taz

Impeccable 👍 Au rugby on ne voit pas de contestations, et c'est très bien, ça améliore le contexte du match. Bon, au foot, ça n'améliorera pas le niveau des arbitres 😁 mais c'est un bon début.

Yes

Si tu lis le forum depuis des années, il ne t'a pas échappé que ce forum est assez détendu, avec beaucoup de second degré chez certains. Je pense que c'est peut-être à toi de te détendre un peu 😉, ce forum est généralement accueillant avec les nouveaux.

Y'a un truc que t'oublies de prendre en compte : c'est l’émergence d'un mec de son âge et qui est au-dessus sur ce qu'on a vu depuis juillet, à savoir Chaïbi. T'en as un qui est plus prêt que l'autre, c'est totalement logique que la hiérarchie soit prise en compte, tout en donnant l'opportunité à Skytta de se développer ailleurs.

Il y a sans doute des raisons. Il est peut-être prêté là où on avait besoin de lui, et là où il avait envie d'aller. Le club n'est pas le seul décideur.

Oui c'est parfait. Et si ça peut parfois permettre à un jeune de venir s'entraîner avec le groupe de temps en temps et ainsi prendre de l'expérience, c'est tout bénef.

Rapporté aux deux écoulés depuis le rachat par Redbird, je trouve que c'est pas énorme. Mais c'est quand même assez logique. Pour le sportif en particulier, il y a toujours du mouvement dans les staffs des clubs chaque année, il y a un mercato comme pour les joueurs.

Dans notre système c'est essentiel, mais bon, je crois que ça sert à rien que j'insiste

Pas de souci marco. Il avait des contacts avec pas mal de clubs de L1 et ailleurs, il est resté parce qu'on est monté en L1. Donc je pense que sa situation a évolué, mais je n'en suis pas certain du coup 😁 Je vais me renseigner.

J'ai jamais dit que les deux étaient liés. Et tu imagines bien que ce genre de choses, depuis le temps, je le sais hein.

Je crois oui. Il a fait quelques entraînements avec les pros cette semaine.

Il a signé un contrat d'ailleurs, mais ça n'a pas encore été officialisé.

L'article sur Rasmus dans Actu Toulouse a fait de l'effet, Blas a la trouille.

Le duel est une composante mais c'est loin d'être que ça. Et gagner les duels ne suffit peut-être pas dans notre système de jeu. Qu'est-il reproché aux latéraux gauche actuels à Toulouse : problèmes de placement, déchet technique, peu d'impact offensif et j'en oublie... Donc pour moi, il suffit pas de gagner les duels pour s'adapter.

Et d'ailleurs il est venu... Latéral =duel. Bien résumé 😂

Rapnouil a un peu disparu des radars, et la saison dernière il n'a pas vraiment trop montré. Néanmoins, pourquoi pas, c'est un spécialiste du poste je crois. Toujours la même question : son niveau.

Non, il n'a pas dit ça, il a dit qu'il n'est pas encore prêt. Les gardiens, c'est assez spécial. Tes arguments ne signifient pas en tout cas que la data s'est plantée sur ces joueurs, désolé. C'est encore trop tôt pour tirer ce genre de conclusion.

Je suis en train de penser que ça fait beaucoup de matière d'un coup pour lesv.c Ils en ont pour 6 mois de recyclage

Comment peux-tu dire ça alors que ces joueurs n'ont pas encore joué pour des raisons que tout le monde ignore ?

Comolli (ou un autre, peut-être Mac Farlane) avait déjà dit cela, que la concurrence mercato était accrue en L1, et que donc on s'orientait souvent vers le 2/3ème choix, essentiellement pour raisons économiques.

ok, j'avais pas cette stat merci

Il est en Lorraine

Il joue milieu axial, ça correspond.

