The president of Toulouse, Damien Comolli, has explained some of the methods that the French club are using under the ownership of RedBird Capital.
Milan officially confirmed RedBird’s takeover of the club after Elliott Management decided to sell the majority of their shares. The club announced the highly-anticipated deal on Twitter and their website last Wednesday.
Since then, there has been a lot of speculation about how the American fund might operate including the money they might be willing to invest in infrastructure and, perhaps more importantly, the playing squad. RedBird chief Gerry Cardinale declared that he hates losing and wants to win, which is a good start.
Comolli, the president of Toulouse who are a club owned by RedBird, spoke to L’Equipe about the methods behind their promotion back to the top flight, which gives an insight into what Milan fans can perhaps expect.
“We analyse 70 leagues, but with the promotion we will have more investment margin. Even if we will not be able to buy Premier League or Bundesliga players, we have for example detailed information on players up to the English fourth division and German third division,” he revealed (via Calciomercato.com).
“We have more than 40 thousand players in the archive so we know everything. We buy data, but we process it with our own algorithms to make it into exclusive statistics. RedBird? I am associated with them because we all wanted to work with this method.
“RedBird bought a well known data analytics company in the US: Zelus. And from them there are nine analysts who work exclusively for Toulouse. Redbird has no speculative will. We want to break away from the model of player trading. But then there is also reality.
“If a player becomes performing we will try to keep him but up to a certain point. The first criterion is of course quality. But we seldom take players over 25 and then push the study very deep.
“We recently met a striker and we showed him exactly his playing zones by percentages of minutes, all his shots over the last two seasons. And not with videos, but with analytics. All in three minutes. Gamers like it, that’s one more argument to convince them. I think we will close many purchases already before June 30th.”
Finally, Milan will start to scout players in other leagues, not just the French league
Naaah, not likely. 😀
Yeah right. You literally have that database in Football Manager, some clubs and coaches publicly said they used it to track talent. These guys are talking like someone made up a player database and no one used it for the past 20 years. 😀
The biggest strenght we have is Moncada, who basically discovered Mbappe and many more. Buying player data from specalized companies is something every single serious scouting department does before sending their own scouts to check specific players.
Huge difference between football manager and using a professional analytics company man.
minimum 50years behind red bull scouting, greetings from Salisburgo 😉 really hard to understand that i can watch in my hometown stadium all the super cool talents from Sorriano, Mane, Keita, to Haaland and Adeyemi and when i went to San Siro just nothing (so happy that Milan have found at least one with Kalulu) but why a teenager should sit on bench in san siro when can play UCL IN SPRING in Mozarttown?? Italiens really need to catch up