AC Milan chief scout Geoffrey Moncada has offered some valuable insight into how the Rossoneri’s data team are beginning to attract envious glances from Europe’s elite
Since taking over, Elliott Management have been big on the use of data and analytics to try and squeeze the most out of every euro that the club spends, and that can be seen in the club’s shrude transfer business which is starting to bear fruit on the pitch.
Moncada has become a big part of that, regarded as one of the best scouts in world football and the man who built the Monaco side which competed on all fronts in 2016-17, winning Ligue 1 and reaching the Champions League semi-finals.
We wrote a feature last month about Milan’s team of data experts that number crunch both the performances of the team and potential signings, and Moncada spoke about the two areas at the club.
“Elliott asked to develop the sports area with scouting: data, statistics. So we decided to create two things: the scouting area and the ‘data’ area. One works with the other every day. When a scout likes a player, we take a look at the numbers and everything else,” he said (via MilanNews).
“When the ‘data’ area tells us that we have a strong player with numbers, I ask the scouts to go watch him. I like this mix: work with the help of statistics. For Elliott it is important to have reports with statistics, videos, not just the observations of the scouts.
“Milan didn’t have this reputation for playing with young people, so we worked on this, we talked a lot with families of the players saying that if we take the youngster, it is because we believe in him and not to play him only once in a while.
“Today, there are many clubs, agents, scouts who call me to say ‘We want to come to Milan, what you do is very interesting.
“I have friends in the Red Bull group or in Dortmund and other clubs who work a lot on scouting and who tell me ‘Bravo, we see the changes at Milan, you work very well’.”
