AZ Alkmaar: The cheese wheels are rolling

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https://www.ad.nl/voetbal/az-talent...zich-voor-kwartfinales-youth-league~a3bdf1ee/
video in link, if it works

AZ talents win at Real Madrid and qualify for quarter-finals Youth League

with video AZ under 19 has qualified for the quarter-finals of the UEFA Youth League. The team of coach Michael van Zijtveld won Wednesday afternoon with 0-2 against Real Madrid in the Estadio Alfredo Di Stéfano at the training complex in Valdebebas in the Spanish capital.
AZ took the lead after 29 minutes through 18-year-old Wassim Bouziane, who scored from the rebound. In the 87th minute, the 19-year-old Anthony Smits made the redeeming 0-2 for the talents from Alkmaar. Kiyani Zeggen was the absolute star with quite a few saves. The 18-year-old keeper even stopped a penalty five minutes before halftime.
The chances ratio in Madrid were 33-5 in favor of Real Madrid, 9-3 when it's about shots on goal. AZ proved to be deadly effective against the team of coach Álvaro Arbeloa, who became world champion with Spain in 2010. AZ will face Manchester City in the quarter-finals. That match will be played at the AFAS Training Complex in Wijdewormer at the beginning of April. AZ won the Youth League in the 2022/2023 season, after a 5-0 win over Hajduk Split in the final. Then AZ won in the quarter-finals with 4-0 against Real Madrid, after a round earlier FC Barcelona had already been defeated 0-3. Last year, AZ lost in the eighth finals on penalties at home to FC Porto.

 

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AZ knows that Tottenham is fighting for last chance: 'They have resilience, they have shown that'
AZ counts on Thursday in the eighth finals of the Europa League on an eager and fierce Tottenham Hotspur. The Londoners are thirteenth in the Premier League and have already been eliminated in the FA Cup and League Cup. The Europa League should still save the season of Tottenham and coach Ange Postecoglou.

 

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AZ beats Manchester City in Youth League quarter-finals thanks to a thunder strike in the last second

AZ's highest youth team has impressed again in the Youth League, this time by beating Manchester City.
AZ Under 19 has reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Youth League. At the training complex in Wijdewormer, the talents of Manchester City were defeated 1-0 thanks to a late goal by Deacon van der Klaauw. In the semi-final battle, FC Barcelona is the opponent.

AZ had not shot on goal the entire match, when the ball was pushed forward in the fourth minute of the (three minutes) injury time. Manchester City had dominated the match at the youth complex, but did not score. The supporters were already counting on a penalty shootout, but the last long ball of the game landed at the feet of Deacon van der Klaauw. He created space on his right and shot the ball hard into the top corner. "I shot it in nicely", the matchwinner said proudly afterwards at Ziggo Sport. "I stayed calm after that, but then I saw everyone coming towards me. A little later I couldn't breathe." Van der Klaauw was overwhelmed by his teammates, who knew that they can play against Barcelona at the end of April. But the man of the match was goalkeeper Kiyani Zeggen. He stopped a penalty kick in the 51st minute and kept his team going impressively throughout the match.

 

The other semi-final will be at the end of April between Red Bull Salzburg and Trabzonspor.
The Turkish club won Tuesday evening in front of 40,368 spectators with 1-0 against Inter.
With that, the attendance record in the Youth League was pulverized. That stemmed from the 2017/2018 season, when FK Krasnodar – Real Madrid attracted 32,510 supporters to the stadium.
The main force of Trabzonspor, which is now tenth in the Süper Lig, usually attracts about 12,000 supporters for home games.

Wow, wow. That youth team pulled in 3 times the average number of fans of their first team!!

 

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AZ is early and brings in first summer acquisition

During the exciting match in Enschede last Wednesday, there was an important new spectator in the stands. Mateo Chávez, who has now signed for AZ, was spotted by attentive viewers. Earlier, a photo appeared in which Chávez can be seen after his arrival in the Netherlands. Who is Mateo Chávez? Chávez is a 21-year-old Mexican left back, who plays for Guadalajara, also known as Chivas, at the highest level in Mexico. Chávez is also a youth international for the Under 23 of the North American country. ESPN reported in April that AZ wanted to bring in the left back and would pay around two million euros. De Telegraaf now reports that the North Holland club will pay between two and two and a half million euros for the Mexican.

 

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https://thesetpieces.com/interviews/moving-analytics-from-moneyball-into-football/


“It was put to me recently that Moneyball has become a bit of an albatross for analytics.
I guess there are two sides to it. Moneyball was a game changer in highlighting the use of data analytics in sport and the possible competitive advantages. The downside of it was that people often forget the context of baseball and underestimate the difficulties of taking a baseball story and moving that into a completely different sport.”

“It’s what I’d call moving from striking and fielding sports
– like baseball and cricket, which are reasonably straightforward in terms of analysis – into the invasion-territorial sports, where at the core there’s the tactical coordination of a group of players. When you look at cricket and baseball, the essence of it is a one-to-one contest. Once you move into sports like football and rugby union it becomes much more difficult. That’s the exciting challenge because there is so much more going on that you have to take into account.

