FOOTBALL’S DATA REVOLUTION has come for the League of Ireland, with Shelbourne announcing last month they have struck an exclusive partnership agreement with Jamestown Analytics, whom the club herald as a “a groundbreaking provider of football data analysis.”
Jamestown was founded in 2017 as an offshoot of Starlizard, the gambling consultancy company founded by Tony Bloom, who is best known to football fans as the owner of Brighton and Hove Albion. Starlizard provided data directly to Brighton and Belgian club Union Saint-Gilloise, in which Bloom owns a minority stake.
The use of this data in player recruitment established Brighton in the Premier League and took Union Saint-Gilloise from the Belgian second division to Europe, all the while delivering stunning transfer successes. The most obvious was Moises Caicedo, whom Brighton signed for £4 million from Ecuador and sold for £115 million to Chelsea two years later.
Starlizard no longer provides data directly to these two clubs: Jamestown now perform that role, and have expanded to work with other clubs. They are very selective as to whom they work with, however, and limit it to one club per country. They also work with Como in Serie A, Hearts in Scotland and, now, Shelbourne in Ireland.
“They were our choice, when we spoke to them, it’s not a case of getting on a call with them and paying a fee”, Shels technical director Luke Byrne tells The 42.
“They analyse you, they look at your performance, your league, your market, and you have to strike a partnership with them. They wanted to know the vision for the club, the long-term strategy for the club, the people on our side who they’d be working with, and why we wanted to work with them. It’s a vote of confidence they are working with us.”
Shels work with Jamestown in three main areas: squad planning, opposition analysis, and player recruitment.
Byrne is clear that while no player will be signed from now without reference to the data, no player will be signed solely because of data, either. Any prospective signing will need to meet with Damien Duff.
“There’s still the eye test: watching footage or watching the player in person”, says Byrne. “Data also won’t predict how the player fits in culturally, what their character is, what they are like when they make a mistake, what they are like when Sean Boyd is screaming at them. There’s still a human touch needed for that.
“Nobody can tell Damien Duff or Joey O’Brien what type of person fits into our dressing room, as they know better than anyone else in the world. They have to be the people to judge that. But the data helps us narrow the search.”
Jamestown have built an enormous, global database of players along with a method of rating these and predicting how they would be likely to perform in any given league. While the system is complex and cloaked in secrecy, football clubs’ engagement with it is straightforward.
“Jamestown have a massive database which has been built over years and is continually updating itself, and it has an ability to tell us how players rate or how they would rate if they were playing in the Scottish Premiership”, said Hearts CEO Andrew McKinlay earlier this year when asked how the relationship worked.
“To give an example, we would have gone to Jamestown for this window saying, ‘We’re looking for a centre-back.’ That gets fed to Jamestown and they then come back with some options based on their analysis. That is pretty much the beginning and end of what they do.”
This is broadly how things will work at Shels. The club will decide on the profile of player they want to add to the squad and will relay that information to Jamestown, who will then recommend potential signings within Shels’ budget who they believe would perform well at League of Ireland level.
The huge advantage of Jamestown database is one of scale: while the data can never tell you something about a player your eyes can’t see, it can tell you something about the players you can’t see.
Byrne also says Shels need to work smartly in the market. Though Shels’ budget has increased with their success under Duff, Byrne says it is still not as big as some of their rivals, and so they can’t simply outbid those rivals on player signings. Jamestown, he says, will help Shels get an edge in the international transfer market.
“No League of Ireland club is ever going to have a network of scouts around the world, and nor should they”, says Byrne. “Historically, it’s a network of agents who put international players to clubs, and you’re naive to think you’re the only one getting a name or watching a video. We have known for a while we need to do something differently.
“There are so many players out there, and when you see where Ireland is ranked, there are thousands of players out there who should be able to perform at a high level in this league.
“But if you look at the international recruits over the years who have been successful: there have not been too many. Some players have done a brilliant job. We have Ellis Chapman who did really well at Sligo, we have had Will Jarvis and Harry Wood, but Will and Harry came in as we had a relationship with Hull. We need to be able to go out and find the next Will Jarvis.”
