IT IS INDICATIVE of how professional football has changed that the man most likely to follow Alex Ferguson in breaking the Old Firm duopoly is Tony Bloom: where once the game could be upended by the ultimate football man, the force of nature who housed a whole football club inside his head, now football’s chief insurgent is a quiet, backroom figure wielding spreadsheets and computer code.
Brighton owner Bloom is now involved in Hearts, and has made a fortune and his wider reputation by finding an edge, initially developing his own dataset we now call Expected Goals in order to beat the bookmakers on football matches.
Hence we shouldn’t be surprised he is the man threatening to drive the first wedge between the Scottish Premiership title and the Old Firm in 41 years.
Bloom brought these principles to Brighton, and having achieved English football’s seemingly impossible double – consistent success and a profit – Bloom has since exported them using the firm Jamestown Analytics, which gives selected clubs access to the coveted database.
Jamestown work with only one club per league – which helped Ipswich’s rise to the Premier League, at which point they had to work without it – and clients include Shelbourne in Ireland and Hearts in Scotland.
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The analytics on offer have remarkable depth – they can advise on set-piece set-up depending on the upcoming opponent – but are perhaps most useful when it comes to player recruitment. Jamestown have an enormous database of players, graded in some mystical way to adjudge how they would adapt to specific leagues. The mantra from those who use the database: while it won’t tell you anything you can’t see in a player, it will tell you about players you would never otherwise see.
Last year, Bloom went one further with respect to Hearts, buying a 29% stake at the club.
The summer and mid-season recruitment has been wide-ranging – they didn’t sign a single British player on a permanent basis -and has also been a resounding success: striker Claudio Braga has scored 14 goals and won the Player of the Season award, winger Alexandros Kyziridis has 14 goal contributions in 37 games; goalkeeper Alexander Schwolow has shown there is a life after Craig Gordon; and Irish defender Oisin McEntee arrived and quickly anchored the defence.
In the world of sporting directors and club recruitment teams, they consider a signing a success if they have played at least half their teams’ minutes: of Hearts’ 12 permanent signings across pre-season and January, seven have hit eclipsed that target. When you had in the fact that these seven players arrived to Scotland’s unique football culture from seven different countries – Slovakia, Norway, England, Iceland, Germany, Netherlands, and Kazakhstan – then this is the stuff of brilliant recruitment.
Contrast that to Celtic and Rangers’ recruitment: they have collectively signed 17 players from leagues outside Britain across the season, only five of whom have played more than half of their sides’ league minutes.
But while Bloom might have felt Scottish football was ripe for a shake-up, not even his famed predictive powers could have anticipated just how quickly Hearts would find themselves as the ascendant power.
The edge to be exploited in Scotland has proven to be the decadence of the ruling duo. Success has led Celtic and Rangers to grow fat and complacent, to the point that both have convulsed themselves in all manner of chaos this year.
Rangers hired Russell Martin to commit to an overhaul of their style of play without giving him the players necessary to do so, leading to a fan fury that would power the national grid and an opening league run of one win in eight games.
Celtic, meanwhile, kicked off the season with Brendan Rodgers in surly form, complaining he was being handed the keys of a Honda Civic and expected to drive it like a Ferrari. Things then descended to entirely less civic behaviour, with fan protests roiling against the board and Rodgers leaving with ears burning from a blistering Dermot Desmond statement, in which Rodgers was accused of kindling hostility toward the board. That hostility has grown even more intense since Rodgers’ exit, with fan protests becoming regular and the club AGM abandoned after Desmond’s son rounded on certain fans he accused of bullying and dehumanising the board, triggering jeers and chants of ‘sack the board’.
Martin O’Neill, having that day told TalkSPORT it would be good if Hearts won the league, was suddenly parachuted into the Celtic job on a short-term basis. There followed the farcical reign of Wilfried Nancy, scoffed at for wielding a tactics board at the start of a 33-day reign which featured six defeats in eight games and a social media post of a Fr Dougal Maguire-style diagram stressing that one should only focus on what one can control. O’Neill has returned to do a remarkable job, really, and it has been down to his energy and clarity that Celtic have dragged this league title to the final day.
Tomorrow’s finale will be tense and fraught and unbearable for all involved, but should Celtic ultimately cling on to their title, Hearts can console themselves with the fact that it need not be the end: they are the resurgent side in Scotland, and look fated to shatter the Old Firm’s staid order.
