I think if you've got a long throw, you can probably get away with to an extent doing less, because check it in the box and the chaos that ensues will naturally create some chances for you. If you haven't got the long throw and you've just got a sort of mid-range throw, if you like, you're probably going to need to be a little bit more creative in your routines and your patterns of play, I guess, that lead up to creating chances from these throwings. I think certainly it feels that you've got your disposal, dictate a little bit around what you can do. But then to the flip side, if you've got a long throw in the box, you don't want to waste that by just checking it in there and hoping for the best. There's definitely something there to work with. And then it's probably like a chicken and egg type thing of what you do first. Do you work with the throw and take it to create these... I'm off on the back here, but getting the ball in the box is going to naturally create chaos and chances, and then from that, you can develop routines, I guess, that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, it's interesting because, again, the Dilap thing, I think, got so much scrutiny because of Dilap's throw. And then from a coach, you're thinking, "I've had that." You know, when you're working with teams then, you don't really appreciate the fact that, yeah, if the center bar is pretty obvious to know when a long throw is happening as well, so they have a center bar, they can deal with that. Yeah, absolutely. But the lap thing, as well, my nose goes back to Dilap as well. But I think, I don't know if it's just a bias of success bias type thing that's coming out, but I go back to that and I think of the chances that they created. But they also, they were obviously a long ball team under Tony Pulis and they had all gone in. And at the time, I don't think there was many other long throws. I certainly not as prominent as Dilap was, whereas now you have your Brent Feds and your Sheffield United for the last season that were thrown into the box. And it seems a bit more measured and a bit more like this is what we're trying to do with the long throw, rather than just checking it in there. When Dilap was as prime, I think it was just a case of checking it in the mixer and we've got some big guys that can deal with it. Yeah, I also had Peter Crouch, I'm not sure if I had any correlation with it. But it kind of moved me back a bit now. And again, the article, you talk about the Premier League table on XG per throw. And I thought this was, this was fascinating. Because I always assume with any table and success that the top teams are doing, like leading the way in set piece, leading the way in possession, leading the way in chance creation. But you have City at the bottom of it and it says, "Oh, I was City don't have a long throw." But then it goes XG per throw. So it's what you have, and correct me if I'm wrong here, what you basically get from the throwing in the chain of a similar XG assistant. But Arsenal are up there and City are way down there. And those are two similar styles. First of all, I'm writing that kind of definition. And then second of all, why is Arsenal way ahead of City? Yeah, you're pretty much right. So Stas Punde has a set piece model that underpins it. And how that then calculates the XG from throwing is whether the phaser plate is still in the throwing. So a phaser plate is determined by the model. And there's a few factors that go into that, location of the ball, time, various things. So yeah, so there's a model that underpins it. And models, by definition, are debatable. There's decisions made with what goes into the model and what doesn't go into the model. So you could probably sit down and watch 100 throwing clips. And there'd be five edge cases where you'd be like, that should be thrown. And it's not classes of throwing phaser plate. But essentially, yeah, there's a cut-off point from the throwing to some point after it, as determined by a number of factors that says it's still in throwing phaser plate, or not in throwing phaser plate. So going back to your question about Arsenal City, I think the easiest takeaway from that is that Arsenal are doing something after the throw-in that gets the ball into the box and creates a chance quicker. Then what city would city are probably more likely to recycle the ball and whether it's move across to the side of the pitch, whether it's to just get back in order sort of standard shape or whatever it might be. So yeah, you're right in what you're saying that that's quite interesting, that there's a difference between them given that they're fairly similar styles of play. Without sitting and watching every single Arsenal throw, the data suggests that they're doing something that a little bit quicker would be following attacking third throws to get a chance away, to get a chance in and go. Well, we'll talk a little bit about speculation, about what potentially teams are doing. It seems like any time you see Arsenal, and obviously Guardiola is at the forefront of coaching and tactics and all that great stuff, but when you see Arsenal, there's a lot of work being done. Even in the documentary, you see some won't be work being done, you see some shot clock stuff being done. So it's obviously a quite data-centric club as well. So perhaps