Palmer and Moon and a diktat from above

As we suspected, the 80%ers are instructing their head coaches who they have to pick. Here's an article from THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER ESBJERG.

Americans want to run EfB with data, youth and financial balance

In future, there must be a shorter way from EfB Akademi to the club's first team, states American Paul Conway.
The young EfBs Phun Mang must be on the team card. This is just one of the cash announcements from EfB's new American investors, who last week took the majority of the seats on the club's board.

Apr 14 2021 at 11:24
Jan Maass Lindhardt jli@ugeavisen.dk

When American Paul Conway was a boy, he was forced to play football. Back in the 1960s, his father got something as rare as a football scholarship to college, and it later ended up spreading to Paul Conway's leisure activity.

- I played baseball as a child, but the baseball season is only three months. My dad said you can not just sit and roll your thumbs the rest of the year you have to play football. I also coached a youth team in high school for a year. I got a red card in my last match and that was the end of my coaching career.

Paul Conway played the Europeans' favorite sport for seven years, he was left-footed and played in central custody.

Today he is the spokesman for the investor group that has taken over the majority of shares in EfB Elite A / S and last week the group sat on three out of five seats on EfB's board of directors for the annual general meeting. But why did it just become Esbjerg that the American investors chose to work with? The answer lies in the new owners' strategy of playing offensive high-pressure football, or using data to recruit players, or having a football club where the budget is in balance and of building up the EfB squad of Danish and Scandinavian players.

- We have met several different clubs in Denmark, where we have said that this is what we believe in. And we have said to them: Tell us what you believe. Do you believe in a youth academy? A couple of clubs said: No, we want older players. Ok, then it's not a good match with us, so those clubs smoked out. We met with another Danish tradition club, and we were told we would invest in a Danish club that primarily invests in Danish players. Maybe some Norwegians, Swedes and Finns. But they said they had a new strategy with some Croats and Eastern Europeans, so it was not a good match for us either, says Paul Conway.

It was different in EfB. Here there was both a desire to use young Danish players from the academy, and then the American investors' strategy of creating balance in the accounts was good news for the local investors, who over the years had repeatedly given financial first aid to football.

If we look at a player at left back we have ten topics. Most clubs look at one player at a time, but it is not effective. You end up paying too much money for the players that way.

So that's why EfB is today in a football family with Barnsley in England, Ostend in Belgium, Thun in Switzerland and Nancy in France. In France, EfB's new investors were previously involved in Nice, at the time they were criticized for not being ambitious enough because they kept up with the finances, so the question is whether you as a football club can be ambitious with a balanced budget?

- Liverpool balance their budget every year. They're doing ok. You can be successful with a balanced budget. The problem in Esbjerg is that you have neither had balance in the budget nor success on the football field. In Esbjerg it did not work, so when we met with our new local partners we showed them what we had done with a balanced budget in Nice, where we came in the Champions League. Belgium is another example. Last season, the club was four days from bankruptcy when we arrived. We came and said there is another way to do things. We halved the salaries, we brought 12 new players to the club and right now we are in fifth place with the lowest budget in the league.In England in The Championship we are in fifth place with the 18th largest budget. So you can be successful with a balanced budget,

- The raw data is out there. You can subscribe to it, the art is to add your own algorithm that suits your business model, says Paul Conway and says that the group has three data analysts employed in England, two in Belgium, and that another will soon be added in Esbjerg.

- Data is a tool, but you need a strategy to manage it. For example, the season we picked up Mads Andersen (from Horsens to Barnsley ed.), We sold three players and we were in the third division at the time and we made a profit of seven million pounds. That's pretty good. We reinvested that money in 12 players. We can not pay the highest salaries or the highest transfer sums, so to get the 12 players we had to make 50 bids, and to get to the 50 bids we looked at 4000 players. One of the biggest mistakes clubs make is that they stare blindly at picking up a particular left back. And if he does not want to come to the club, they bid the price up. We need to pick the best players we can afford.Data allows us to know the market better than anyone else. Data also enables us to run the business better,

- In Nancy, we sat down with the coach and said: We have the eighth biggest budget in Ligue 2, and we are in 17th place. He had his story about what had gone wrong, but we looked at the data. We had six players over 30 sitting on 44 percent of the salary budget. Some of the players should not play, we could show him that from the data, but his response was that it was the highest paid players, says Paul Conway, who also helped point out that one of Nancy's youth players who represented the French u17 national team was to play.

