Sleafordblade
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I see the athletic have done an article on our own blades analytic. I wondered if any of you subscribe to this and would mind screen shotting the article please.
Blades analytic/ the athletic article
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Withington Blade
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The Sheffield United fan who’s tweets landed him a job in player recruitment
From, in his own words, “venting about Sheffield United on Twitter” to being part of a League One club’s recruitment operation just eight or so months later.
Quite the remarkable journey for Jay Socik, one of the pioneers behind the “fanalytics” movement and now partner in a company providing specialist scouting services for several clubs, including Swansea City and US second-tier side Tampa Bay Rowdies.
“It has been way beyond what I could have dreamed about,” the 30-year-old tells The Athletic. “As a kid, you obviously grow up wanting to be a footballer. Then, when I went to university, it was all about wanting to be a coach or analyst.
“Three years ago, I did feel that opportunity of working in football had gone. I had my day job but was not doing anything in football. I was just tweeting as a fan — an ordinary bloke.
“So, to go from having literally no followers on Twitter to, first, getting involved at Peterborough United with Darragh (MacAnthony, the club’s owner) and now working with all these great clubs is crazy.”
Socik is one of six partners in MRKT Insights, a company set up last year whose data-driven analysis has already been tapped into by clubs looking to unearth hidden gems in the transfer market by using their insight in both recruitment and performance analysis.
It is, however, his route from a fan with a smartphone to being part of Peterborough’s recruitment set-up that is perhaps the most fascinating.
“I have always spoken about football with my pals,” adds Socik, a one-time Bramall Lane season ticket holder who — under the handle @Blades_analytic — has built up a 22,000-strong Twitter following, “either down the pub or when getting together with friends and family.
“But I still needed a place to vent about the Blades, and where better to do that than Twitter? I have always been quite analytical about sports. I did a degree that was performance analysis-based. So, I started to analyse Sheffield United. If, say, we lost 1-0 but had 12 shots to their six, I asked myself if we needed to look into that in a slightly different way.
“Early on, Kevin Gage, the former United defender, gave me a retweet, as did (local journalist) Alan Biggs. Kev said something along the lines of, ‘I agree with this guy — he has got it spot-on.’ That led to quite a lot of Blades flocking to the account.
“I started revving in more and more of the stats-based things. I looked at how football was doing things and found there was a bit of a gap between what that data might mean and how it was being interpreted in football circles. I tried to plug that from a Sheffield United perspective at first, and then the EFL.
“It grew, despite me not really having a clue what I was doing — none of this marketing nonsense or targeting where to tweet. It was literally me saying my thoughts on football and backing it up with a bit of evidence.
“Within six to eight months, it had got quite popular and that was when Darragh saw my work. We ended up talking over Twitter about data in football. I explained how I interpreted that data in a football context by using it in conjunction with video to highlight trends, players and so on.
“Ali (Maxwell, presenter of the Not The Top 20 podcast) then came in on the conversation and said, ‘You should look at bringing him in for a bit of advice.’ Darragh emailed the next day and we bounced a few ideas around.
“To cut a long story short, I was brought in on a paid basis as a consultant. Initially, to work on his ‘Gem’ initiative — basically, a non-League/League Two project to discover the best young talent. Could I find him under-23s or under-21s? If he and Peterborough then liked these recommendations on the video clip, they would go out and scout them.”
Socik adds: “I found working with Darragh really, really interesting. I learned so much about how the industry works. The work could be random in terms of frequency. Basically, all of last season, but ad hoc.
“I still had my day job as an engineer. So I wasn’t going into the club every day or anything like that. More a case of me talking to Darragh or emailing him, working out what sort of profiles Peterborough were wanting to recruit and then providing a bunch of players, from the data, who fitted that.
“Darragh already had quite similar things going on. But they liked it that much that, when the window came round, the work came into the first-team set-up too. Basically, providing a quality assurance. A case of, ‘We like this guy, we think we will sign this guy — what do you think?’ It was my first real exposure to a transfer window and how chaotic they are.”
