United appoint Dominic Jordan as director of data science

Adnan

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It's about getting the best person for the job even if you have to wait. People in this field are normally in jobs and are then put on gardening leave, which is what happened with Dominic Jordan. We're not going any slower than Man City or Liverpool when they were putting their data teams together overseen by their football departments. The only thing that slowed us down was a lack of foresight from both the owners and David Gill, when the ideal time to transition to a modern up to date structure was around 2012. So we're slow due to a lack of foresight from the likes of Gill and then Woodward. But from the time John Murtough was made the defacto DoF, the pace isn't any slower than what I read about Liverpool and Man City under Brian Marwood, when they set the motion for their data science teams. Liverpool for example only brought Will Spearman to the club, six years after Ian Graham arrived in 2012.



And Alex Kleyn isn't someone who was working as part of recruitment at Southampton but rather he was working towards aligning the tactical strategy between the first team and B team by applying advanced statistical metrics. Dominic Jordan is already reported to be working on the recruitment side of things as things stand.
 

Roboc7

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It's about getting the best person for the job even if you have to wait. People in this field are normally in jobs and are then put on gardening leave, which is what happened with Dominic Jordan. We're not going any slower than Man City or Liverpool when they were putting their data teams together overseen by their football departments. The only thing that slowed us down was a lack of foresight from both the owners and David Gill, when the ideal time to transition to a modern up to date structure was around 2012. So we're slow due to a lack of foresight from the likes of Gill and then Woodward. But from the time John Murtough was made the defacto DoF, the pace isn't any slower than what I read about Liverpool and Man City under Brian Marwood, when they set the motion for their data science teams. Liverpool for example only brought Will Spearman to the club, six years after Ian Graham arrived in 2012.



And Alex Kleyn isn't someone who was working as part of recruitment at Southampton but rather he was working towards aligning the tactical strategy between the first team and B team by applying advanced statistical metrics. Dominic Jordan is already reported to be working on the recruitment side of things as things stand.
His work aligning the B team was something he did not something he was working towards. As Lead Data Scientist for 4 years he will have been involved with a lot more than that.
 

Adnan

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His work aligning the B team was something he did not something he was working towards. As Lead Data Scientist for 4 years he will have been involved with a lot more than that.
Of course he was likely involved in more that, but Southampton have data scientists who are dedicated to recruitment whilst others within the same department dedicate their time improving performance. Liverpool had Will Spearman working full time on recruitment whilst the other 5 data scientists worked on performance through out the club from the first team down to the reserve/youth teams.