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Scotland's thrilling title race: Where new world analytics meets Old Firm torpor
IT IS INDICATIVE of how professional football has changed that the man most likely to follow Alex Ferguson in breaking the Old Firm duopoly is Tony Bloom: where once the game could be upended by the ultimate football man, the force of nature who housed a whole football club inside his head, now football’s chief insurgent is a quiet, backroom figure wielding spreadsheets and computer code.
Brighton owner Bloom is now involved in Hearts, and has made a fortune and his wider reputation by finding an edge, initially developing his own dataset we now call Expected Goals in order to beat the bookmakers on football matches.
Hence we shouldn’t be surprised he is the man threatening to drive the first wedge between the Scottish Premiership title and the Old Firm in 41 years.
Bloom brought these principles to Brighton, and having achieved English football’s seemingly impossible double – consistent success and a profit – Bloom has since exported them using the firm Jamestown Analytics, which gives selected clubs access to the coveted database.
Jamestown work with only one club per league – which helped Ipswich’s rise to the Premier League, at which point they had to work without it – and clients include Shelbourne in Ireland and Hearts in Scotland.
The analytics on offer have remarkable depth – they can advise on set-piece set-up depending on the upcoming opponent – but are perhaps most useful when it comes to player recruitment. Jamestown have an enormous database of players, graded in some mystical way to adjudge how they would adapt to specific leagues. The mantra from those who use the database: while it won’t tell you anything you can’t see in a player, it will tell you about players you would never otherwise see.
Last year, Bloom went one further with respect to Hearts, buying a 29% stake at the club.
The summer and mid-season recruitment has been wide-ranging – they didn’t sign a single British player on a permanent basis -and has also been a resounding success: striker Claudio Braga has scored 14 goals and won the Player of the Season award, winger Alexandros Kyziridis has 14 goal contributions in 37 games; goalkeeper Alexander Schwolow has shown there is a life after Craig Gordon; and Irish defender Oisin McEntee arrived and quickly anchored the defence.
In the world of sporting directors and club recruitment teams, they consider a signing a success if they have played at least half their teams’ minutes: of Hearts’ 12 permanent signings across pre-season and January, seven have hit eclipsed that target. When you had in the fact that these seven players arrived to Scotland’s unique football culture from seven different countries – Slovakia, Norway, England, Iceland, Germany, Netherlands, and Kazakhstan – then this is the stuff of brilliant recruitment.
Contrast that to Celtic and Rangers’ recruitment: they have collectively signed 17 players from leagues outside Britain across the season, only five of whom have played more than half of their sides’ league minutes.
But while Bloom might have felt Scottish football was ripe for a shake-up, not even his famed predictive powers could have anticipated just how quickly Hearts would find themselves as the ascendant power.
The edge to be exploited in Scotland has proven to be the decadence of the ruling duo. Success has led Celtic and Rangers to grow fat and complacent, to the point that both have convulsed themselves in all manner of chaos this year.
Rangers hired Russell Martin to commit to an overhaul of their style of play without giving him the players necessary to do so, leading to a fan fury that would power the national grid and an opening league run of one win in eight games.
Celtic, meanwhile, kicked off the season with Brendan Rodgers in surly form, complaining he was being handed the keys of a Honda Civic and expected to drive it like a Ferrari. Things then descended to entirely less civic behaviour, with fan protests roiling against the board and Rodgers leaving with ears burning from a blistering Dermot Desmond statement, in which Rodgers was accused of kindling hostility toward the board. That hostility has grown even more intense since Rodgers’ exit, with fan protests becoming regular and the club AGM abandoned after Desmond’s son rounded on certain fans he accused of bullying and dehumanising the board, triggering jeers and chants of ‘sack the board’.
Martin O’Neill, having that day told TalkSPORT it would be good if Hearts won the league, was suddenly parachuted into the Celtic job on a short-term basis. There followed the farcical reign of Wilfried Nancy, scoffed at for wielding a tactics board at the start of a 33-day reign which featured six defeats in eight games and a social media post of a Fr Dougal Maguire-style diagram stressing that one should only focus on what one can control. O’Neill has returned to do a remarkable job, really, and it has been down to his energy and clarity that Celtic have dragged this league title to the final day.
Tomorrow’s finale will be tense and fraught and unbearable for all involved, but should Celtic ultimately cling on to their title, Hearts can console themselves with the fact that it need not be the end: they are the resurgent side in Scotland, and look fated to shatter the Old Firm’s staid order.
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coming into bloom Hearts Scotland Scottish Premiership