Interview with Daniele Bianchi, CEO of Footurelab, a society formed by football professionals, in the service of football operators.
If it is true that datas represent the new oil, they are even more useful in the sports field, where technical and technological evolution make it increasingly necessary to rely on “numbers”.
Footurelab is a young and dynamic company that firmly believes in the strength of data and of their combination, the only way to optimize resources and push to the maximum the potential of the sector in which they are used. The research area of Footurelab is sport and in particular football, a sport that over time has evolved, transformed, becoming increasingly fast and complex to analyze.
The team of Footurelab is composed of experts in the fieldand and computer professionists, a mix that gave rise to a complete and structured analytical project.
What you can do with Footurelab
The services offered by Footurelab are many and give support to the technical staff of the football teams from different points of view. Let’s see in detail:
Match Report
Match analysis through over 400 variables and 1600 types of events cataloged accurately and qualitatively thanks to a method of detection, production and processing certified.
Scouting
Analysis and study of individual players to help the technical staff to have a complete overview of technical and tactical characteristics. The service is customizable in accordance with the most relevant parameters and includes a video archive with technical gestures made in the field
Coach Assistant
Detection by qualified technicians of technical-tactical data in game situations. The data collected are processed by monitoring the events of the individual and the tactics of the team.
Video Archive
The data that are recorded are always accompanied by video clips available to the technical staff
Player Support
Study of data to support the professional athlete in career decisions . The service includes the monitoring of performance during the competition , market consulty, identification of the best team suitable for the athlete’s playing style
Media Contents
Exclusive reports and content for media partners
On loan player monitoring
Monitoring and analysis of players on loan to ascertain the growth in the team to which they have lent him/her.
Goalkeeper Area
Report and analysis by technicians specialized in the preparation and evaluation of technical gestures of goalkeepers
Are you curious to know more about this young and innovative reality? Read the interview with Daniele Bianchi, CEO of Footurelab.
Hello Daniele, nice to meet you and thank you for your time. Footurelab, how can you tell us about this beautiful reality?
Thank you for your interest. Footure Lab is a company that works in the area of sports analytics, through the production and analysis of data and over the years is also specializing in the tech and digital sector. The key issues of our mission are: customization (of products and services) and data literacy, that is the direct consulting in reading and interpreting of data with our customers, which we believe provides a great competitive advantage. We strongly believe in an approach related to the specific skills of our team (which all have a background as an employee in football) combined with technology and digitization.
How and when was the idea of creating this project born?
Footure Lab was born from the meeting beetween football professionals (players, coaches, observers and directors in the technical department) together with an important reality, Abinsula, a company in great expansion that works in the field of Embedded, Digital, Iot and cybersecurity. From the union of the know-how of the sports sector and that of the engineering department of Abinsula was born Footure Lab.
We had the good fortune to create a team of people hungry for knowledge who believed in this project from the beginning: our steps forward are the result of a really important in-house training and alignment work and I am particularly proud of that. This mentality has given us the strength to face the difficulties that a company normally faces in its journey. We are also lucky enough to combine work with a huge passion for what we do. In 2019 we started working for the staff of Mister Cannavaro, who at the time led the Guangzhou Evergrande in the Chinese Championship: this kind of experiences we also gave the opportunity to immediately test our level and study our target with a learning by doing process. Others followed, with advice for teams and operators in Serie A and in several countries in Europe.
What is the service on which you bet more or simply the most requested?
Over the years, undoubtedly, the scouting area has been the most solicited. In our company we have a software, Footure Compass, which contains data from the last six years of over 210 championships and allows and allowed us to work on predictive analytics.
We are also completing an internal study, based on the historical described above, about the characteristics of the main European competitions, with the aim of analyzing and understanding the styles and intensity of the various championships to refine our offers by relying on the result. Under this light the “Player Research” (the search for the ideal profile) was the request that stimulated and engaged us: it is abouttrying to search for the most functional player profile for the technical and economic demands of the club and starts from the analysis of the customer’s context and its medium-term objectives.
In this sense, our customers have access to a completely customized set of information, in an extremely short time and that decreases the investment risk. Of course, the club then makes the final evaluations with its specific figures, but this process globalizes and at the same time reduces the work.
Who does Footurelab target?
Our activity is aimed at companies that operate in the world of football, from clubs and brokerage and consulting companies to individual operators in the sector and the media. Specifically, we have created transversal services for all the figures in the sector, from the technical staff (with an area dedicated to goalkeepers), to the sports management sector, through data-driven consulting linked to the monitoring of their players and the search for new profiles carefully selected depending on the technical and economic parameters of the clubs.
We also work with intermediary agencies for the digitisation process, to support them for the management of their portfolio and the search for new opportunities. Last, only in chronological order of activity, a weekly support for media content, with the aim of enriching the content through data.
How do you think Footurelab can help football technical staff improve their teams?
Our job is not to replace or to burden the work of technical staff. Our job is to provide functional solutions to the context. With the staff we work to give a vision related to the data relating to the analysis of the performance, both individual and collective, of their team, to provide the staff with an objective vision of the work and path that our client is doing.
In the same way we study the opponents and store all the information about them. Usually the first 10 days of the working relationship we work to structure a working methodology as close as possible to that of the staff: we clearly start from a base built over the years and we model it in this span of time.
We are interactive tools and as such we are quiet and operational, always available for requests. That’s why it is important for us that the Footure Lab team is formed by professionals who know the football and sports industry: to understand the language of the unspoken, the times of communication with the staff and the level of professionalism required. They are essential components to work with a technical staff.
How much more can technology be useful in world football?
In recent years the market has focused heavily on the production of data in a massive way, reaching for the sector really remarkable levels: this is a market that will provide more and more solutions, that will also cover the monitoring of the athlete outside the training range and that will integrate these data with the aim of increas the customization on customers proposal. I firmly believe that the area of data analysis is the one with the most growth margins. As reported by Real Madrid’s Digital Business Manager, Oscar Ugaz, “you have to invest in people who understand business, take all that data and extract insights from it”.
And we will also focus on the “democratization” of this technology for a more widespread use and not only for a niche market. But we’re just at the beginning, it’s a sector that moves at the speed of light.
Curiosity: Project that satisfied you the most?
There are mainly two: the work with the staff of Guangzhou FC led by Mister Fabio Cannavaro and the one with the consulting company Branchini Associati, for over thirty years a symbol of a football made of moral values. For both, in addition to the Footure Lab services, we are continuing the process of digitization within their working structure, with Footure Desk, a product” homemade” and that has margins of growth really important.
For the technical staff, Footure Desk Coach Assistant, a virtual area where the various technical areas interact, into are inserted the data regarding the Training that are related to the Medical Area and the Data analysis, a branch of the Performance Analysis; This, which in this case is covered by our company, deals with that we have already described above about our activity. For Branchini Associati, we have modeled the Footure Desk Scouting to create a product related to the daily activities of the consulting agency in the football sector: from the management of its players, to relations with clubs and other companies, to the Scouting area up to the monitoring of internal activities, to optimize workflows with business partners.
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