they're just looking at saying, yeah, they're looking at getting, what you're saying there's maybe a shorter time to take advantage of a throw-in, whereas City are using it in a circulation type way? Yeah, as I said, without having watched every single throw-in and taking this video feedback from that, the data certainly suggests that they're doing things either a little bit more quickly following an attacking throw-in or a little bit more directly, in terms of when they get a chance from a subsequent phase of play after the throw-in. All right, definition time, all BV you talk about and then XG assisted, give us the breakdown of where kind of all BV's different from XG metric. Yeah, so XG is obviously a measurement of chance creation. So every shot on goal, I'll be given it, I'll have an XG value. Where that differs from OBV is OBV values every action on the pitch. So whether that be a pass or a dribble or a tackle or a shot, everything has an OBV value. So when we're looking at measuring throw-in XG, if we have a phase of play where throw-in down the line, ball into the box, ball goes right across the six yard box, but nobody gets a shot away. That's not going to get an XG value because there's no shot at the end of that. Whereas using OBV allows you to measure everything that builds up to the place where the shot didn't occur. So because you've done a lot of good work in that build-up, you've got the ball into it in a very good area, but don't get a shot away. You're still getting a value from the OBV model. That kind of assigns positive negative connotations from that. Kind of tying into that there, this five second aspect of OBV that you talk about with second balls. That's not necessarily, do they get a chance in second balls? That's more or less, can they move the opposition with second balls? Is that more specific? Or is that accurate? The five second thing was a fairly arbitrary decision from me and when I was pulling this data together. It was kind of just another example of how you can measure success from your throw-in. There's a fairly legitimate argument that you could extend that five seconds to 10 seconds and look at the results there. You could use the phase of play model that we talked about earlier and just look at the OBV values within that. Yeah, five second was just a kind of, I wanted to see how quickly teams will move in the ball in more dangerous areas and I wanted to remove the element of having to get a shot away at the end of it. Yeah, it's a short time window, but it's just a decision around, again, coming back to what I was kind of saying at the start. You need to find, if you're wanting your KPIs, I guess our throw-ins is to say we want to quickly create chances within five seconds of an attacking throw-in, then that might be a good mark-up. If you're happy to be a little bit more measured, say 10 seconds might be fine. Maybe if we looked at that for mindset in Arsenal, if we extended that to 20 seconds, perhaps that's when mindset in Arsenal start to level out because the mindset you're doing things a little bit more further down the possession chain, if that makes sense. Yeah, another aspect you talked about, which was probably my favorite part of the article, because I'm a big believer in it, is switching a play and some teams using the throw-in to switch, like, again, without seeing a massive sample size or without knowing what goes on behind the scenes, I took a look at Liverpool a couple years ago when Thomas was there and with the lens of every time they throw in, there must be something deliberate being done here and I noticed that even a ball bounced back from the thrower back to Trent Alexander-Arnold and you see that there's a whole compilation of this where he's volleying the ball across the pitch blindly to Robertson on the far side. Without that's not really that, that's two passes, so I guess where it's not an extreme amount of possession, how would you look at that from a data perspective? Yeah, I guess there's a number of ways you could literally just look at how often the ball moves from the throw-in side to the other side within whatever timeframe or whatever number of passes. You mentioned two passes there, it could be that, it could be we wanted on the other side within four seconds. You can also measure, so one of the metrics that stats bone collects is ball receipts in space, so you might want to look and say, okay, how often do we get the ball from Trent out to Andrew Robertson when he's in space? So there's no good movement, too, I'm if he's got a man on him, and that doesn't really achieve her goal, but how often can we move the ball from one side of the pitch to the other and find a winger attack and fill back in excellent space, and that could be your measurement of success in that instance. Yeah, that's really interesting, I didn't know stats bomb had that receipt receipts of space. All receipts in space, so you can effectively measure the volume, the area of space around the ball, the player receiving the ball, so that could be, you could say five, you could see, you can also set parameters on that, so you could say I want them to be within five yards of space, or 10 yards of space, or whatever you, what is your want to measure. This is a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, time on throws. Do you