Within a few minutes of the final whistle of every Manchester United game, Ruben Amorim and his coaches receive a detailed but digestible report of all the key data points from the match direct to their mobile phones.
It helps to inform the manager and his staff about where the team have been good and bad, weaker or stronger, how hard they have worked and provides an array of metrics that present an analytical snapshot of the game. Perhaps some suspicions will be confirmed by the data or maybe it flags things that were more deceiving to the naked eye.
Amorim’s predecessor, Erik ten Hag, had been the initial beneficiary of such data reports, which were not available when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Jose Mourinho, Louis van Gaal or David Moyes had been in charge at Old Trafford.
Those reports were just one of the many platforms built and designed by United’s data-science team, which had not existed until 2022 when Old Trafford’s powerbrokers finally woke up to football’s data revolution – an area that Sir Jim Ratcliffe bluntly stated this month the club had “completely missed” over the previous decade.
It is clearly a source of irritation for Ratcliffe, particularly in the context of recruitment and the money frittered away on transfer blunders and inflated contracts that have contributed to the financial challenges now facing the club.
The Ineos chairman first made reference to it last December, 10 months after securing a minority stake and taking over day-to-day operations at Old Trafford, when he told the United We Stand fanzine that the club was “still in the last century of data analysis” and that it “doesn’t really exist here”.
Ratcliffe expanded on that theme in interviews this month, talking as enviously as he did admirably about the transformations at Liverpool, Brentford and Brighton while bemoaning that United are “still missing out because we still don’t have data analysis” at the club.
He even went as far as to suggest that “all we’ve got is Jason’s eyes”, a reference to Jason Wilcox, who was appointed by Ineos as United’s technical director in April last year and has ended up taking on more responsibilities since Dan Ashworth was ousted in December after just five months as sporting director.
In both instances, Ratcliffe’s overarching message was clear: United have to get much better at recruiting players if things are to improve on the pitch and, to do so, need the best data analysis to underpin their processes.
So are United really still in “the last century” when it comes to data analysis? Is it true to say it still barely exists at the club and that, when ...