Socik joined MRKT in the wake of the company’s launch last year. “We now have seven clubs that we work with,” he adds. “We even have a player in the Norwegian third division as one of our scouts. We feel that is an undervalued market and wanted someone who knows those leagues really well. He is a genius.
“What we do at MRKT is recruitment analysis — such as talent ID, where we come up with recommendations. A club can say to us they want a No 9 who does this, that and the other. We build a profile with the club and then use the data and video to scout before going back to the club with players who fit that profile. They will then take a look at the video and, if they like what they see, watch the players live.
“The whole business has grown substantially over the last couple of years. Certainly from when I first started in ‘Fanalytics’, as they call it. Brentford have been doing this for five years now and everyone is aware of their success. They are trying to catch up.
“All our work is done from home. It was the same at Peterborough. I never met Darragh, we just contacted each other online. At MRKT, we more or less run the company on Slack (an online messaging service) — one of the guys, Ram, lives in India.”
All this analysis does beg the question as to whether games involving Sheffield United are now a work exercise for Socik or still the passionate pursuit they quickly became after first being introduced to Bramall Lane as a five-year-old. “Don’t worry, I am still the same lunatic who has stood at the back of Gangway B for years in the Kop,” he laughs. “I cut loose when we score.”
This brings us neatly on to Chris Wilder’s team and what improvements, if any, need to be made next season following the club’s ninth-place finish on their return to top-flight football.
Socik cites the defensive record — only the top three conceded fewer Premier League goals — as justification for not tweaking too much at the back, other than adding genuine strength in depth.
“If we lose Chris Basham, John Egan or Jack O’Connell then we are in trouble,” the lifelong fan says, before adding how badly Dean Henderson will be missed if he does not return on a new loan from Manchester United.
“Not wanting to be too geeky here but, if you look at post-shot Expected Goals versus goals conceded or saved, Henderson made seven or eight goals difference. And a lot of those saves came in games when we either won by a goal or drew.”
It is at the other end where United can make more substantial gains in 2020-21, according to Socik. “We need to be more creative,” he adds. “People look at the strikers and, yes, we need to be more clinical. Six goals for a top scorer (achieved jointly by Oli McBurnie and Lys Mousset) is not good enough.
“But I don’t think we actually create enough. We are 20th for shots in the league. Expected goals (xG) was about 14th or 15th overall. OK, that’s not bad but we are in tight games and we need that bit more creativity.
“We rely on crossing so much. Apart from Liverpool and Manchester City, we had more crosses than anyone. The interest in Matty Cash (at Nottingham Forest) makes sense to me. I know some fans were saying, ‘But we have (George) Baldock.’ I get that completely. I love George. He played every single minute in the Premier League last season but competition is always good and Blades do need ways to be able to change games, especially out wide.
“What I also must say about George is just how strong he is defensively, especially in a one-on-one situation. If you put him up against (Crystal Palace’s Wilfried) Zaha, George back-pockets him.
“Going forward, though, we do need more creativity. We also need to be able to vary the game up a bit more, create different type of chances. It is not easy to play against us but teams are starting to match us up. And we don’t like it when teams do that. It denies the space out wide and the one thing we don’t have is dribblers. We are so low in Premier League terms for dribbles. Look at Villa, (Jack) Grealish saved them because he can dribble. Lines open up all over because of him.
“I’d like to see us sign another creative midfield player. The links with John Swift (at Reading) make sense to me. If we are going to play a flat three, we need that right centre midfielder to be able to drop into pockets, where David McGoldrick often went last season. ‘Didz’ is a great link-man but not a creative passer. He doesn’t play through balls or set a chance up. That is what Swift can do — get hold of the ball and take it into the channels, drift centrally or get in behind. He can play through balls.
“We did brilliantly last season. Picking holes in anything feels harsh. Even analytically, it is difficult to point at too many things that can be done much better. But I do believe that little bit more variety would make a big difference.”
