As the Ottawa Fury get ready to kick off their North American Soccer League season on Saturday against the Carolina RailHawks, coach Marc Dos Santos is leaving no stone unturned in ensuring his team is adequately prepared.

For the richest clubs in Europe, getting set for the start of the campaign involves sending scouts all over the globe to watch opponents and look at potential target transfers. Dos Santos and his relatively small staff don’t have those same luxuries in the NASL, and that is why they have to rely on techniques such as video and statistical analysis.

“We have to make sure we go through everything before the first game,” Dos Santos told Sportsnet.

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The NASL and all of its teams subscribe to a service called InStat Scout, a program that offers video and statistics on almost every league in the world. This gives teams such as the Fury a chance to watch video of players they would never have had the opportunity to see otherwise.

“Today it allows us to have a certain reach towards any player in the world. It is not realistic for us with a short staff to have a scout in Costa Rica one month and the month after being in Brazil then Argentina, so the use of video and the use of a program like InStat Scout becomes incredibly important for us,” Dos Santos said.

The use of video analysis is not just confined to the coaching staff, though. The players go through two video analysis sessions a week—one on Thursday watching opposition tape and one on Monday recapping the weekend’s game.

Dos Santos is no amateur when it comes to using video and cutting game tape to illustrate specific situations, even though the Fury is his first senior head-coaching role since he left the Montreal Impact in 2011.

After parting ways with the Impact he spent three years in Brail keeping up with the latest in coaching developments and video analysis. During his time there Dos Santos coached the FC Primeira Camisa U-20s and the SE Palmerias U-15s. Even at the youth levels he was using video analysis

“I was actually surprised when I arrived there and started to see the amount of hours put in on the use of video,” Dos Santos said.

Dos Santos admits that although video analysis was being used extensively at the Brazilian youth teams they were slightly behind on using statistical analysis. With Ottawa, Dos Santos has started to integrate statistics into the decision making process.

“We try to use the stats—not after one game, but say after five or six games—to see (for example) the amount of corners we had and the amount of goals we conceded off of corners,” Dos Santos explained.

With the Fury, Dos Santos is looking for a balance of video and statistical analysis suggesting, statistical analysis “is important more in the longer term, but the video allows us to look at moments that are very specific right away.”

Aside from the off field analysis a major part of the Fury’s preparation for the 2015 NASL season will depend on bringing their off-season acquisitions into the system, the most high profile being Canadian national team captain Julian de Guzman.

Dos Santos is practically buzzing when he talks about De Guzman and what he will bring to the side, although he is careful to temper fan expectations when it comes to goal scoring.

“We see him playing in the No. 8 role, in one of the two positions in front of the defence. We don’t expect him to score, we don’t expect him to have assists—we expect him to give rhythm to the team. If he gives rhythm to the team in possession then other guys are going to score and assist,” Dos Santos claimed.

The Ottawa coach places lots of emphasis on how players fit into the team, and how all of the preparation—the video, the statistics, the meetings, the training sessions—is part of working towards building a model of play. Clearly he sees de Guzman as a significant part of this model of play.

The NASL is a difficult league to predict and it is further complicated by the Latin American style split-season structure. Dos Santos himself is critical of the complex spring and fall season set-up. That being said the focus in Ottawa is clearly on the long term, making sure the team is prepared for any obstacles and making the most out of their limited resources using various analysis techniques.

For Dos Santos, it isn’t about just winning the spring or fall season—it is about building something for the future.

“At the end of the day you have to be the best in the long term. We really want to do something special, but it comes with time,” Dos Santos stated.

Sam Gregory is soccer analytics writer based in Montreal. Follow him on Twitter