STRYKZ Special: How To Use Inefficiencies In Football For Transfer Miracles

Christian Szymanski
strykz
Published in
4 min readJun 10, 2018
Picture: Copa 90 and Hyundai

Football isn’t drastically different from tech. The most significant innovations of the 21st Century came from tiny startups with minimal financial backing. Facebook. Youtube. Patreon. Very often companies in financial trouble come up with ingenious ways of saving money without affecting results.

We’ve already told you about the fascinating story of Brentford FC. This one here is not just about them, but also Borussia Dortmund — one of the biggest and most prestigious football clubs in Germany — and how YOU can leverage their knowledge to become the smartest coach and manager in Football-Stars powered by STRYKZ.

The intelligent way of doing transfers: Buy low at super high quality

Picture: Copa 90 and Hyundai

Football was always a money game. But these days it’s a game without any spending limits.

Paris Saint-Germain paid €222 million for 26-year-old Brazilian superstar Neymar in 2017. All made possible by a substantial investment from their owners, Qatar Sports Investments, and their chairman Nasser Ghanim Al-Khelaifi. Before that, Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo, who were both bought for roughly €100 million, were the most expensive transfers.

But there are other ways and means to use smart data and global analytics to buy the best players at a bargain price. “The transfer market is riddled with inefficiencies,” says Rasmus Ankersen, who has built not one, but two successful clubs at the same time. Right now he serves as Chairman at Danish Champions FC Midtjylland, as well as Brentford FC. “We just had to exploit some of these inefficiencies by using data. Most clubs pay way too much money for quality that is not worth the price tag.”

“Lots of clubs pay too much money for players that are low-quality”

The most surprising fact about Ankersen’s approach is it would be entirely possible, for pretty much every club in the world, to replicate his decision-making based on data. Even the boss himself acknowledges that, “every European team could do it, just takes some balls.”

Let’s break down Brentford FC’s method:

  1. Gather data from all clubs around the world about their goal efficiency, i.e. How many attempts do they need before they score.
  2. List all of the high-ranking clubs in one league — doesn’t matter from which country.
  3. Pick a team that is not that well known on the global scale and analyze them. Ankersen bought multiple players from German underdog Greuther Furth. The data gathered clearly shows that they are as capable of scoring and winning as huge Premier League clubs, including Manchester United.
  4. Start a deep-dive into the analytics of said team, combining scores like: headers, speed, shot precision and so on. With this data you can calculate an overall score for each player. (By the way: We are the official License holder for the German Bundesliga, which means we have all of this original data exclusively available within Football-Stars powered by STRYKZ)
  5. Finding the diamond. Ankersen and his data team found out that Greuther Furth had multiple players with very high overall rankings — above 7.5. Tim Sparv even had 8.1! As a German, he was barely known within the British scene.
Picture: Copa 90 and Hyundai

Find diamonds in the global football scene, and your fans will love you

Germans are in high demand right now, mainly because Jürgen Klopp has made a name for himself as a remarkable coach at Liverpool FC — even though Real Madrid beat them in the grand final of the Champions League. Thomas Tuchel, former coach at Borussia Dortmund, just recently became head coach at Paris Saint-Germain.

“I used to have a lot of fun making predictions about who we would buy, and was right about 70 percent of the time back in the days,” says a fan and supporter of Brentford FC for over 50 years. “These days I have no clue, and I love it. It’s a full bag of surprises, and they buy people that truly elevate our game. Our club is the poster boy of analytics; makes me proud. And of course, it’s a great change for everyone that all of a sudden we are winning. We are winning more matches than ever before because of that data wizardry.”

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Christian Szymanski
strykz
Writer for

CEO of ComboStrike, a full-service marketing agency with tailored & holistic media, creative & influencer solutions - working exclusively in the gaming industry