Maybe I'm the fool http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...database-to-profile-players-in-real-life.html According to this, FM uses Prozone stats. Maybe that's where our spreadsheet comes from. Wonder if Kennedy Bakircioglü is still available?
It's interesting that people laugh at this, I guess because they remember the early days of Football Manager (or Championship Manager if they're old enough) and some of the random legends it created. But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense, and I wouldn't be surprised if an awful lot of football clubs were now using the 'game' to recruit players. And when you consider BFC have made a lot of noises about 'statistical' approaches in the last couple of years, you wonder what that actually means. There was a point in time when Football Manager was a basic simulation, they auto-generated player attributes in the most part, and it was there for fun. But in the early 2000's when they started adding dozens of leagues, they starting recruiting people to watch games and give feedback on a level that was beyond most pro football clubs. They've honed a system for evaluating and comparing players, clubs and leagues that creates pretty realistic games over dozens of seasons. As a result, they now have thousands of experienced researchers (scouts?) covering most leagues in the world. How many football clubs have that? The database has over half a million players on it. For many years, there have been plenty of rumours that people in the game were using Football Manager to try and identify players before anyone else. I'd guess that there were far more doing it than anyone would admit, and the reason is they got it right so often. People quote the random **** Swedes and Scots that were great in FM and didn't make it (Tonton Zola Moukoko was actually signed by Derby County as a 15 year old), but they forget that Rooney, Messi and co featured in the game as 14 year old superstars and went on to do it in real life too. Ibrahimovic, Falcao, Tevez and Cavani were also superstars in the FM world a long time before they made it in the real world too. The deal they've done with ProZone makes sense. ProZone were doing player analysis based on all kind of metrics, but only covered a limited number of leagues, clubs and players. Some clubs had started using their 'scouting' systems. FM had a database about 10 times the size, and now between them they have a pretty comprehensive offer. Prozone are analysing more players, and the FM database is more evidence based than before. I can only see it growing further from here. Which brings us back to clubs actually using it to recruit. I suspect it's already getting to the stage where most clubs use these systems to identify players to go and watch in greater detail, so it stands to reason that the challenge has shifted from unearthing gems, to using the system most effectively - because the gems are already known and available to everyone to find. Club scouts may be better at judging the players than FM/ProZone ones, but they can't cover the same volume. And what of BFC's 'method' - are we really generating our own methods for scoring, assessing and monitoring players (based on Patrick's nipper's spreadsheets apparently?) or are we just doing what everyone else is? At the end of the day, it comes down to how effective the research/scouting is. Probably not at the level that most clubs operate, but good enough to be a first filter. After all, we all knew Stones was class the first time we saw him, and equally we knew Dwayne Mattis was **** the first time we saw him. If you can get that kind of view from almost every club in the world, every week, why wouldn't you take some kind of notice?