https://theathletic.com/3526088/2022/08/25/transfers-data-market-toulouse/ La suite, je vous ai enlevé les photos pour moins charger le message Inside a football club: Transfers with data, the extreme version Dominic Fifield 22-27 minutes Toulouse are newly restored to the French top flight. A club that appeared to be sinking without a trace as French domestic football shut down prematurely, paralysed by the pandemic, in the spring of 2020 is enjoying a renaissance on and off the pitch under American ownership and the chairmanship of Damien Comolli. Philippe Montanier’s side, the youngest and least experienced team in the division, are still unbeaten after their first three matches and attacking life at the higher level with all the vim and vigour which saw them establish records for goalscoring while claiming Ligue 2 last term. The Athletic was invited to spend time behind the scenes at a club reborn, talking to those who have instigated the upturn in fortunes and others who have embraced it. The first of two articles, Rising from the Ashes, detailed the story of that revival following the purchase of “Le TeFeCe” by RedBird Capital Partners, a United States-based investment fund valued at over $6billion (£5.1bn), a little over two years ago. The second looks at the innovative techniques Toulouse have implemented, and the sporting partnerships they are forging, as they seek to maintain momentum and re-establish themselves at the top level. Theirs is a bold approach, on and off the pitch. “But we’ll have no inferiority complex attacking Ligue 1, and by ‘attack’ I mean on the pitch and psychologically,” says Comolli, a former sporting director at Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool. “We are as good as the others. You’ll not hear me, the head coach or the players — from the youth section to the senior and women’s teams — saying our target is merely ‘to stay up’. “For us, always, the sky is the limit.” Toulouse benefited from some time to prepare for promotion. Montanier and his players built up a head of steam as last season reached its halfway point and were in the division’s top two since the third round of games. Yet, even with the benefit of bonus breathing space, their planning in the new year had to take into account the fact they would be fighting at a disadvantage from the outset at the higher level. The distribution of television rights money in France leans heavily on a team’s performances over the preceding five years, a period in which they finished 18th, 16th and 20th in the top division before their two-season stint in the second tier. On top of that was the reality that, in March, the Ligue de Football Professionnel sold a 13 per cent stake worth €1.5billion (£1.3bn, $1.5bn) in the organisation’s new commercial company, which handles the selling of broadcast rights for Ligue 1, to the Luxembourg-based private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners. “All our competitors are getting €33million each (from that arrangement),” says Comolli. “We get €16.5million as a promoted team. So not only do we have hurdles to vault with less television monies, but we only get half the money from CVC Capital, too. We have a clear path as to where we should be after three years in this division, by which time we should have increased merchandising, marketing and broadcasting revenues and will be in a better place to compete financially with the other clubs, barring Paris Saint-Germain. “But, for now, we have to optimise what we do with transfer fees and wage bills. If we go after the same players as, say, Montpellier and Lorient, we won’t get those players. We have to do things differently. Our recruitment department spent hours, days, weeks working on a strategy to give us a competitive advantage and we follow that religiously.” Comolli envisages the club ranks around 16th in terms of its wage bill in a division from which four teams will be relegated this season. The edge they possess stems from the self-imposed discipline of their recruitment operation, and the sheer depth of data they have generated to shape transfer policy and in-game approach — an attempt to make life in a volatile environment as risk-free as is feasible. “We decide how we work and we won’t deviate from that just because an agent calls pushing a player to us, or if people think we should do things differently,” says Julien Demeaux, the club’s head of data who was one of the first appointments made by Toulouse following RedBird’s takeover in the summer of 2020. “There is a real discipline to our approach, and the ownership likes that. It all starts from the top.” Demeaux is sitting in the boardroom flanked by Brendan MacFarlane, the club’s head of recruitment, and the senior scout Julia Arpizou. The latter, a former player in the youth and reserve teams at Toulouse, Bordeaux and Lyon, where she shared a dressing room with Megan Rapinoe, is the only one of the trio to have played football at a high level. Demeaux’s background is actually in aeronautics having spent a decade with Airbus and ATR in Toulouse, before “a fresh start” with a move to San Diego in 2015 found him working as a high school football and baseball coach. “That’s where I first met people involved in high-performance areas, in baseball specifically, and began digging into how they use data to make decisions,” he says. “I started to educate myself in how we could translate that into football. I came back to France in 2018 and worked for a company developing the sporting side of data: in contact with football, rugby, basketball clubs. Then the pandemic set in. “While we were all stuck at home, Seattle Sounders organised a virtual conference in which they ran a ‘data in football’ contest. I was at home, with nothing else to do, so I entered. You had to create a 10-slide deck based on soccer data and present it. Some people looked at season-long trends — you could do anything — but I did a pre-game analysis of FC Barcelona. They announced the result three days later: ‘And the winner is… Julien Demeaux in Toulouse, France’. My Twitter lit up. I didn’t have a clue what was going on given it was the middle of the night over here. “But some people from RedBird were following the process. They were buying the club at the time, and you could almost hear them thinking: ‘Oh, he’s French. Wait, he lives in Toulouse!’