![]() Perhaps even more impressive is the style of play they achieved. Under Potter, Brighton, with far fewer resources than their competitors, consistently challenged for the top half of the Premier League. ![]() When Brighton sacked Chris Hughton in the summer of 2019 and replaced him with Graham Potter, a manager with only a single season of managerial experience in the English Football League after successes in Sweden, they were, by most conventional wisdom, mad. While their data-led approach has led to successes in areas like player recruitment and opposition analysis, perhaps their biggest success to date was transforming their game model by hiring the now Chelsea head coach Graham Potter. Last season’s ninth place finish on 51 points cost them £847,647 per point, the third lowest spend per point in the league behind Benham’s newly promoted Brentford and Leeds United. According to Caplogy, Brighton have the fifth lowest salary bill in the Premier League, some £43,230,000 annually. So it is unsurprising that Bloom’s club Brighton are champions of a data led approach, achieving far above their resources. These days their chance creation measurement has been replaced by expected goals (xG), while the other stats their group measured by eye have become publicly available, bringing that knowledge to the wider football world. They used that insight, alongside other statistics, to beat the bookmakers and make a fortune. Their syndicate were among the earliest to realise chance creation, rather than goals scored, was a better measure of a side’s performance and therefore ability to win matches. This clever approach is to be expected under owner Tony Bloom who, together with Brentford owner Matthew Benham, made his fortune going against the conventional wisdom in the betting markets. Perhaps the model outside the ‘big six’ for the use of data, combined with clever football expertise in the top flight, is Brighton and Hove Albion, a modest club with few historical honours. This is something that requires knowledge of both the data and the context from which it was collected. Dan Pritchard assesses Graham Potter’s tactical approach using data to show how he overachieved relative to budget with the SeagullsĪlmost all football clubs at the professional level use data these days, but fewer are led by that data, used to its fullest potential.
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