Markus Krösche’s first summer in his new position was eventful. A few months after taking over as sporting director of Eintracht Frankfurt, he found himself with not only a manager to replace, but also a few star players.
Krösche, 41, hired from RB Leipzig, got to work. He hired Oliver Glasner as coach. He made a complicated deal to sign Rafael Santos Borré, a Colombian striker, from Argentine club River Plate, and acquired two young wingers to complement him. In total, he signed 11 players that summer and sold or loaned a dozen more.
The acquisition that could prove to be the most significant, however, has gone almost unnoticed. Quietly, Krösche returned to his old club to hire Bastian Quentmeier, a bookish former hockey player with unruly hair and a fisherman’s beard, as head of data analysis for his new club.
Even in the relatively small world of German football, few people had heard of Quentmeier. Even fewer people knew exactly what his role at Leipzig actually entailed – a data researcher. However, those who did so thought highly of him. “He has something unique,” said Ralf Rangnick, the visionary And current manager of Manchester United who had approved the hiring of Quentmeier in Leipzig. “Really good and unique.”
The appointment did not make headlines. Quentmeier’s arrival was so discreet that Eintracht didn’t even see the need to confirm it on the club’s website. There was no announcement beyond a subtle update to Quentmeier’s personal LinkedIn profile.
This modesty belied his importance. Krösche has pulled off a coup – strengthening his club’s position while weakening that of a rival – in an arms race so new it is only just taking shape. He had hired Quentmeier not only for his skills, but also for something increasingly valuable to clubs across Europe: his knowledge.
Change of the sea
Perhaps the best way to assess how quickly football has adopted data is to compare Quentmeier’s situation in his new role with that of his previous position. At Eintracht, he leads a team of three analysts: another full-time staff member and two students in support roles. There is nothing unusual about this.
When he arrived in Leipzig in 2016, it was a little different. He had joined the club, initially part-time, after meeting Johannes Spors, its chief recruiter, at a conference in Munich. At the time, Quentmeier worked for a subsidiary of Scout7, a company that provides data and video footage to clubs.
“We played games in all these leagues all over the world,” he said. “We had to pay them all, but we found that there were certain leagues that the clubs, our customers, were not interested in.” Its job was to track which leagues were being monitored by teams that signed up for the service and which were not.
Quentmeier didn’t think about the meeting until, a few months later, the Spors made contact again. Despite corporate backing, Leipzig has always cultivated a deliberate start-up energy, and Spors were keen to discover how best to use data to help recruit players. He asked Quentmeier if he would be willing to take on the “mini-job” of advising the club on which data providers might be most useful.
The salary was not high – a few hundred euros per month, according to Quentmeier – but the trial was successful. A few months later, Spors and Rangnick asked him if he wanted to join the club permanently.
Officially, he would be a data researcher – one of the few employed in Germany at the time – but that did not capture the full extent of his role. Quentmeier was not joining an established staff for training. He was responsible for a department of one. “In reality, there was nothing,” he said. His job was in fact to find out what the job of a data scout would be.
He spent the first few months browsing different data providers, determining which ones provided him with the best quality information. He spoke to Opta, Wyscout and InStat, three well-known providers, then branched out outside of football, picking the brains of everyone he could think of who worked in data analytics.
But most importantly, he tried to figure out what kind of questions a football team’s data system needed to answer. “Every coach, every athletic director and recruiter has their own idea,” he said. He knew his model had to be flexible enough to adapt to individual tastes. It was not enough to compare defenders, for example. “You had to distinguish between someone who knew how to play ball and someone who was more of a warrior,” he said.
Designing and building the system took up most of its first year. “It was easier to do it myself from the start,” he said, rather than just buying an external system and trying to adapt it to Leipzig’s needs.
The model Quentmeier built didn’t just allow him to evaluate players or performance. This allowed him and his superiors to analyze a coach’s play. He predicted the development of young players, based on historical parallels. This helped him discern whether a player was shining because he was on a good team or because he had a special talent.
Above all, this gave RB Leipzig another advantage. “Leipzig spent a lot of time and money to be ahead of the curve,” Rangnick said in a telephone interview last year. These kinds of things don’t stay secret for long in football. Quentmeier believes that in his early days, only a few other teams in Germany were investing in data.
Now, he said, it is “normal” for clubs to have a team of data analysts. This also means that it’s okay for teams to do everything in their power to ensure they have the best data analysts. This may mean seeking expertise outside of sport. Or, increasingly, it may mean taking the approach that brought Quentmeier to Eintracht, and snatching someone away from a direct rival.
Shopping lists
Like Quentmeier, a vast majority of data scientists – even at football’s most decorated clubs – remain essentially anonymous. Only occasionally, when a team makes a particularly important or particularly unusual meeting, do their names come to the surface.
Manchester United’s hiring of Dominic Jordan in October as its first director of data science was welcomed as a major step forward for a team locked in conservatism. Last year, Manchester City’s appointment of Laurie Shaw, an academic with a Ph.D. in computational astrophysics who had previously advised the British government, seemed exotic enough to attract attention.
The situation inside sport, however, is different. “There is a lot more knowledge about smart people, people who do good work, people who are making waves at other clubs,” said Omar Chaudhuri, director of intelligence at the data consultancy Twenty First Group. “The leaders will know them by name. They are much more likely to have them on their shopping list.
These are not, in most cases, easy appointments to make. Krösche knew Quentmeier from his time in Leipzig; he could vouch for his work first hand. Not everyone has this advantage. Clubs are reluctant to share knowledge and information that they consider proprietary. Few, if any, are willing to make public the work their data services do. This makes it extremely difficult to establish the qualifications of any individual staff member.
“Sometimes the proof of their success is enough to convince people,” Chaudhuri said, pointing out that clubs perceived to be successful will find their staff sought after by others, eager to acquire a little magic. Even then, it can be difficult to know exactly where the credit should go.
“Leaders who aren’t data experts don’t necessarily know what good work looks like,” he said. “Sophistication of analysis and sophistication of presentation are not always the same thing.”
In some cases, this has led clubs like Twenty First Group and Nolan Partners, a London-based headhunting company specializing in sports, to work out who does what and who does it well.
“We’ve provided a picture of what exists in this space to a few teams,” said Stewart King, Nolan Partners’ head of Europe. Twenty First Group was also tasked with managing recruitment processes, participating in panels and designing practice tests for potential candidates, Chaudhuri said.
The emphasis is often on communication: Quentmeier has found that analysts and the models they use must be able to predict and answer the types of questions that coaches and recruiters are likely to ask. This, Chaudhuri said, is what clubs are looking for above all else.
Both expect these types of acquisitions to become more common over the next couple of years, as clubs scramble to keep pace with their rivals or get ahead. Capacity is no longer the only currency in the transfer market. Information and the ability to interpret it are now just as important.
