Sevilla FC: Becoming One of Europe’s Elite
Back in the 1999/00 season, Sevilla FC suffered relegation from La Liga (1st division) to the second-tier Spanish league. The club was in a terrible financial situation, results were bad, and fans had lost all belief in the team. However, that same year, Sevilla FC would appoint as sporting director one of the club’s most influential persons over the last 20 years: Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo, better known as Monchi. Under his management, the club changed drastically. After just one year, Sevilla would be promoted back to the 1st division and never look back. They would go on to win 10 major titles, including 6 Europa League titles, more than in their previous 110 years of history. Monchi’s work with the youth sector and scouting department, and the club’s “sell to grow” philosophy, have allowed the club to grow consistently year after year. Their model has been praised all over Europe and many have taken it as an example. In this article, we analyze Sevilla FC’s business model, Monchi’s scouting method, and the application of big data in the scouting process.
Business Model
A little more than 20 years ago, the club had just been relegated and was facing financial bankruptcy. In the 2001/02 season, the club had €8 million in losses and accumulated losses of €36 million. President José María del Nido and his team put a plan together to address the situation, and in just one season, they managed to achieve a result of €1.2 million in profit. Then in the 2003/04 season, the club reached a profit of more than €15 million. Most recently, according to KPMG Football Benchmark, Sevilla is one of the few clubs to experience revenue growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. The club’s revenue rose from €137.903 million to €146.577 million during the 2019/20 season, making a 6.3% increase from the previous year.
The secret behind this success is the club’s “sell to grow” philosophy. The basis of this idea is to buy and sell football players efficiently. The key is to understand that no player is irreplaceable and that once the player is valued at a good price, the money from the sale can be reinvested to buy other assets at a better price. Some examples are:
As you can see, all these signings were sold for 2 or more times the initial investment. Mistakes can happen; like with the case of Quincy Promes, who was bought for €21 million and sold just a year later for €15.7 million (Monchi was not part of the club at the time), but in the long run, there have been far more hits than misses.
Monchi
Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo or Monchi, was a former goalkeeper for Sevilla FC from 1990–99; and in 2000, he was assigned as sporting director of the club. Monchi has often been named amongst the best in the world in his role. He excels in many areas, but the two that he is most known for are Player Development and Scouting.
As mentioned before, when he stepped in as sporting director, the club had just been relegated and they were facing a very difficult situation. He understood that in order to rebuild the club and become one of the top clubs in Spanish football, a long-term approach was needed. At the time of his appointment, Monchi didn’t have that much experience for such a role, so he decided to study the methodology of other clubs that had a similar approach to his idea of how to manage a club. He took a lot of inspiration from FC Porto and Lyon, who were very successful clubs, but would lose their star players frequently and re-build their teams again and again. He quickly learned that the main thing was to accept losing your best players and replace them with someone of similar quality or potential for less money.
The first thing he did was to develop the youth academy and focus on player development. His thought was that the club needed a strong foundation that could consistently provide players to the first team. Monchi knew that the financial situation at the time was hard and that big signings could not be made, thus the academy would play a key role in shaping the first team. His philosophy is that player development should be more important than results, especially at a young age, because higher quality will consequently lead to better results. This method has clearly been a success, with players like Sergio Ramos and Jesus Navas coming out from the academy, and young talents such as Dani Alves, Ivan Rakitic, and Seydou Keita scouted, who were all sold for far more than their purchase price.
Scouting Method
Since Sevilla cannot compete for signings with Real Madrid, Barcelona, Man City, Chelsea, or PSG, they have had to take a very different approach to sign new players. Instead of looking for players that will have an immediate impact or that have big names, they look for players that still need development. Knowing that players don’t tend to stay long at the club, they look for players that might be undervalued or that still have plenty of room to grow, with the hopes of selling them at a higher price in the future. For this to be possible, the scouting department needs to do some extraordinary work, something where Monchi and his team excel at.
Monchi’s method is based around the idea of a “global player database” in which it contains the reports of many players for each position, with many different profiles for each position. For example, for right-backs, they have reports for players that are more offensive, more defensive, more physical, more technical, etc. This allows them to be ready for any unplanned situation that might arise at any moment; and not just have reports for players that they need that specific season.
Monchi’s scouting process has three key moments: the “Gross” scouting, the “Net” scouting, and the Player Selection.
Gross Scouting:
- Occurs during the first five months
- The scouts watch a lot of football with no particular aim.
- Each scout is assigned a tier A league, a tier B league, and a tier C tournament (see picture below). The scouts must provide a monthly top 11 for each league with players that could fit the club’s profile (Mbappe or Neymar are obviously not realistic targets).
- The purpose of this phase is to collect as much data as possible and to grow the player database.
Net Scouting
- From January to May/June
- Players from each of the top 11s are scouted further.
- The aim is to get reports of the player in as many different situations as possible. For example, playing home and away games, cup and league games, against big and small teams, for club or national team, etc.
- The scouting in this phase is done by different scouts than in the “gross” phase. The purpose of this is to obtain as many different points of view and opinions as possible for each player. In total, each player is scouted 6 –7 times minimum.
- The objective of this phase is to obtain as much information as possible on the players selected in the previous phase, so when the moment comes, the team can make a more precise decision with a lower chance of error.
The Player Selection
- Here is when the coach comes into play. The coach provides the club with the type of player he needs and the characteristics that the player must-have. Then, Monchi goes back to his team, and they narrow down the list of players to a list of 7–8 possible names that could suit that profile. A back-and-forth dialogue occurs between the scouting team, the coach, and Monchi until a name is finally decided on.
- One important thing that Monchi says is that “the coach provides the profile of the player, and the sporting management team provides the name of the player”.
- Another important aspect of this phase is to understand what the coach wants. It doesn’t matter how good the player is, if he is not what the coach needs, he is more likely to fail.
- Once the player is signed, the sporting director makes sure that the player has everything he needs to be successful.
Big Data
Monchi is a big supporter of big data and data analytics. He believes that anyone who refuses to use video or data will eventually be left behind. Apart from reducing costs and saving time, Monchi thinks big data is the future of football because it helps to “minimizes risk and to make the right decision”. In the past, scouting depended a lot more on “feeling” or “intuition” from the scout. There was some data available, but it wasn’t enough to draw a meaningful conclusion from it. Nowadays, with platforms like Wyscout or InStat, scouts and coaches have access to every interaction a player makes during a game.
Sevilla started their analytics department in 2016 and has already begun looking into hiring engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and experts in statistics and algorithms, to further gain a competitive advantage. Sevilla uses “objective” data (stats like goals, assists, expected goals, distance run, etc) and subjective data (the interpretation of scouts from video or live games). The goal is to try and reach a conclusion that will be supported by both the objective and subjective data, and in turn, reduce the chance of making a mistake.
Conclusion
If you look at where the club was at the end of that 1999/00 season and where it is today, it is hard to believe that we are talking about the same club. There has been outstanding work and commitment from everyone at Sevilla FC, but much of their sporting success would not be possible without Monchi. His scouting model has become a point of reference inside the football world. The only way a club can keep competing with the big teams, while on a lower budget and losing their stars frequently, is if they can keep discovering and bringing in talented players year after year. The method that he has developed in combination with the use of data has helped Sevilla become one of the 4 biggest clubs in Spain today. This shows that when an organization commits to a long-term plan and is led by the right people, even the worst situations can be turned around.