I got introduced to the people at AZ through Billy Beane.
He recommended me to Robert Eenhoorn, the general manager, when Robert took over in 2014. Robert went to college in the States, excelled in baseball, made it into MLB, but never quite nailed down a starting position. He then went back to Holland and ran their national baseball operation very successfully, winning a world championship. AZ invited him to become their general manager, effectively in charge of the sporting operation and the football side of things. He has a very similar outlook to Billy: not just relying on gut instinct but planning your decision making so you do your due diligence.

Billy and I have been involved for the last couple of years.
My responsibility has been working on developing the use of the data to go alongside traditional video analysis. I work alongside the performance analyst at AZ. I analyse the Opta data (from matches) and send off reports looking at the performance of the team as a whole and individual players. I point out what the key strengths of the performance were and, at least in terms of the numbers, what the weaknesses were, to stimulate debate in the coaches’ meeting when they review the game.

The attraction to analytics is what I would call a ‘David strategy’.
It’s how an organisation that’s resource-constrained tries to compete with much richer rivals. The teams that are open to a more analytical approach tend to be teams that have to operate within budget constraints. You saw that in Oakland, you see it in leagues that are operating in salary caps. AZ, in budget terms, are quite restricted compared to the likes of PSV, Ajax and Feyenoord.

It’s about having to come up with an alternative.
You either give up and just accept your place in the world or you use what resource you do have better. That’s essentially what Moneyball is, using all the evidence and the data to try and compensate for that resource gap and not just relying on gut feeling. It’s forcing people to justify their decisions and their recommendations. It’s a discipline. The role of data analysts is to try and ensure that we make better informed decisions and use what’s available. People saw the film as a story about player recruitment. But I see the use of analytics as much broader than that, as using data to support any coaching decision.

People forget that Moneyball the film, although based on a true story, was not an authentic representation of the truth.
For dramatic purposes it highlights conflict between the traditional approach of looking at players and evaluating them intuitively, versus the analytical approach. I always differentiate between the Oakland A’s run by Billy Beane and the Hollywood A’s run by Brad Pitt. There’s no way Oakland would have been as successful as they have if they had operated in the way that the film portrays. They would have been so dysfunctional.

I can see elements in the film – the comment where Billy doesn’t watch games, he goes off to the weights room – that are true.
The first time I ever went to Oakland, I sat in Billy’s seat to watch the game and he sent a security guard at the bottom of the 8th to get me. I met up with him as he finished in the weights room. Billy doesn’t want to watch the video and analyse it wrapped up in the emotion of the game. He keeps in touch with the scores, but he’ll analyse the video knowing only the result, and that takes the emotion out of it.

It’s about recognising the biases regarding decision making.
If you ask a coach to review a game from memory, they will only remember key points. A player might have had 89 minutes of great performance but if they make one mistake, that will cover the whole assessment of their performance. Coaches are normally very good at remembering things that happen right at the start of the game and approaching half time.

The problem with football is that analytics has made a lot more headway in player recruitment, and less so in the day to day coaching.
It only works effectively if everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet. What I’ve found in a number of football clubs is that you get a separation of powers. The analytics is done in the player recruitment and scouting, but if you don’t have the buy-in from the coaches then inevitably you get tensions. It usually goes hand in hand with the recruitment being controlled by a technical director and not the manager/head coach. Where it works well is when the head coach and technical director see the world in the same way, so the types of players that are being analysed are players they both agree on.

Where you get a dysfunctional outcome is when there is very little input from the head coach in player recruitment.
Again, it’s partly the problem of taking a baseball story and putting it into football because in baseball the field coach is trying to get the best out of a group of players individually. In the invasion-territorial sports, there has to be a tactical plan and the players have to be recruited into that tactical plan. As I’ve seen at some clubs, if you’ve got a technical director who’s recruiting on one basis, but a head coach who’s operating on a different one, that’s when it just doesn’t work and it falls apart.

Of course the manager always feels in a weak position because he knows it’s his head on the line if the team doesn’t function.
The media often dramatise it in much the same way as the conflicts were dramatised in Moneyball. They build up the story and exacerbate the conflict, but often there’s an element of truth that there’s some disagreement. You’ve got very different views on it. It works a lot better on the continent than it does at times here. Certainly at AZ there’s absolutely no issue. The football operation has three departments: there’s an academy, a scouting department and a first team. The technical director’s role is to ensure the three departments work together.

I still don’t hear of too many clubs that are using analytics to support the coaching staff.
I think most of it is still in the academy and scouting departments. Some clubs have invested quite a lot in analytics and some academies have been very progressive. The young coaches coming through are far more adept in the use of computers and data. And the players now are the ‘Prozone generation’, so when they go into coaching they’ll have spent their entire playing career having their data tracked and analysed. Football’s probably a lot further down the line than is often given credit for, but there’s still scope for development.