How clubs like Brentford turn data into an advantage

The ‘four rooms’

Ridgewell, who spent 15 years as an analyst in the club game before crossing to the provider side, outlined Performance Studio’s four sections.

1. Insight

The multi-game video tool. Seven seasons of Premier League data with the tracking layered on top are searchable to a forensic degree.

“You do really simple stuff, like, ‘I want to see all of Erling Haaland’s shots,'” Ridgewell said. “But you could also say, ‘I want all of Haaland’s shots during a transition, that started in this area of the pitch, where Kevin De Bruyne played a pass at some point.'”

A ranking function sits alongside, so any search can be set against the rest of the league. If Mohamed Salah completes 100 one-v-ones in a season, you can ask if that is a lot, per 90 minutes, compared to his peers.

2. Creator 

Automates the repetitive coding that has long eaten an analyst’s hours.

“At Southampton, we created an XML and put it in all 380 Premier League games,” said Ridgewell, who was Analysis Operations Lead at the then-Premier League side.

“Save that onto a server, and any member of staff could take a game off it knowing it would be coded like a first-team analyst at Southampton would, in our philosophy.”

Now, an entire season’s footage, coded to one shared way of seeing the game, can be available to the whole department in seconds.

3. Fitness

Aggregates the tracking data into physical outputs – accelerations, high-speed running and so on – by player, team, game or season. Critically, this is interwoven with the tactical picture.

“You’d be able to find things like, show me who does the most sprints during attacking transitions,” Ridgewell said. “Which are the questions you get from coaches. They might say, I don’t think we sprint enough when we win the ball. But with the software you can actually find those things.”

4. Spotlight

The newest section, where teams turn the numbers into the spider plots, timelines, average shapes and formations that fill a modern opposition dossier or post-match report.

Seen through a player’s eyes

ProView3D is a viewing option and capability that sits across the video environment in Performance Studio, powered by mesh tracking and GeniusIQ.

It uses mesh tracking data to rebuild a match as a navigable 3D environment. This is a “digital twin” that the analyst can move through at will – and it enables them to see what the player saw on the pitch.

“You might get a player watching his tactical video back saying, ‘That’s not what I saw, you can’t just pause it and tell me that pass was on,'” Ridgewell said.

“But with this 3D world you can go and see what he could see at that moment. And it works both ways. Sometimes it’s, yes, that pass was on. Other times, I’m sorry, you’re right, it wasn’t. Or you prevent yourself from saying something to a player and creating that debate.”

You can drop the camera behind the goal for goalkeeper work, follow the play from a drone’s-eye view to mirror training footage, or step into any player’s position to see what they saw.

Getting buy-in

Newton spent six years as a First-Team Analyst at Brentford before following Frank to Tottenham, and has since joined Sunderland as an Opposition Analyst.

Ultimately, data and tech don’t really matter if the coaches won’t use them, he told the TGG Pod. Performance Studio earned its place at Brentford because Frank fully engaged with it.

“Thomas was really open and keen to know – once we introduced him to some of these metrics – ‘Oh, where are we for that?'” Newton said. “He’d be checking the opposition report, where it showed a league table in certain metrics, so he wasn’t just looking at where the next opponents are but where we are in the league too.”

The analyst’s skill is pitching the complexity to the audience: richer metrics with the coaches, then translated into something clean for the players.

“I could use more complex metrics with the coaches, because they were more familiar with it,” Newton said. “Then we adapt it when we deliver to the players, or are really clear on what that metric actually means.”

From DVDs on a motorbike

To see how far the profession has come, Ridgewell explained where he started. He began his career at Birmingham City’s Academy before moving on to Bristol Rovers, The Football Association, MK Dons and Doncaster Rovers, before joining Southampton in 2018.

“When I started, we were still giving DVDs to a guy on a motorbike, who’d take it off and get it processed somewhere else, and you’d get your data back a day or two later,” he said. “There were no league-wide shares, so you’d be emailing people, ‘Can you send me this game footage.'”

The departments have changed shape as much as the tools have. 

“Most teams had one or two analysts, whereas now departments have several people and those roles are specialised – set-piece analysts, training analysts,” he said. 

“Now you have coach-analysts who go on the grass, sit on the bench. And managers take analysts as key staff, because they often know the best way to show a philosophy in video.”

The frontier now, he says, is AI stripping out the manual grind, freeing analysts to interrogate the footage rather than assemble it.

• Adam Ridgewell’s full interview features in the second half of Episode #79 of the TGG Podcast, in association with Genius Sports.