. The following week, Damien contacted me and asked if I was available to talk.” There are three million rows of data in Demeaux’s database, covering up to 70 leagues around the world and separate divisions within those domestic setups. They compile reports for the top six divisions in England, and go down to the third tier in France and Germany. If anyone was inclined to watch every match they have collated, back-to-back and with no breaks, it would take them 30 years. “My responsibility is to interpret that data science, accumulated by our partners, in a way that benefits our club. If I run my algorithm over those three million rows then, very quickly, I can tell you if a player is good at doing this or that. “I can see way more than any human, and very quickly, through that data.” That partner is Zelus Analytics, a sports data business founded by Luke Bornn — formerly head of analytics at Roma — in which RedBird owns a 50 per cent stake. It has a team of data scientists and engineers, the majority dotted around the US, who work for Toulouse whether accumulating raw numbers that will help the club analyse their own team, their opposition or the transfer market. “All the data infrastructure and science that helps us be efficient is done by Zelus,” says Demeaux. “They work with me to create the algorithms and with a data provider to gather the numbers, create the models. “I will provide them with some feedback from the ground: what worked, what didn’t, where we need more insight. I need to be able to interpret the data and make the science work for us. When I’m here at the training ground and there is a question from Brendan, from Damien or from the coach, I have to be able to provide an answer, so I’m in constant dialogue with Zelus. Their brief is broader than just football but, on ‘soccer’, they have seven or eight full-timers, two of whom are based in Europe.” Those same analysts will supply data for AC Milan once RedBird completes its purchase of the Serie A champions on September 6, for all that the Italians will presumably be targeting players who are Champions League ready. Regardless, that database will continue to benefit the French. “We use data in a lot of different areas,” adds Comolli. “There is stuff we do internally in Toulouse, and stuff we ask Zelus to report back with. Julien then distributes that to the stakeholders in the club: the coaching staff, the academy, the fitness guys, the nutritionists, whoever. We used data when appointing Philippe Montanier as head coach in the summer of 2020, analysing what he had done with previous teams and determining whether he was a good fit for the style in which we want to play football here. “So, yes, as a club, we are extremely data-driven.” Over the summer, Demeaux analysed 600 player profiles and, from specifications drawn up by MacFarlane in conjunction with Comolli and Montanier, provided a more succinct list of suitable players to the recruitment department. “Data tells us ‘what’ the player does great or not,” says Demeaux. “Then the scouts give context to understand the ‘how’.” Even the chronology here is at odds with many other football clubs, who apply the data to specific targets only once they have been pinpointed as potential purchases. “There is obviously scope for one of our scouts, if they do spot a player they like, to check how he scores on the data but, in general, we start with the numbers,” says MacFarlane. “The scouts are there to look at what the data says, and they go out and file their reports armed with that knowledge. So many other clubs use the data to back up what the scouts already believe, which just leaves you open to confirmation bias. “The way we use what we have is more intelligent than the way lots of other clubs work. Even the scouting we undertake is not ‘old school’. We trust the data 100 per cent, but we just try to fill in any blind spots, things the data cannot pick up: a player’s tackling technique, perhaps; pace, sometimes, in terms of work off the ball. That’s something we used to worry about with centre-backs, but it’s a small issue in the process. We signed (Rasmus) Nicolaisen from the data, and he’s been outstanding.” MacFarlane had been Brentford’s lead scout in France before joining Toulouse in March 2021 but, again, his entry into the industry is atypical. He studied French and International Relations at St Andrews University in his native Scotland, a course which involved a year as an English language assistant in a French secondary school. The student might have been dispatched anywhere in France. “Actually, I could even have been sent to Martinique, New Caledonia, Tahiti,” he says. “But I ended up in Niort where, in all honesty, there was very little to do outside work in the school. “So, really to alleviate the boredom, I started following the local team in Ligue 2 and, as I got more into it, noted down players I was seeing who I felt might do a job for Celtic, the team I support, back home. Guys like Riyad Mahrez, N’Golo Kante, Diafra Sakho and Sofiane Boufal. It became an obsession and, when Niort were playing away, I’d watch whatever games were being broadcast. Almost inadvertently I built up a database of the best players in the division — something that might be quite useful to a club.” Celtic blanked his unsolicited report on Tours’ Andy Delort — a regular scorer since for Toulouse, Montpellier and Nice in Ligue 1 — so, unperturbed, MacFarlane set up his own blog and wrote about those quietly making a mark in the second tier. That attracted interest from clubs in England, Scotland and the Netherlands to the extent that, once he had concluded his studies in 2016, his part-time scouting was eventually formalised by the late Rob Rowan — he, like MacFarlane, grew up in Kirkcaldy — who brought him in at Brentford. The head of recruitment will go and meet prospective signings, armed with extensive background research, and their family members to determine whether a transfer is to be pursued. Toulouse do not have the financial margins to take unnecessary risks. “We found a player recently who looked amazing on the data but, when I did my research, there’d been drink driving and drug abuse and you realise you shouldn’t go near him,” says MacFarlane. “So we need to contextualise it. “We’re meeting players to make sure it’s the right cultural fit for the club. Football’s maybe the only sector of the world where you might spend £15million to sign someone and not interview them. That’s crazy. It’s so absurd. But we do that. We interview the player. We speak to the family.” Their successes, on a relatively tight budget, have been eye-catching. Rhys Healey, whose life became a series of loans at Cardiff City, was picked up after 18 relatively prolific months with MK Dons for around €500,000 and won the golden boot in Ligue 2 last term. He boasts 36 league goals in 58 appearances, for all that he will now be absent long-term after rupturing the cruciate knee ligament in his left knee in stoppage time at the end of Sunday’s 2-2 draw with Lorient. Branco van den Boomen had spent most of his career in the second tier of Dutch football before signing for €350,000 in the summer of 2020. Last season he scored 12 times and provided a league record 21 assists. “There’s one phrase Julien uses all the time which I love: ‘Let other clubs make the mistakes,’” says MacFarlane. “That’s a good mantra. People look at us and wonder why we’re looking at players in the Second Division in the Netherlands. So let them make the mistake of not looking at the leagues we’re looking at. The longer they do that, the better it is for us.” MacFarlane, Comolli and Demeaux meet formally once every fortnight to discuss strategy and progress. In the interim, the head of recruitment and his small team of scouts — he has two full-time scouts, including Arpizou, and one part-time — spend their weeks poring through games, sometimes in person but, more often than not, on-screen in one of the prefabs that flank the full-size academy training pitch. “We only watch two each per day, maximum,” says Arpizou, whose time as a left-back was curtailed by a serious ankle ligament injury. “You want to be fresh and focused when writing your reports, so Brendan has set that limit. “I will watch the first team, under-19s and women’s team training while I’m working at the club, tracking the evolution of the players we have brought in. But it is also important to look at the progress of the youngsters coming through so that we never block their pathway into the first team by making unnecessary signings.” Arpizou had initially embarked on a coaching career once her playing days were over, and was overseeing Toulouse’s under-15s in the women’s section when her input at the cultural questionnaire seminars run immediately after RedBird had bought the club impressed Comolli. “He said he wanted me in his scouting team instead,” she says. “I may be the only female scout in the men’s game in France. I certainly don’t know of any others. People are very open-minded here in the club, with men and women treated as equals. When I’m speaking with agents, it’s not been a problem. They see me as a scout, not as a gender.” That ability to unearth gems in unlikely places has given Montanier’s first-team squad, even with its reliance on graduates from the academy, a distinctly international flavour. Toulouse’s matchday squad for the game against Lorient was made up of players representing 14 different countries from Denmark to Morocco, Australia to Japan. The on-field language used at training is an odd blend of French and English, with franglais clearly understood by all. A head coach who once took a team of amateur players at Boulogne into the top division over five years takes it all in his stride. “People always say we’re the big boss of data, and that everything we do is down to numbers, but it is actually just another big decision-making aid,” says Montanier. “It helps us locate players and to know they will fit in with our style of play. But we need that other element, the human quality, to know he will integrate into our group. There’s a balance. “But it is a huge help. We have objectives as a team, and the data shows us whether we are on course to meet them. We receive detailed reports after every game in each player’s performance, and once a month we meet with the head of data to look at a bigger, longer-term analysis to help plan ahead. In-game, it can help us improve set pieces, throw-ins and to pinpoint weaknesses in our opponents.” In the season before the head coach’s arrival, Demeaux’s analysis ahead of a fixture against Paris FC suggested the visiting goalkeeper, Vincent Demarconnay, struggled to react to shots pinged low to his right. Stijn Spierings, another Dutchman, recalled the pre-match heads up and duly scored the game’s only goal with a shot in Demarconnay’s perceived blind spot midway through the second half. The head of data received his own round of applause in the dressing room post-match. But does he allow himself the luxury of feeling proud when the players he has helped pick excel? “That’s an emotional thing,” says Demeaux. “In this job, when it comes to making