Introduction

If you are following professional football – whether it implies being a fan, watching games regularly or similar – you most likely have not failed to notice the growing number of specialists and analysts working in the industry. 

But have you ever asked yourself the question “what are these people actually doing?” – or the perhaps most relevant question: “Are the players actually using all the specialists and analysts?”.

In our opinion these questions summarize the greatest challenge for someone working as an analyst in the business of professional football. Professional football players are people like everybody else. If they do not understand (or worse, if they do not trust) the information you are providing, they will not use it.

Therefore, we, in TSA, argue that being able to provide players and staff with knowledge in a useable way is the single most important skill for an analyst in professional football to possess.

In TSA our methodology, to provide information to professional football players, is based on principles from behavioral science and psychology. This approach is – in our own humble opinion – quite unique, since we are connecting the often conservative world of professional football with its contrary; the world of science.

See the next blog post, Behavioral science on the pitch, for further explanation of how, TSA use science to provide information to professional football players.