- We told the coach this kid is going to play. Now we are number eight with the same coach with a more attack-based playing style. The coach trusts us that he does not have to play with the highest paid players if they are not good enough.

The young people have to play

So when will we see you tell Olafur Kristjansson in EfB that he should play more attack-oriented and high-pressure?

- We have just arrived, but Jimmi (Nagel Jacobsen, EfB's sports manager ed.) Has already encouraged the coach to be more attack-minded. I would like to see some of the youngsters play, so Phung (Phung Man, who debuted as a 16-year-old editor earlier this year) will be playing. He is one of our best resources. We do this because we have a good academy and the academy boys have to play. It has been a slippery slope in recent years that old players from other teams have been brought in on free transfers. But it must stop, states Paul Conway.

 

Can you give a few examples of what data you are looking at - for example, how far a player runs in 90 minutes?

- This is not where we start. We start by looking at all the players in the super league, for example, and then we rank them. From 100 to 0. So who can we afford? It sorts many from. We are trying to find out who are the best and most underrated players in those countries.

But I'm trying to figure out what your algorithm thinks is a good football player.

- How do we rank players?

Yes.

- OK. There are many different statistics. Expected goals (expected goals in relation to created chances in a match ed.) In the offensive and in the defensive, we do not look at scored goals and assists, because if the player is already making them, we can not afford them. Bigger clubs take them. So these are players who contribute to goals and assists that can not be seen in their stats yet. Won air duels, ball conquests, there are many different statistics and it gives a ranking of all the players in the league. If we then compare the super league with the best row in Norway, we include the strength ratio between the two leagues.The Super League is a stronger league, so while we look at the best half of players in the Super League, we may only look at the top 20 percent in Norway. The next step is to look at whether players can play in our style of play

Paul Conway is a spokesman for EfB's new majority shareholders. The American is also part of the club's new board.

From Wall Street to football

So even though Paul Conway played football as a child, and later, when he worked on Wall Street, personally invested in a couple of football clubs, the idea of investing in European football clubs only came when Paul Conway got a Chinese connection. On Wall Street, he did business with Chinese companies, and he ended up being employed in one, moved to China and lived there for three years. Later, he created Pacific Media Group, a media company that invests in television and film and makes a living from distributing content in China and other parts of Asia.

- The idea of investing in European football arose in China when we saw the growth in revenues in the Asian market, says Paul Conway and explains that EfB and Danish football in general must also be more aware of making themselves interesting both for foreign sponsors and TV viewers, he says.

However, this will not be the first place EfB's new investors put in.

- The most important thing to fix here is the squad. It's both the fastest way we can create value, but it's also the fastest way we can lose value for the club. We also need to become better at interacting with fans, having a better digital signature, being better at appealing to international sponsors and supporters. Last Monday, I even called around to some Barnsley season ticket holders to hear why they had not renewed their season tickets yet. And people said, wow, this is the first time there are some calling me. And I just say why not, because then you also get the opportunity to hear their concerns. We will fix that here. There should not be a wall between the club and the supporters, there should be a much better connection.

But in Barnsley you were criticized for not communicating enough with the fans.

- It's a business. If you have an iPhone, will Tim Cook, Apple's Chairman of the Board, call you? No. And we have professional local teams and we want to give them responsibility. When people criticize us, it's because they do not like what we say. People just want us to spend money. Like they said in Nice, and in Barnsley they say the same thing. They want us to spend money, but we do not. In Esbjerg we were not accepted either, because we came and said we would spend money and win championships.

So you do not take the fans' dreams of championships from them?