think if someone takes a quick throw, you've more chance of success, or I know there's a big middle ground here where you could be setting something up, or if someone takes too long, options dry up, do you think there's any that would be an interesting piece to go down, or do you think I'm completely wasting my time with it? I think subjectively, I definitely agree, like if I'm watching my team on a Saturday or Sunday, I want quick throws all the time, and I don't know if that's just something that's built in from watching football as a kid, or not, and it's a difficult one to quantify in data, because especially with event data, there's many unknowns, you don't know what the setup is around you, how, what the sort of phase of plays when the ball goes out, and things like that, but certainly, like if you're in an attacking phase, and the ball goes out, and you can get the ball back and play quickly, like subjectively, I always find that something that excites me as a fan and wants to see it. I think there's also them all going back a little bit to what we're talking about before around chaos, like if you're quick to take a throw in, you're more likely to catch the opposition, the defending team off guard, and help you create that chaos, and I think that's what set pieces can be good at, they can create a bit of chaos in the opposition, because you know what you're doing, whereas the opposition are somewhat reactive to your movement, so I think by taking more time and slowing it down, you give the opposition more time to get back into their shape and back into their usual setup, and deal with whoever's coming, so I don't have any data to back any of that, but general opinion I have. It's a good, it's a good pop chat as one of my friends, yeah, that's it. The space is obviously a big thing, and, and when I'm thinking about this and reading your article, thinking about the questions, I'm thinking about space, like it's all about if you take a quick throw, you get space, it's about obviously the the receipt metric there that you talked about, which I didn't even know about, this space, you have a great visual on how teams, and I'll put it up here, how teams use space, which are almost like a heat map, can you talk about how that data is kind of worked out with that area? Yeah, so let's come back to what we were just talking about there, about the measurement of space around a player when they receive a ball, so the heat map effectively is depicting where, where teams are receiving the ball with more space and where they're receiving the ball with, with less space. I think one of the takeaways I had was that, I think, shifting out of the top of my head was one that had a lot of ball receipts in space around the sort of middle area of the pitch, yeah, they're one of the teams with the longest throws and throwing in the box most often, and I think that also kind of speaks to what we're talking about there is, although the team, defending team, are going to be set up to defend the longer throw, that then gives you other opportunities for the shorter throw to find someone a bit deeper in space, and I guess to counter what we're saying about the quick throw, if you do, if you make a quick throw, if you're chef united, maybe there's not the space there, but if you take the time and everyone gets in the box and waits for the longer throw, then maybe the space appears somewhere else in the pitch, and I guess it's both in that balance a little bit. It's fast, and when you start, when you start looking at it a lot deeper, you start to, again, it's a kind of Pandora's box, you get 20 more questions to yourself. One of the pieces, again, speculation you put in the article was, was Brighton and Brighton style and Dessert Bay, and part of me thinks, you know, Dessert Bay, I think challenged coaches in a lot of ways about space as well, where he saw maximising opportunities where there was congested areas as an opportunity, and again, we could take this two different ways, pure speculation, are they working on it, do they value it, or maybe he sees that as, yeah, if we can play out of a 10 by 10 box around the penalty area, we can play out of a 20 by 30 box around the pitch, like, again, speculation, what are you, what are you feeling about Brighton's work in this area? Yeah, when you said you mentioned this question before we came online, and I had it out myself about the Dessert Bay thing, and I went looking at Google, I was trying to find a definitive thing that says he doesn't work on set pieces, and there's not really anything there. There's a couple of clips of him saying that he's not particularly focused on set pieces, I guess, but that kind of, that comment or that reference in my article, kind of came back from work that we've done, it starts from myself and other guys there that worked on various projects, and looking at Dessert Bay teams, and their set piece outputs always been sort of middle to pure, and it's time of Brighton, and it's just real before that, so it was kind of just something that was in the back of my mind, and we discovered that his teams never really shown for traditional set piece measurement metrics, so that's not to say, going back to what I was talking about earlier, that there's other intentions from his set pieces, so yeah, again, it's all coming back to like, it