In the hands of someone who is intelligent about the data I love it. It’s probably viable to identify candidates through stat DNA and then scout them thoroughly the old fashioned way. I always wanted the club to do that, it’s the future of the sport.
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The issue with stats is that some people use that as their single source of truth. If you use it in conjunction with proper scouting then it can be a great tool.
Interestingly, our two top targets, Aouar and Partey do not have the best of stats.
I do worry about that a little bit.
Mustafi was a notorious STAT DNA find, as was Xhaka and Gabriel (Original Recipe) and I think Lucas Perez. All four of those guys were failures to some degree and yet on paper the numbers had them down as good investments. I don’t know that Arsene ever really watched Xhaka play before we signed him and there were rumors after signing Perez that Arsene was like “da fuq is this guy? I wanted Vardy.”
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Yeah, Xhaka wasn’t getting many minutes early on and Lucas Perez barely featured.
Wenger always threw players in the deep without slowly integrating them so him not playing them right from the get go was strange.
As you touched upon, it was rumoured that Wenger wanted Kante and Vardy.
That’s what you get for not going all in on your #1 targets. 
That’s my fear with an over-reliance on STATs or databases. We can’t go full Brentford because at the end of the day players are still humans and not just a collection of stats wrapped in a meat sack.
I’m still really skeptical of Edu’s connection to Kia. I guess the proof will be in the pudding so to speak.
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You definitely shouldn’t rely exclusively on stats as you always need scouting and an understanding of the team context in which stats are accrued.
FWIW, I don’t believe for a second that any of those players (Xhaka, Mustafi, Perex, etc) were signed against Wenger’s wishes or without his blessing. He completely ran the ship back then and Stat DNA was brought into the club with his full support. Wenger was enough of a control freak, and had enough veto power over transfers, that there is no way our resources are concentrated on a bunch of players he didn’t want.
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100%
I’d further add how insane the notion is that even in baseball, the sport perfectly suited to stats, scouting plays a major part.
This is great to hear. I hope this reduces our dealings with the band of agents that started to hone in around Arsenal.
It’s fine having them as an option but it makes sense that this new committee can identify what they actually want, rather than be force fed something we don’t ideally want and at an inflated price to boot.
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This. We’re disassembling a network we spent decades building. Cagigao had been here for 21 years getting tons of talent over to the club because when you’ve worked for the same club for that long you know very well what you’re looking for in a player and what profile they should fit.
Getting data is not an issue, any club can get data on players, it is interpreting them that is an issue. And then there are young players you try to get before anyone else that you don’t have data on, then what.
Just ask yourself why we are not doing both scouts and stats - Because we’re cleaning out their salaries. It’s smells a bit like horse shit all this about wanting a different structure, this looks more like cutting costs.
We’ve never been in agents’ pockets too much, we never hung out with them too closely and we always tried to avoid the worst of the bunch like Raiola best we could. I don’t see this setup being any better at all.
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That’s absolute nonsense.
It should be “fewer” people.
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Destiny.
good, 100% support is the only way to go.
Also getting increasingly more angry the more I read, at how we’ve sacked the scouts and decided to go with statDNA stuff. Things like how Cagigao kept going on about Lauren as a full back and not a midfielder, tried to get Azpi and Monreal much earlier, we tracked Cazorla since he was 16, Auba since he was 21, Messi was a work permit away back in the same move as what got us Fabregas (imagine having both of them back then), also scouts wanted Vardy over Perez back in 2016 or w/e and none of them wanted Mustafi, that was all statDNA overruling the scouting dept. Cagigao’s last arguments were for Saliba and Martinelli, then he got sacked. RIP 
What were his arguments?
that was poorly worded by me, I meant recommended but the word escaped me as I wrote. I read that the last work he did for us before the cleanout was to recommend Saliba and Martinelli as good targets.
Wasn’t the club doing this before though? Seems like Edu had gotten rid of the second part altogether which is a bad thing
This is not really representating fairly of what his point was:
“I don’t want individual people working in one area or for one country. I want a group working together. Less people with much more responsibilities.
“That is my vision and for me in this process the most important thing is that everyone is very clear on the responsibilities which everyone has to make the right decision.
These are some of the scouts fired:
Now the club have informed Ty Gooden, who covers France and Belgium, that he will not be retained and further changes are being made across their international operation. Leonardo Scirpoli, who has overseen their scouting in Germany since last summer, will also lose his job and a similar fate has befallen their scout in Scotland, Alex Stafford, the Spain scout, Julio de Marco, and the Italian scout Alessandro Sbrizzo.
To be fair this does seem like overkill?
Scottish scout ffs. We signed the best player there last year and we all know who the next best player is already.
Oh Stephen Bradley, the Shamrock Rovers manager was also an Arsenal scout and one of those laid off. Like how the fuck did that work?
Its hard to say without details but firing a bunch of longtime scouts doesn’t mean we won’t be scouting these leagues.
The old model involves paying a ton of people to watch lower league and youth football matches around the world, then sifting through a zillion first hand scouting reports that may or may not be reliable. That model is not only cumbersome but doesn’t necessarily produce information that allows you to make good decisions. And there is also a real moral hazard issue in this model, in that scouts have incentives to big up players because they want to be known as the “guy who discovered X.”
In theory, an alternative model is to identify a much smaller group of potential top players using a combination of stats, world-of-mouth, agents, and video, then have a core group of scouts whose opinions Edu/Arteta really trust (and who evaluate players in ways that are standardized and make comparison a lot easier) travel to see those players in person.
I think you can make the argument that the latter model isn’t just more efficient financially, but will also yield better results in the end.
It appears idiots on social media have been attacking Edu’s son.
What is wrong with people man? This shit needs to stop.