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We are thrilled to announce that Everton Football Club have extended their relationship with SkillCorner for a further three seasons, adding our Game Intelligence suite to their existing Physical Data to further enhance their recruitment and analysis processes.
Everton have been SkillCorner customers for many years, and this expansion speaks to the confidence they place in our solutions.
We sat down with Charlie Reeves, the club’s Head of Performance Insights, to discuss how adding tracking-derived insights to their existing data sources will help Everton achieve a more complete picture of player and team performance.
Can you give us an overview of the insights department at Everton?
I head up a five person department covering all our football data requirements - from GPS, sports science and load management to recruitment. That includes analysts, data science and engineering.
We’ve built some quite sophisticated models using events and physical data, but our vision is to enhance them with tracking data. Tracking data allows us to measure a huge part of the game that we’re missing, that we know is important.
We also want to increase our understanding of physical data, really zero in on what’s important at team and player level - how does what’s required for success change depending on how we play, who we’re playing against or what position on the pitch we’re talking about.
It’s about getting a full understanding of the game - what’s important and actually what’s less important - bringing the physical, technical and tactical elements together and how they all interact.
What role does SkillCorner Game Intelligence play in achieving that vision?
It's crucial. Event data gets us about halfway there, but tracking data probably takes us another third of the way on top of that.
We’ve decided to go down the Game Intelligence route because SkillCorner has done a lot of the heavy lifting for us in terms of getting insights out of the tracking data.
It allows us to measure huge parts of the game that we can’t get from event data - what players are doing off the ball. With event data, you’re only following the ball, so you’re limited on how you can answer questions around team shape, or how a team builds up, for example.
In a recruitment scenario, where we're looking to spend tens of millions of pounds, we need as much information as possible on what a player adds and how they’ll fit into the team. This data helps us build a fuller picture of why things happen, how a player truly fits our team style, and ultimately, how good they are. It’s about being more confident in decision-making to avoid those costly mistakes.
Why was SkillCorner your preferred choice?
We’ve worked with SkillCorner for a long time, and as the innovators in this space you have that edge in terms of maturity and quality of the data, but also an understanding of what needs to be provided, and what’s useful for clubs.
One of the key things for me is that SkillCorner data translates coaching language and game principles into measurable data. A coach talks about something, and with SkillCorner, we can be confident in measuring exactly what they’re asking for - we don't have to build proxies anymore. There’s a lot of metrics that make sense to me as an analyst, or to a coach, and allow us to much easier answer those questions that we've not been able to answer before.
Plus, we’ve used their physical data for a long time, so integrating Game Intelligence was easy, and the two data types complement each other really well.
SkillCorner is also just a very easy and responsive company to work with; you listen to our feedback, and we have seen how it gets implemented into the product, which is hugely important and gives us a lot of confidence and trust.
What impact has SkillCorner had so far, and what are your expectations for the future of the partnership?
The physical data has already had a massive impact, especially in recruitment and answering coach-led questions on physicality.
Going forward, we’re now moving out of the exploration phase with the Game Intelligence data. The plan is to fully integrate it into our core recruitment and first-team analysis models, moving from event-based to tracking-enhanced models across the board, and we’re confident this will allow us to answer those complex game and player questions much more effectively.
Everton FC are one of 270+ teams around the world that trust in SkillCorner data to power smarter decisions in recruitment and match analysis.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch today.