depends what you want to do from set pieces, there's not right or wrong here, it's about measuring what you're trying to do. Yeah, wouldn't it be great to be such a brilliant monitor that you can say publicly that you're not really worried about set pieces, like in 2024, you're never getting hired if you say that. Yeah, exactly, now you've got to be in Jefferson. Let's bring it back a little bit where, because I think this is a really good topic, and something that we don't really talk about as a coaching community is like, okay, we're talking about data, and the data is outstanding, and the work that stats bummed through about progressing conversations in this area, I think it's been phenomenal over the last few years, but I think there's still this kind of thought process around coaches where, hey, listen, I don't have a stats bum membership, or I don't have a big amount of budget to spend on data, but you talked before about coaching your sons under 11 seem, even with the thought of what you're trying to do from a throw in, or maybe little areas of like, this is how it's measured, I'm sure that can transfer to grassroots level, to what you just think about the game a little bit differently, would you agree? Yeah, I think, I mean, throw in some of it are difficult, because the reasons we discussed before, they're kind of like a second thought within games and whatnot, but, and you can sometimes come away from it, if I'm coaching my sons team, you come away anywhere, you won't remember any throw in some of the game, it's been 25, 35, 45 throw in and you'll remember one of them where you kind of go in behind the defence or something like that, so I think you're relying a grassroots you're a little bit more reliant on subjective assessment, I guess, but that's not to say there isn't an advantage there, and I know myself, we have two training, two one-hour training sessions a week, well, they're not an elite team, they're a good team, but they're not an elite team, and you have to choose what to work on, and I say, do I spend 20 minutes working on throwings, or do I get them in their shape, or moving the ball about, or training certain drills that are going to have more of an impact on the game, so I think that's why the whole conversation around the article I wrote has been focused on Premier League teams, and it's easy to prioritize throwings maybe once a week, once a month, twice a month, if you've got that sort of resources and you've got that time to work with players, as you go down the food chain, so to speak, resources and time become less in it, I can see why throwings get pushed to one side, yeah, see, I disagree, the more I read articles like this, the more I think resources that are low then create heavily, and solutions have to be higher, so where, you know, I look now at session design a lot, not just because of this article, but I think it confirms to me is like, okay, if we're measuring this now, it's obviously got value, but how many possession exercises, even from a tactical 11v11, 11v10, start from a coach kicking a ball to someone, could that not start with a throw in? Yeah, and I think like, although we're seeing nobody's really got time to work on it, or whatever, but if you're the team that does find 20 minutes a week, or 20 minutes every couple of weeks to work on throwings in your session, you're probably going to see a difference within your, if nobody else is doing it, then that's where we talk about marginal gains and all that sort of stuff, but maybe it's a little bit more than marginal at grassroots because literally nobody else is doing it, if you're the one team at a your 12 team league that can spend a bit of time on that, and I can make a quite a big difference at times. Could you subjectively, just say you draw a line on the pitch and you get your video or whatever it is that you're recording the match on, and you go through it, then you analyze it, you take, I mean, how many throwings in a youth game probably, it's probably actually a high amount, probably 30, 40, 50, and taking those down and doing a little bit of maybe if it's attacking ways, doing a, but like a diagram line the pitch charted out, counted. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly ways you could monitor it. If you've got the time to sit down and watch the game back and effectively chalk up successful outcomes from your throwing, just from watching the video, then I think that there's definitely ways you can record that, and it's the same as what the big clubs will be doing, but you're just having a bit more work about yourself, but knowing and trying to get the ball into a certain area within five seconds of a throw in or whatever it might be, there's ways to measure it if you've got the time and the resources to do it. Hello, coaches. We'll take a quick break here. Two quick things. First off, if you are in the process of starting up the season and planning for the season, please check out the special offers, modernsarcaculture.com/shop. We have high school bundles and we have pre-season bundles where we're basically giving away a ton of our resources. A really, really, really low price. We're keeping it open for a couple more days before we will take them down, but there's tons of stuff on there. It's a really, really good deal. And then finally, if you want