From, in his own words, “venting about Sheffield United on Twitter” to being part of a League One club’s recruitment operation just eight or so months later.
Quite the remarkable journey for Jay Socik, one of the pioneers behind the “fanalytics” movement and now partner in a company providing specialist scouting services for several clubs, including Swansea City and US second-tier side Tampa Bay Rowdies.
“It has been way beyond what I could have dreamed about,” the 30-year-old tells The Athletic. “As a kid, you obviously grow up wanting to be a footballer. Then, when I went to university, it was all about wanting to be a coach or analyst.
“Three years ago, I did feel that opportunity of working in football had gone. I had my day job but was not doing anything in football. I was just tweeting as a fan — an ordinary bloke.
“So, to go from having literally no followers on Twitter to, first, getting involved at Peterborough United with Darragh (MacAnthony, the club’s owner) and now working with all these great clubs is crazy.”
Socik is one of six partners in MRKT Insights, a company set up last year whose data-driven analysis has already been tapped into by clubs looking to unearth hidden gems in the transfer market by using their insight in both recruitment and performance analysis.
It is, however, his route from a fan with a smartphone to being part of Peterborough’s recruitment set-up that is perhaps the most fascinating.
“I have always spoken about football with my pals,” adds Socik, a one-time Bramall Lane season ticket holder who — under the handle @Blades_analytic — has built up a 22,000-strong Twitter following, “either down the pub or when getting together with friends and family.
“But I still needed a place to vent about the Blades, and where better to do that than Twitter? I have always been quite analytical about sports. I did a degree that was performance analysis-based. So, I started to analyse Sheffield United. If, say, we lost 1-0 but had 12 shots to their six, I asked myself if we needed to look into that in a slightly different way.
“Early on, Kevin Gage, the former United defender, gave me a retweet, as did (local journalist) Alan Biggs. Kev said something along the lines of, ‘I agree with this guy — he has got it spot-on.’ That led to quite a lot of Blades flocking to the account.
“I started revving in more and more of the stats-based things. I looked at how football was doing things and found there was a bit of a gap between what that data might mean and how it was being interpreted in football circles. I tried to plug that from a Sheffield United perspective at first, and then the EFL.
“It grew, despite me not really having a clue what I was doing — none of this marketing nonsense or targeting where to tweet. It was literally me saying my thoughts on football and backing it up with a bit of evidence.
“Within six to eight months, it had got quite popular and that was when Darragh saw my work. We ended up talking over Twitter about data in football. I explained how I interpreted that data in a football context by using it in conjunction with video to highlight trends, players and so on.
“Ali (Maxwell, presenter of the Not The Top 20 podcast) then came in on the conversation and said, ‘You should look at bringing him in for a bit of advice.’ Darragh emailed the next day and we bounced a few ideas around.
“To cut a long story short, I was brought in on a paid basis as a consultant. Initially, to work on his ‘Gem’ initiative — basically, a non-League/League Two project to discover the best young talent. Could I find him under-23s or under-21s? If he and Peterborough then liked these recommendations on the video clip, they would go out and scout them.”
Socik adds: “I found working with Darragh really, really interesting. I learned so much about how the industry works. The work could be random in terms of frequency. Basically, all of last season, but ad hoc.
“I still had my day job as an engineer. So I wasn’t going into the club every day or anything like that. More a case of me talking to Darragh or emailing him, working out what sort of profiles Peterborough were wanting to recruit and then providing a bunch of players, from the data, who fitted that.
“Darragh already had quite similar things going on. But they liked it that much that, when the window came round, the work came into the first-team set-up too. Basically, providing a quality assurance. A case of, ‘We like this guy, we think we will sign this guy — what do you think?’ It was my first real exposure to a transfer window and how chaotic they are.”
Socik joined MRKT in the wake of the company’s launch last year. “We now have seven clubs that we work with,” he adds. “We even have a player in the Norwegian third division as one of our scouts. We feel that is an undervalued market and wanted someone who knows those leagues really well. He is a genius.
