Swansea City hired data analyst Dan Altman in December 2016 to work simply as an “advisor” but it appears that his expertise in the ever-growing world of analytics was never fully utilised, which leaves you wondering, well why did our American owners hire him in the first place?
Not only that but why didn’t you take on board his ideas of how to improve our processes and structure because they clearly needed improving and modernising.
From the outside, it might have looked like the Harvard graduate left his role following a poor performance, given the millions of pounds wasted on transfers but he wasn’t involved in the decision making behind the flopped signings of Andre Ayew (£18.5m), Sam Clucas (16.5m) and Wilfried Bony (£12m). A combined total of around £46m as the club lost their way completely when it came to effective recruitment.
An interview with Dan Altman at https://differentgame.wordpress.com is well worth a read as it provides an interesting insight in his time at the club and his views on our structure and how we could potentially improve various things.
One of the interesting questions was regarding the constant change of managers during his short spell at the club and whether or not the lack of consistency hindered his role and the influence he could have. In answering the question regarding the change of managers, Altman said:
“I worked for several years as a strategic consultant before getting into football, and I have some ideas about how organisations ought to run and how decision making processes ought to look.
I feel very strongly that even if you didn’t have an analyst at all, if you had a good decision making process, you’d probably make better decisions than a club with a great analyst and no process. That was one of the things I thought could improve at Swansea.”
Decision making at Swansea needed improving? Oh I can believe that.
Dan Altman’s approach to scouting also makes sense and it’s an idea and view that many other analysts also believe in. Data and human scouting is the best combination whereby players can be filtered firstly by advanced data and analytics and of which those players can then be humanly scouted to assess their attributes, qualities and suitability.
“Well I think it’s important for clubs to have an integrated human and machine intelligence scouting platform, where you bring all those inputs together.”
“You can use data as an initial filter to identify players and then narrow that down with video analysis and human scouting. Or you can put them together simultaneously and design some sort of decision algorithm whereby you create a consensus. For example, Fulham had a ‘both boxes ticked’ strategy where they said, “If the data say yes, and the scouts say yes, then we say yes.”
You can structure it in different ways. I would typically look to create such a system, collect the inputs and try and gain consensus with the outputs.” – Dan Altman
Dan also praised former goalkeeping coach Tony Roberts as “one of the most analytical goalkeeping people I’ve ever met.”
Another interesting comment that Dan made was regarding investors and how they see the Premier League and other European leagues as “cash cows and they want to get in”.
“I think that there are some investors who see the Premier League and other European leagues as cash cows, and they want to get in. But once they’re in, and they realise they don’t know much about the game or how clubs work internally, they place a lot of trust in incumbents.”
Altman also praised the staff at Swansea City as “really wonderful people” but reading the interview, you get the impression that his skills and ideas simply weren’t taken on board.
I mean, they couldn’t have been. No way, would his advanced analytics models would have returned Wilfried Bony, Sam Clucas and Andre Ayew to shortlist for human scouting.
The club were able to make sensible recruitment decisions in the early years of their Premier League spell thanks to a better structure being in place, not to mention having the likes of Brendan Rodgers and Michael Laudrup in charge and involved in that process. That was lost during the end of Laudrup’s reign and things just got worse and worse from there.
It begs the question again, if you need to re-establish a solid recruitment structure, and you actually bring in someone with Dan Altman’s expertise, why not use his knowledge and ideas?
The problem for us and has been for too long now is non-footballing people making too many footballing decisions, big decisions too that has cost us millions, not to mention our Premier League status.
The final quote I’ll include before encouraging you to read the whole thing on https://differentgame.wordpress.com/2019/03/25/dan-altman-interview/ is Dan Altman’s frustration when he was told that the club could no longer afford their share of his fee. Following Graham Potter’s arrival, the entire recruitment and scouting team were sacked and replaced by new head of recruitment Kyle Macaulay.
“Yeah. I mean it’s the old Steve Jobs maxim: “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” It was frustrating for everyone.”