to go one step further with your coaching development, please check out our online course, Certificate in Advanced Tactical Analysis and Coaching Methodology. We've built a course, which the objective is to connect coaching to analysis. You go through all the processes around pressing data, packing data, set piece analysis, coding, game model design, scouting frameworks, coach philosophy. We've had 50 coaches go through the program over the summer and we've got some brilliant feedback. So we're going to continue to build it so you don't just get a certificate and we'll see you later. There's going to be tons of other opportunities to jump on and engage on the analysis side. As a member, please check it out, modernsaculture.com/analysis. Get involved and hope to see you there. Thanks for the support. See you soon. Yeah, well, we'll kind of go into the other end of the spectrum now and flip in the time and resources and let's say you are a professional team, but not at the level of Champions League, where you have kind of expertise alongside the data, which is kind of what I see. Let's just say you've got data. And as you know, I've worked with Stats Bomb or I previously worked with Stats Bomb for a few years and you're telling me two or three metrics that I didn't know even existed because they're growing it every year and they're pushing out more and more. But there comes a challenge as a coach to be how much data is too much data. Like you can't focus in a workflow. You can't focus on a week on everything. So I guess how would you recommend the coach who in a lot of levels today, they might not admit it, but are kind of being introduced to the volume of data at an earlier stage. How would you navigate around that or how do you advise them to do that? Yeah, I think my thoughts on that is to try and pull back of it, not getting into the intricacies. Maybe you don't want to measure the throwing, you don't want to measure it every game, but maybe you don't want to look after every game, say, okay, this is the extra we created from the throwing. You don't want to look at that game by game by game, take it back, look at it on a 10 game by 10 game block and say, okay, over this first part of the season, we didn't work on throwing as much. Now we've got the second part of the season, we've started working on throw-ins, are our numbers going up? Are we achieving more? So rather than, I agree, you can get bogged down and looking at too many numbers and you can look at them too often, but if you can do like a quarterly or a five game review, and so pick up trends that are related to things that you might have been working on, and if you've been working on throw-ins for an hour a week, for a five-week period, and nothing's changed on your throwing numbers, then either the work that you're doing is not up to scratch, or you might want to just been off and focus on something else. There's no point in banging away if things are not turned around, or you can't keep doing the same thing over and over, you need to change what your drills are, what your techniques are around throw-ins to try and pick those numbers up. But looking at one game by one game is maybe a bit too focused on if that makes sense. Yeah, I think this is really fascinating on the topic, because this is part of where I see talking marginal gains, even if it's, I think there's a bigger piece on the pie on the table, where five years, I think mainstream will then, everyone will have access to almost the same amount of data, and then all of a sudden, like, okay, well, what's going to separate? Surely it's not the volume of staff. James, surely there's going to be tricks to be in skillful. What are you thinking, that area? Yeah, I understand. I think that's what we're seeing generally in football and data. A few years back, four or five years back, just having data was an advantage. Now everyone's got data. Now it's about how you use the data and how smart you are with it, and not getting bogged down in there. If you can have an analyst that can bring you the key takeaways as a coach, then that's the skill of it, I think, and knowing how to interpret and knowing how to pick apart the different elements of it. And I think, again, coming back to the overall the sort of premise of the blog post that I wrote, knowing what you're measuring and knowing what your success is and what you're looking at. It's not necessarily the headline numbers of XG or Shout Son Goa or Final Third Progressions, get a little bit more into the ways, find things that are specific to you, find things that are a little bit different to what everyone else is looking at, and that's where you can get a little bit of an edge. Yeah, great topic. We kind of got moved away, but like I love us here where, yeah, there's a skill of being a data analyst, you know, to connect, similar to being a very analyst, connecting with staff and trying to see it from their perspective. And, you know, I see Italian night day, and I see R9, Ronaldo there behind you. So like, you're obviously someone who enjoys, you know, the element of the game, the way a coach would, how would you say then, maybe someone who's coming at it from a pure, you know, numerical genius, data science, Harvard, all these Ivy League schools, like, is it a challenge in your eyes to see that where you do