Brexit, says Byrne, has made the League of Ireland more visible to international players who can no longer easily get work permits for English football. Brexit has also perversely made the domestic market much more challenging for clubs: the player pool here has been drained by the fact Irish players aged 18 or over can move to the UK more easily than their European counterparts, thanks to the Common Travel Area.
Ally that to the fact clubs are more regularly tying down first-team players to multi-year contracts and the ongoing wage inflation across the league – the average weekly wage has climbed from around €800 to €1000 in the space of a year – and it’s more difficult than ever to recruit here.
“The teams that win the league are built on League of Ireland players”, says Byrne. “I don’t know if that is ever going to change. We have a strange, funny league here.”
Shels’ recruitment has an added layer in the sense they seek players who are tactically flexible.
“If you play the same way every week, you could build a squad with two players in each position with similar attributes”, says Byrne. “But our strength has been the ability to change.
“Yeah, it might make recruitment a little more complicated to find players to do different things, but that’s been our strength. That’s one of the reasons the team has been successful: the team has evolved in the years since the manager took over. But even within seasons, the first year, second year, third year, look into it and you’ll find he as adapted across a season.”
The Jamestown link-up, says Byrne, will allow Shels broaden the scope of beliefs they already hold. Byrne describes the League of Ireland as a “transitional league”, where a high percentage of goals are scored via counter-attacks. In looking at the international transfer market, he cites other leagues with similar characteristics, including French football and the Scandinavian leagues. Given Shels don’t have the money to be prising players from Ligue Un, his focus has been drawn to the French second division.
Byrne also accentuates the importance of set-pieces, which Shels have taken into account in their recruitment.
“Look at the end of the season, at a ‘for and against table on set pieces’, it wouldn’t look far off the actual league table.” Sligo Rovers have also alighted on this trend, and hired a specific set piece coach ahead of the 2025 season.
Byrne also says that while the League of Ireland is physical – every league game is rich in physical duels and heavy tackles – it is behind when it comes to athleticism.
“You can see it when Kameron Ledwidge and Mipo [Odubeko] come back from England: they are physically elite in this league”, says Byrne. “You have to put a large part of it down to what they were exposed to when they went away at 16, as opposed to the kid who stayed here.
“We played Zurich [in the Conference League qualifiers] last summer, and you could see the physical level was different. The speed, the power of the players: how they moved was completely different. We are behind in Ireland on athletic development.”
Byrne says international recruitment is a means of raising the physical floor of the Shels team, and it is a characteristic they prioritised in some signings in this off-season. It’s from the next transfer window that Shels’ work with Jamestown will be seen in earnest, though everything will still ultimately rely on Duff’s unique touch.
“Damien is incredibly social aware, he and Joey read people unbelievably well”, says Byrne. “You have to understand your dressing room and your league, and Damien does that better than anyone.
“It comes down to looking in someone’s eyes, and listening to them talk: do you believe them? You don’t get them all right, but if you spend enough time on it, you should get more right than wrong.”
Nice story about a good young player coming through and Mourinho somehow makes it all about him as usual.
@Joseph Bloggs: Or the one quote selected by the media is the quote by Mourinho that addresses how the media portray him
@Joseph Bloggs: no Joseph he praises the lad FIRST and then makes it about plebs like you …
@Johnny Bravo: Me? You must struggle with the written word Johnny, he clearly makes it about himself.
@Joseph Bloggs: see my comment below.
I heard something about Jose recently. Apparently he was being interviewed after a game and basically he was being a complete pr**k, walked out on the interview and all. Then, when the camera stopped rolling he walked over to the reporter and was happy as Larry, laughing and joking and apologising. It’s all a game, lads. He does it because he thinks if people are talking about Jose, they’re not talking about *insert name here* and how they’re playing shite. It’s an excellent managerial approach. It also creates the siege mentality that winning teams tend to have.
Having said all that…he’s a massive pain in the hole.
@Lurfic: Ha ha, nice one Lurfic :-)
@Lurfic: Think this was actually RTÉ’s Darragh Maloney! Or at least he has a similar yarn.
Still awaiting his Premier League debut? He has two premier league appearancs to his name.
@Brian Murray: yeah they have that wrong , maybe meant he’s waiting his first premier league start ??
@Pizyco: maybe
Remember when Darron Gibson was like this…
Dom solanke that is, now at liverpool and played about 10 minutes for chelsea good job jose