“What we do at MRKT is recruitment analysis — such as talent ID, where we come up with recommendations. A club can say to us they want a No 9 who does this, that and the other. We build a profile with the club and then use the data and video to scout before going back to the club with players who fit that profile. They will then take a look at the video and, if they like what they see, watch the players live.
“The whole business has grown substantially over the last couple of years. Certainly from when I first started in ‘Fanalytics’, as they call it. Brentford have been doing this for five years now and everyone is aware of their success. They are trying to catch up.
“All our work is done from home. It was the same at Peterborough. I never met Darragh, we just contacted each other online. At MRKT, we more or less run the company on Slack (an online messaging service) — one of the guys, Ram, lives in India.”
All this analysis does beg the question as to whether games involving Sheffield United are now a work exercise for Socik or still the passionate pursuit they quickly became after first being introduced to Bramall Lane as a five-year-old. “Don’t worry, I am still the same lunatic who has stood at the back of Gangway B for years in the Kop,” he laughs. “I cut loose when we score.”
This brings us neatly on to Chris Wilder’s team and what improvements, if any, need to be made next season following the club’s ninth-place finish on their return to top-flight football.
Socik cites the defensive record — only the top three conceded fewer Premier League goals — as justification for not tweaking too much at the back, other than adding genuine strength in depth.
“If we lose Chris Basham, John Egan or Jack O’Connell then we are in trouble,” the lifelong fan says, before adding how badly Dean Henderson will be missed if he does not return on a new loan from Manchester United.
“Not wanting to be too geeky here but, if you look at post-shot Expected Goals versus goals conceded or saved, Henderson made seven or eight goals difference. And a lot of those saves came in games when we either won by a goal or drew.”
It is at the other end where United can make more substantial gains in 2020-21, according to Socik. “We need to be more creative,” he adds. “People look at the strikers and, yes, we need to be more clinical. Six goals for a top scorer (achieved jointly by Oli McBurnie and Lys Mousset) is not good enough.
“But I don’t think we actually create enough. We are 20th for shots in the league. Expected goals (xG) was about 14th or 15th overall. OK, that’s not bad but we are in tight games and we need that bit more creativity.
“We rely on crossing so much. Apart from Liverpool and Manchester City, we had more crosses than anyone. The interest in Matty Cash (at Nottingham Forest) makes sense to me. I know some fans were saying, ‘But we have (George) Baldock.’ I get that completely. I love George. He played every single minute in the Premier League last season but competition is always good and Blades do need ways to be able to change games, especially out wide.
“What I also must say about George is just how strong he is defensively, especially in a one-on-one situation. If you put him up against (Crystal Palace’s Wilfried) Zaha, George back-pockets him.
“Going forward, though, we do need more creativity. We also need to be able to vary the game up a bit more, create different type of chances. It is not easy to play against us but teams are starting to match us up. And we don’t like it when teams do that. It denies the space out wide and the one thing we don’t have is dribblers. We are so low in Premier League terms for dribbles. Look at Villa, (Jack) Grealish saved them because he can dribble. Lines open up all over because of him.
“I’d like to see us sign another creative midfield player. The links with John Swift (at Reading) make sense to me. If we are going to play a flat three, we need that right centre midfielder to be able to drop into pockets, where David McGoldrick often went last season. ‘Didz’ is a great link-man but not a creative passer. He doesn’t play through balls or set a chance up. That is what Swift can do — get hold of the ball and take it into the channels, drift centrally or get in behind. He can play through balls.
“We did brilliantly last season. Picking holes in anything feels harsh. Even analytically, it is difficult to point at too many things that can be done much better. But I do believe that little bit more variety would make a big difference.”
Melbourne Blade
Active Member
It's his stint on bladespod which really got him noticed. Sky's the limit for Roy!
I should coco
A little harsh on a well meaning body of men
"Watched him with my dad. My dad got fed up and I was shouting at the tele that much, I forgot his name"
Roygbiv
Well-Known Member
You may laugh but there is a definitely a gap in football for toilet based anecdotes.
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