understand the numbers, but maybe you don't understand the kind of reality of the chaos of the game. I think it depends on the individual. There's certainly people out there that are using data and these Harvard, whether it might be data scientists that maybe don't understand the game and there's some that they, I think, in the bigger organizations or the bigger clubs that have got the resources that has been increasingly becoming a role where there's somebody who sits between the two, somebody who understands the data science part, but necessarily can't, maybe can't necessarily do all the intricacies of it, but also understands football to a degree and almost like an interpreter in between the day as the heavy data guys and the heavy football guys. But yeah, I think there's a comment, there's been a comment together over the years of, you'll know better than me, but football people are becoming more open to it. And I think the initial resistance of 10 years ago from your traditional football old school guys, it has dissipated a lot. And I think that's because people have started explaining that. I think that wasn't necessarily our old school against new school type thing. The new school guys had to think about how they were translating the insights and having a level of understanding of both helps to bring it together. Yeah, that's a really interesting point on the translator. We had a guest on a few months ago that talked on this topic and said that the closer you are to the communication process, then the more kind of football aligned you need to be just because of that. Again, almost the dialect of communicating football to football people, even if the coaches, even if the coaches modern and open minded being presented with data that tells you that you're not good at something, isn't what people want every day that week. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's also the thing. People and people have seen data as a stick to beat them with, and I don't think that's necessarily always the case. I'm sure people have used it in that way along the way. But I think using it as a way to inform your processes and inform whether what you're doing is working, whether you need to change things and give you a bit of a more of an objective outlook. It helps in that way as well. Absolutely. I still think we're there, similar to data being perceived from a player standpoint to being used, even if it's event data or physical data that's being used to say, all right, you're not covering enough ground. It's the kind of human mindset of if we're trying to improve something, you have to highlight a weakness. So if you're trying to improve the team by 1%, there's no point in rolling up and saying, hey, you're really, really good at OBV. This is brilliant. But also the translation piece is sometimes that data analyst is translating from ownership, who is more data centric with financials and numbers. It's interesting. I think the way it depends on who you're speaking to as well, the way you want to communicate findings to a sporting director might be different to the way you communicate them to a first team coach or a manager. It's just about knowing your audience and who wants the information and what level of information they want and why they want it. Yeah, it's a skill? I think so. I think when we talked about OBV before, and I'm not suggesting I give the best explanation, but there's about 100 ways you can explain OBV, and some of them will resonate with certain people and some other resonate with others. Again, it comes back to what you said about a relationship between the analyst and the coach and staff and knowing how to speak to them and knowing what level of communication, what level of insight, I guess, or what level of depth of the scientific part of it that you want to give to the coach or you just say, look, it's a difference between how likely you have to score from this position versus this position. Sometimes that just clicks away from there. Yeah, you've also got a generation of coach now that's more cleared up with the conversations, so now they're sitting. That's got to be a factor, so now the gray is significantly increased, so they have element of communication. Even from, again, going back to stats bomb, when I used stats bomb, two favorite things about stats bomb was the glossary of definitions, which is, I needed that a lot, but two was the radars, player radars, and comparing those there, but I actually did a presentation of this during the week about youth coaches, like, where's the game going to go? Eventually, people are going to be evaluating players from a more objective lens, but the consistency, and you might disagree with this, James, the consistency I saw with radars is that even the top players are really, really good at something and really, really average or below average at something, so. Yeah, it's just about contextualizing as well, and knowing what a certain metric tells you, and also what it doesn't tell you, it's not necessarily always more as better, or nice as worse type thing, there's a lot of gray areas around it as well, and knowing why a player performs purely on a certain metric is almost as important as knowing whether he performs good or bad, but if he used the date to ask you more questions, that's why, kind of, the way how you