Bespoke football analytics
A key to Twelve football’s success with clubs is that we can tailor our services to each clubs needs. Every club is different. And every club is at a different stage in their journey with data.
In one recent example of our work we built customised scouting and managerial metrics for an English League One club. We constructed, what we call, bespoke qualities to measure how players contribute to a team. For example, for the League One club, we measure midfielders in terms of effectiveness, defending, scoring threat and ability on the ball. How we construct these particular qualities is agreed with the club, and is confidential, so I won’t provide details. But below I give en example of one of our twenty standard qualities in TwelveGPT.
For our standard run quality we combined how much a player gains from both carrying the ball forward (box entries, ball runs, carries) and receiving the ball deep (deep runs, penalty area receptions). We see that Apter is the type of winger who specialises in taking the ball forward himself, rather than receiving the ball himself. The automated TwelveGPT text reflects this. We can also ask TwelveGPT how we measure run quality. I do this below.
All the clubs we work with gain immediate access to these standard qualities and can start scouting straight away with them. We cover 140 leagues on the men’s side and 15 leagues in the women’s game. And we also offer the flexibility to build your own bespoke qualities. Our customers meet with one of our Twelve data scientists, often together with me, and talk to them about what they are really looking for in a player. From there, we construct the bespoke quality from over 200 metrics we have already built and often we also create new metrics which measure a very specific aspect of play. The process isn’t complicated: we start by identifying a player which the club scout admires and then look to see what he or she is good at. That forms the basis of the quality. From there we iterate the process several times and build a customised platform for the scouts to use.
Some of Twelve’s data scientists who help build qualities. From top left to bottom right: Ida, Jernej, Agust, Nicole, Pegah and Ana.
Currently we are onboarding clubs from all over the world, from the Singapore Premier League to the English Premier League. Some are using our Standard TwelveGPT qualities for both players and match, others are in the process of creating their own bespoke metrics, and some of the larger clubs are integrating their entire scouting operation (combining written scout reports, physical data and event data) on our platform.
Your club is very welcome to join us. All you have to do is drop an email to us at hello@twelve.football. Looking forward to hearing from you.