decisions, I’m trying to be as cold as possible. To stick to the process. The data tells me one thing. The scouts provide context. Whether a player should sign for us should never be an emotional question, so I try and keep that separation in there. “It’s tough. This is still a team sport. An individual player like Branco (van den Boomen) needs those around him to be performing if he is to show his best, too. So I take more pleasure in that — when the collective operates smoothly. The pride comes from that. The long-term vision, the discipline we have. Look, I was happy at the end of last season. So there probably was some pride. For all of us…” “I wasn’t here when Branco signed but, if I were Julien, I would be proud,” interrupts Arpizou. “No one knew this player. Even coaches in the Netherlands think they missed this player. It’s the same with Spierings.” “That’s one of the best feelings,” adds MacFarlane. “When you speak to people in those countries and they ask, ‘Wow, how did we miss that guy?’ But, for me, the thing that makes me proudest is when you see kids with the name of the player you identified on the back of their shirts. That is something else.” Those replica jerseys are increasingly visible on the streets of Toulouse these days where, only recently, locals might have sported the colours of Paris Saint-Germain, Marseille or, most likely of all, Stade Toulousain. This city has a reputation for being a rugby stronghold, and with good reason. Though Toulouse FC can point to three Ligue 2 titles and victory in the 1957 Coupe de France final — a 6-3 trouncing of Angers in a French fixture, uniquely, refereed by an Englishman — Stade Toulousain have been a dominant force in French and European club rugby union. They are five-time European Champions Cup winners and have won the domestic league, the Top 14, 21 times in their history. They won both of those competitions in 2021 while Toulouse FC were being beaten in the Ligue 2 play-offs. Montpellier may have claimed their crown in June, but Ugo Mola’s team remain a powerhouse of the sport, playing a fast, carefree style of rugby that is lapped up by their fanbase. They have long been Toulouse’s sporting success story. When one acknowledges that US Colomiers Rugby play in the French second tier, the Prod D2, and Toulouse Olympique, the local rugby league side, are currently competing for the first time in the Super League — admittedly, their debut season will culminate in relegation — then it might be easy to assume the football club would struggle to find a niche in the city. The reality is somewhat different. “There are those three rugby clubs, then the city’s volleyball and handball teams are in their top divisions, the women’s volleyball side are in the top division and now so are Toulouse FC,” says Comolli. “During COVID-19 we all came together and met local government over grants and, in that process, a very strong bond developed between the seven clubs that probably had not existed previously. “We liaise constantly, swapping ideas and spending time at each other’s clubs, learning from each other, whether in the marketing or media departments, data or sports science, and have created a dynamic of communication at chairman level and below. Our respective coaches meet every month at a different venue. One month they can talk about data. Last month they met around ‘return to play’ — how you bring a player back from injury as quickly as possible. They share ideas constantly. There is a spirit of collaboration.” The football club president is actually due to have lunch with his opposite number at Stade Toulousain, Didier Lacroix, once he has finished speaking to The Athletic. Lacroix has described their relationship as “very constructive”. “We do things intelligently rather than trying to get in each other’s way,” he said. His team play most of their games at their Stade Ernest-Wallon but the municipality, which owns the bigger Stadium de Toulouse, allows Stade Toulousain to play six fixtures at the ground on the Garonne each season. At their final game of the 2021-22 campaign, the rugby club paraded their counterparts from football, as Ligue 2 champions, on the pitch at half-time. Lacroix has also requested 30 tickets for the Virage Brice Taton, in among Toulouse’s ultras group ‘The Indians’, for the Ligue 1 fixture against PSG on 31 August. His players intend to wear t-shirts declaring “Stade Toulousain supports Toulouse FC”. “And remember they have the Leo Messi of the rugby world in their team, too,” says Comolli. “These are some of the best in the world.” He was probably referring to the France captain and scrum-half, Antoine Dupont, though it says much about Stade Toulousain’s strength in depth that he could arguably have also meant the young fly-half, Romain Ntamack. “We see a lot of synergies, and a lot of areas where we can work together,” adds the football club president. “We have sold tickets for each other’s matches and are even thinking about appointing staff to work at both clubs, in IT particularly. The balance is good. People say the city is rugby, probably, but the region is football. There are six times more football clubs than rugby clubs in the region, and six times more licensed players. So football is very much engrained here, too. “All sports can thrive in this city. There is the appetite. The positivity we have experienced here at Toulouse has touched us all, and made us more determined than ever to maintain it. We are at the table we deserve to be at. Where we were before, in Ligue 2, was wrong. Now it is about maintaining this momentum and establishing ourselves back in the top division. “The hard work never stops.”

Le mercato, c'est comme toujours un jeu de dupes. Il faut prendre un peu de recul. Même avec de l'argent et de la réputation, c'est pas facile. Alors imaginez pour nous 😁