- You can not win a super league title if you play in the second best row. And look at what we're doing at Barnsley, we're about to play for promotion to the Premier League. In Belgium, they think we were crazy. They do not think our business plan made sense, but we are honest and I think that is what the fans want first and foremost. We say that the academy, a budget in balance and offensive football are the way we want to do it. That's what we want to do, that's what they want to see. We do not come and sell false dreams, what we promise are realities and it tends to work quite well.

 

I suspect that's why Jasper Moon has played so regularly this season whilst Sibbick is still nowhere to be seen despite an injury crisis.

 

Is it surprising that some players in the squad are a bit p!ss£d off.

 

I suspected that was why Moon was getting shoehorned in this season. Don't forget that Sibbick was once in Moon's shoes. He's now been hung out to dry.

This stood out: 'to get the 12 players we had to make 50 bids, and to get to the 50 bids we looked at 4000 players.' We all know how that season went (19/20), and was it really worth getting in the likes of Wilks, Thomas, Radlinger, Halme, Diaby, Schmidt just to offload Brown, Davies and Moore? A couple of years later we are arguably in a worse position than when the owners came in to the club.

Now we have the likes of Oulare, Iseka, Cole, Benson based on their data, while players like Hondermarck and Christie-Davies (remember him?) don't get a look in. It just looks all over the place. Surely we need to start looking at quality over quantity, look how many strikers we have on the books, and then at how many goals we've scored. It's embarrassing really.

 

That article sums up perfectly why Barnsley FC is a complete basket case. They haven't got a clue you can't run a football club like a corner shop it's not a retail enterprise it's a competitive sports club. I just want these jokers gone before they do long lasting possibly terminal damage to OUR club if they haven't already that is.

 

That probably all sounded good on 14 April 2021. Right now it looks less so, as we sit at the bottom of the table, below a team docked 21 points, and with fewer goals than all the other 91 clubs bar Burnley.

 

I bet a few of our players feel like they're on remand at the moment

 

I wonder if ‘they’ still think the owners are crazy at Oostende?

I suspect they do, among other things.

 

Another example why we need PMG out of our Club

 

We have players in BFC who play in "central custardy".
I sort of lost the will to live part way through but kept on, glazing over, wondering what the chuff has any of this got to do with FOOTBALL.

 

There is space in football for a data led approach, this is how any sensible team recruits and the likes of Liverpool and Brentford are great examples.

However, there has to be common sense and football nous. We play like an u23's team, some decent phases here and there, but lacking intensity, end product and defensive know how. This is because an u23 team is exactly what we are

The spreadsheets can never quantify experience, game management, defensive organisation etc. Roy Keane is exactly what we need but would score badly on a spreadsheet. Conway et al seem much too pigheaded to understand this and when our direction isn't coming from a maverick coach the players aren't able and don't have the experience to figure it out themselves.

 

Also players that don't play like SibbickVeta and Cole..
I think we all actully knew this was happening.
This is just the confermation

 

Don’t get where people believe someone wants Moon in over Sibbick due to trying to push his value up?
Sibbick 22 years, Cost a transfer fee and no doubt on more than Moon a week.
Moon, 21 years, academy product and on less money per week.

If these guys are all about the money then surely they push Sibbick to get a return on him and then replace with Moon to repeat.
Doing it as suggested leaves them potentially taking a hit on Sibbick, which sort of defeats the object of pushing Moon.

 

And losing every week is going to be tremendous for their personal and professional development and hence their re-sale value.

 

Agree with that don't think we would leave players out just to push others. The squad is full of young inexperienced and inadequate players. So I would imagine the inexperienced and potentially inadequate coach is free to play whoever he likes.

 

Also, Sibbick is a much better player so getting him in the shop window should be task 001 on the checklist...

 

Good find that!
I particularly thought this very interesting....
"We sold three players and we were in the third division at the time and we made a profit of seven million pounds. That's pretty good. We reinvested that money in 12 players. We can not pay the highest salaries or the highest transfer sums, so to get the 12 players we had to make 50 bids, and to get to the 50 bids we looked at 4000 players".
Two thoughts.... 7 million quid???!!!
and sp#nked it (scattergun style) on 12 players....clearly that did not work on those players recruited.