approach it, okay, display it at this level for this metric, why, and then if you can, if you can answer the question right, and that informs you, you're, you're all around the opinion of it, especially in your recruitment, I suppose. Brilliant, last couple for you, what does a, what does a data analyst look like as an under 11 coach, are you trying to fundraise for GPS and all for you? No, I try to switch off, that's my weekend to switch off from the data stuff, and although I can, I can definitely see that when they're shooting from outside the box, it drives me mad, far from that, I'm trying to switch off. Brilliant, yeah, I mean, when we're looking at where the game is going to go, which obviously is going to be really, really interesting, I mean, when do you think that, again, from a development standpoint that, you know, the players of tomorrow are going to be sitting in front of a laptop with video, and everyone's like, oh yeah, that's going to happen, a lot of that education is going to be, again, a mainstream money, no football, but they're also going to be sitting in front of someone with a radar, and when do you think, again, just speculative, when do you think that should be introduced to them and kind of that aspect of the game? Do you mean in terms of our age? Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, it's a tough one, I don't like the idea of young kids being introduced to it, like from a, that they can be aware of them, and look at, you can look at how they've made off of Holland, but for their own performance, failure might be a bit, what's the word? Destructive, I guess, like, it's not, it's not an encouragement, you do want to have kids going out there at 11, 12, 13, 14, trying to think about all my exchange, I'm just going to get higher on my progressive addresses, and if they don't like the idea of that, I'd be a believer in just trying to get them out there playing and a bit more freedom, you don't want to stress around it, sort of thing, and I guess that that varies if you look at the top of the word, it says, how we use football, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't be encouraging looking at it, anything under, like, 16, 17, once again, 18, maybe there's a use for it. Brilliant. All right, last one for you, tomorrow of giving you a job, taking it from stats bomb for triple your salary to come to a Premier League club as a director of football, would you, because obviously on the topic of throws, we're going to work on it, would you specialize in that kind of the long one, if you had that, or would you say, listen, let's start at the halfway lane and let's maximize that there from a personal point of view, why would you see the greater value? In terms of what we're working on in training, do you mean that? Yeah, in terms of trying to get a return from it, yeah. I think it depends what you've got in your club, if you've got a long thrower in there, I'd be pushing for trying to make some use of that, very, not very few, but fewer teams than have longer throws in their game in the team than don't, so to leave that on the table and not be, if we've got a long thrower or not, we're not throwing it in the box semi-regularly, I'd be a little bit concerned, I think that's almost working at a disadvantage to something that you could be maximizing. But yeah, more generally, I think it depends where we are. I don't want to go out and tell the coach to spend an hour a week working on throwings when we're getting B4 and L every week later. If we're a decent team and we're up the top end of the table and there's a suggestion that we could we could get an extra couple of percent out of the chances of winning a game from throwings, then yeah, I'd be encouraging it, but I'm not, not one for saying let's drop everything and work on throwings or set pieces. Yeah, well, here's the million dollar one, and I'm only asking this because I don't know what interview it was, but I've listened to the lap, I think it was under the course he made it be on, and I talked about how it was kind of a fluke, how he was found, he was throwing something, but it wasn't like a throwing competition. So again, something we don't talk about as coaches is how do you find someone? Now, if I buy the lap from Stoke, I kind of know now, but a lot of levels, people don't know if someone has the capabilities of a long throw, would you measure that on one day on your first day? Yeah, it wouldn't be against it. I don't think like make it a bit of fun, let's have a thrown competition so you can throw it the furthest, and if somebody happens to be an absolute rocket launcher and can check it out for the end of the pitch, then we're starting to use that, right? Yeah, I'd be up for at least finding out if you've got a throw, a long throw in your team. I wouldn't just assume that nobody can throw it because nobody has. Yeah, Berlin. Berlin. Great way to finish it. James, whenever throwings take off in the next five to ten years, people will refer to this podcast as the change. Thank you so much for coming on. Ready, ready, appreciate it. Great work. Cheers, Gotti. Pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Modern Soccer Coach podcast. For more coaching topics, sessions, and resources, head on over to Coach Kurnine on Facebook or visit the website at www.modernsocercoach.com.