“What that allows you to do is have a level of accuracy particularly with timestamps, and also add additional layers of data on top. So we could do things like pressure, and the number of guys behind the ball. That allowed you to do a lot more than what Opta could do. The big difference with us and Opta, with regards to event tagging was time-stamps. If you’re going to build a model that looks at a goalkeepers ability to claim a ball in their area, you need to know the exact time of when the goalkeeper claimed the ball or when it passed through his area, and when it was delivered. Because you’re looking at how much distance a keeper can cover in any certain period of time to claim a ball in the box.”

At the time Rosenfeld and Taylor created Stat DNA, nobody was doing that kind of work. Either your ginormous mega-team was collecting data on its own, or you just couldn’t afford it. Taylor’s company started with an eclectic mix of clients, recording their games and the games of the opponents in their league or potential players they wanted scouted, and sending them to Laos. Back then, the games were send via digitally FTP to the local telecom company, where they took all night to be downloaded onto a hard drive, and then Fran would pick them up at five AM and take them to the office for the day’s work. Then the data analysts would tag all the events, and Fran would then stick all that data into a computer model to give him useful player information. Taylor and Rosenfeld had clients like the University of North Carolina women’s team and Brazilian club Botafogo, sending them tape of their own players and team as well as opponents they wanted scouted.

In his free time, Fran would play soccer in the Laotian Premier League. “They liked to make fun of me a lot and tried to convince me that any person of Asian descent was actually Lao, like Manny Pacquiao. They called me “Kop”- or “Frog”. I have no idea why. It wasn’t a very serious league- I think they paid me 400,000 kip a month or the equivalent of 50 USD.”

After a few years of watching all manner of soccer matches from around the globe, a bigger client came calling in 2013: perennial English Premier League heavyweight Arsenal Football Club. At first they were Stat DNA’s main client. Then they became their sole client. Finally, Arsenal were so happy with the results from the hard-working crew in Laos, they bought StatDNA, lock stock and barrel. That soon required Fran to relocate to Boston, and then London. Which was a bit of a change from spending his time playing in Laotian first division games on the weekend and scouting Clemson’s women’s team all week.

“I mean it was night and day.”

Getting an Education at Arsenal

Taylor spent his days at Arsenal’s facility, looking back at every movement and detail of each past Arsenal game and upcoming opponent, along with a team of sabermetric wiz kid analysts and under the direction of the Manager Arsene Wenger’s technical staff. But as much as Fran was contributing to Arsenal’s week-to-week preparation, Arsenal was training Fran about what to look for.

“When Arsenal bought us, things really changed at least for me in my role. Or at least what I was able to learn. Because there’s only so much you can learn watching footage by yourself, purely from the lens of an analytics person. Some of the things that I remember thinking about the game back then are kind of scary to me. And naive. And it took me working in a club environment with people who knew the game intimately to kind of teach me a lot of those things.”

In its essence, Fran began the important work of separating the ability to measure something with the ability to find measurable things that really mattered. That only happened because he was sitting with Arsenal coaches and watching the games, instead of sitting with office drones clicking their mouse buttons to input match events. Numbers are just numbers, and useless ones, until they can be converting into information that describes good soccer as opposed to not-good soccer. Fran described the analysis room at Arsenal as “a kind of hangout spot” for the technical staff.

“That’s where (Arsenal Assistant Coaches) Steve Bould, Neil Banfield would roll in if they wanted to blow off steam or watch parts of the game back. And then the analysts there are top notch too. Because they’re the ones that are working with the technical staff pre-match, briefing the players on the strength of the opposition.”