The dust had barely settled on Reiss Nelson’s late and potentially season-defining winning goal on Saturday evening when Arsenal were being bestowed with a prestigious honour more than 3,000 miles away.
At the renowned Sloan Conference at MIT, a domain where football for so long has struggled to be embraced by the wider sports data community, the Premier League side won the Alpha Award for best analytics organisation.
And while that may not exercise the average Gunners fan, it is something that will be celebrated by many behind the scenes at a club that was laughed at 11 years ago when they bought the US-based analytics firm StatDNA for £2.16m. That was a time before metrics such as xG were embraced by the common football man, with the numbers game still viewed as an outsiders’ pursuit.
Then-chief executive Ivan Gazidis would not even name the company during the club’s AGM in 2012 and the club’s accounts showed a deal had been done with AOH-USA LLC, otherwise known as Arsenal Overseas Holdings.
How StatDNA worked exactly, aside from providing information that can be used both for analysing opponents and settling on transfer targets, was also held like the most closely guarded secret in a deal which came with plenty of mystery.
“The company is an expert in the field of sports data performance analysis, which is a rapidly developing area and one that I, and others, believe will be critical to Arsenal’s competitive position,” Gazidis said.
“The insights produced by the company are widely used across our football operations – in scouting and talent identification, in game preparation, in post-match analysis and in gaining tactical insights.”
The data has also produced a number of recruitment duds and fans still point to the summer of 2016 when Granit Xhaka joined from Borussia Mönchengladbach, Lucas Perez arrived from Deportivo La Coruna and Shkodran Mustafi from Valencia because, supposedly, the data told them to.
Xhaka has become a key player under Mikel Arteta after a spell where many Arsenal fans would have been happy to see him depart but there were few sad to see Perez and Mustafi depart.
The firm played a role in selecting Unai Emery as Arsene Wenger ’s replacement, too, while Edu is a keen advocate for using the data to inform decision-making. In terms of recent recruitment Arsenal have got so much right - from Aaron Ramsdale in goal through to Gabriel Jesus up front via Martin Odegaard.
There have been widespread changes in personnel in the intervening decade-plus but many of the key figures behind the analytics team remain Stateside, including the club’s head of software and analytics Chris Dove, who is based in Utah. And the exact methods remain closely guarded.
What can be said with certainty is that among those really in tune with the sports analytics world, the Premier League leaders are also setting the pace in the numbers game.
