It was once a tiny room on the first floor of Manchester City's Carrington training complex, not much bigger than a broom cupboard, where successive managers from Kevin Keegan to Stuart Pearce and Sven-Goran Eriksson would field questions at close range from the press. Today, partition walls have been removed to house a team of full-time analysts who study every touch, turn and sprint made from the Premier League champions down to the club's Under-9s. The world of data analysis has developed rapidly within football in recent years but not, City believe, beyond the guarded confines of its clubs. That is about to change.
On Friday, City will make available through its website the data on every player in every team from every game in the Premier League last season. That may not enrapture the supporter fixated on Robin van Persie's next career move but to the growing number of researchers, sports scientists and bloggers seeking new ways to measure performance and value a player, it is potentially ground-breaking.
Until now, data that costs all Premier League clubs a small fortune each season has not been widely available or at least widely accessible to the public. Baseball may have been revolutionised by Bill James's sabermetric findings from the late 1970s onwards, leading to Michael Lewis's book Moneyball and now a film starring Brad Pitt, basketball coaches make tactical decisions based on live data during a game, but developments in football have largely remained in-house.
As Gavin Fleig, the head of performance analysis at City, explains: "Bill James kick-started the analytics revolution in baseball. That made a real difference and has become integrated in that sport. Somewhere in the world there is football's Bill James, who has all the skills and wants to use them but hasn't got the data. We want to help find that Bill James, not necessarily for Manchester City but for the benefit of analytics in football. I don't want to be at another analytics conference in five years' time talking to people who would love to analyse the data but cannot develop their own concepts because all the data is not publicly available."
Fleig's full-time department alone consists of four analysts attached to City's first team and six analysts working at every level of the club from Under-21 to Under-9 level. As he conducts a tour of the office, one analyst is dissecting an Under-18s game against Chelsea. Ensuring the next generation is following the football strategy of the first team is paramount, although the data is not simply to educate young players on the way up. Far from it.
Two years ago Vincent Kompany instigated a weekly review of City's defensive performances with the analysis team. Every defender in Roberto Mancini's match-day squad now spends 15 minutes before a game assessing the unit's previous display, on topics such as transitions in play when City have lost the ball, their relationship with the midfield, defending crosses and recovering back into shape. "I would argue that having the best defensive record over the past two years is partly down to the reflection process the defenders have on a weekly basis win, lose or draw," says Fleig. "They have a constant guide as to how they are doing."
Work stations at Carrington allow every player to analyse a breakdown of their performance 24 hours after a game. Each has a specific development area to study too, if they wish. Gareth Barry, for example, can see how he protected his back four, his goal attempts and movement to receive the ball. A full-back such as Micah Richards can review one-on-one tussles, pass selection, positioning, recovery runs, supporting attacks, stopping crosses and running with the ball. There is also a personal highlights package they can play in the gym, a good way to boost confidence on the way back from injury.
Friday's data launch is for a global community, however. Fleig has worked closely with Opta, one of the first sports data organisations to embrace analytics in football and which has given City permission to make the database available, in an attempt to support the analytical community.
He explains: "The responsibility for developing analytics has always tended to fall on the clubs and that hasn't really changed, even as the community of statisticians, bloggers and students who are focusing on performances and analytics has grown dramatically. Bill James didn't work for a club. He was a statistician with a normal job outside of the sport but he was able to get hold of the data because it was made publicly available by the broadcasters and the league itself. There is a data culture in America. There isn't a data culture in the UK, although we are getting there.
"The whole reason for putting this data out there is to open the doors. The data has value, previously it has been kept in-house and behind guarded doors, but there is a recognition now that clubs need to help this space develop. There are a lot of people out there blogging and doing their own research and they can do a lot more with this data. I hope it will have a big impact on those who want to do research. It might just be the armchair enthusiast. If the worst it does is show a few people that there are different ways of looking at a player's performance, then great. If it helps universities and gets the blogging world talking and coming up with fantastic ways of modelling performance, that is what we want. We want to engage with them."
The data will be available from Friday by logging in to mcfc.co.uk/mcfcanalytics. For further information follow MCFCGavinFleig on Twitter