The ‘four rooms’
Ridgewell, who spent 15 years as an analyst in the club game before crossing to the provider side, outlined Performance Studio’s four sections.
1. Insight
The multi-game video tool. Seven seasons of Premier League data with the tracking layered on top are searchable to a forensic degree.
“You do really simple stuff, like, ‘I want to see all of Erling Haaland’s shots,'” Ridgewell said. “But you could also say, ‘I want all of Haaland’s shots during a transition, that started in this area of the pitch, where Kevin De Bruyne played a pass at some point.'”
A ranking function sits alongside, so any search can be set against the rest of the league. If Mohamed Salah completes 100 one-v-ones in a season, you can ask if that is a lot, per 90 minutes, compared to his peers.
2. Creator
Automates the repetitive coding that has long eaten an analyst’s hours.
“At Southampton, we created an XML and put it in all 380 Premier League games,” said Ridgewell, who was Analysis Operations Lead at the then-Premier League side.
“Save that onto a server, and any member of staff could take a game off it knowing it would be coded like a first-team analyst at Southampton would, in our philosophy.”
Now, an entire season’s footage, coded to one shared way of seeing the game, can be available to the whole department in seconds.
3. Fitness
Aggregates the tracking data into physical outputs – accelerations, high-speed running and so on – by player, team, game or season. Critically, this is interwoven with the tactical picture.
“You’d be able to find things like, show me who does the most sprints during attacking transitions,” Ridgewell said. “Which are the questions you get from coaches. They might say, I don’t think we sprint enough when we win the ball. But with the software you can actually find those things.”
4. Spotlight
The newest section, where teams turn the numbers into the spider plots, timelines, average shapes and formations that fill a modern opposition dossier or post-match report.