Data is the difference that will take Norwich City to the Premier League for majority shareholder Mark Attanasio.
The Canaries owner’s work on statistics with baseball franchise the Milwaukee Brewers has inspired a similar process at Carrow Road, City’s analysis department rapidly growing from four employees to 14.
Attanasio hopes that the strategy will have a similar effect to that of Brighton and Brentford, who were both promoted to the top flight and stayed there thanks to data-focused ownership, although it’s in its early stages.
“They’re the best examples of how you can do more with less,” he said of the Premier League pair. “But they had years of gaming data and probabilities that they were employing.
“I’m mindful that if I look at our analytics programme in Milwaukee, it really started in earnest in 2014. So we’re about 10 or 12 years in. This is not equivalent – I’d say that we were at that point about a year ago, and we’re at the equivalent of 2018 now.
“We’re starting to get up the curve, but one of the challenges is that as you get more steeped in it and hire more people, in the beginning you don’t know what you don’t know.
“We have many more professionals working on it now than we did last year, but at Milwaukee we’ve got over 40.”
Numbers aren’t all that matter, however, with the 67-year-old’s practices needing adaptation between sports.
“It’s not just an arms race, because you have to generate probative data,” he continued. “You have to have data that aligns with what the coach wants to do and you have to be able to transmit it to the players.
“If you go to guys on the pitch with a notebook full of stuff, that’s very, very hard to translate. There’s also a lot more motion here than baseball. There it’s the most point-to-point measurement of all the sports, and here it’s a little more complicated than that.
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