Dale Chief Operating Officer George Delves was a recent guest on the In-Play Sports Podcast, where he took the opportunity to explain a little more about the Club’s relationship with MRKT Insights.
The relationship was first made public back in March, with a focus on player recruitment, squad modelling, and Academy pathways being stated at the time.
The full podcast will be available via In Play Sports’ channels in the coming weeks. Below, we’ve brought you an exclusive write up of Delves’ explanation of MRKT and their role with the Club.
“They [MRKT] do a lot of work for us in the first and second phase of our recruitment process. They give us a really good sounding board to analyse potential signings in different ways,” Dale’s Chief Operating Officer began.
“Various stakeholders around clubs think that, from a recruitment point of view, its either just on the manager, or you're relying on a network of scouts who are doing the miles across the motorways to watch reserve team games and under-21 games here, there, and everywhere.
“And whilst there's still a place for that, most [clubs] have moved away from that a little bit – not necessarily entirely – but most are trying to find different ways of doing things and trying to be much more process driven, moving away from one person’s subjective opinion as much as possible.
“So, the way that works for us, is that we meet periodically as a technical staff, with representation from the Board of Directors, and also representation from MRKT Insights, to do the real big picture stuff. I.e., positional profiling, what Jimmy McNulty's style of play looks like, succession planning from an Academy point of view, what do our depth charts look like in certain areas, what does our budget look like, etc.
“And then, rather than us having to rely on scrolling through contact books, or who do I know at this club and that kind of stuff, we effectively go to MRKT Insights, we know precisely what we are looking at for a right back or a left winger in that first phase of things, we'd like to create a list of your best 20 options from a data point of view right now.
“They can also say, here are players that we'd like to continue monitoring and might be good to go for 24/25. Here's some players that aren't attainable right now, but if we transition back into the EFL in future, might become attainable.”
Elaborating on the recruitment process, Delves continued: “If you counted out the phases of what we talked about there from positional profiling to somebody putting pen to paper, it's six phases for us.
“MRKT Insight's involvement is in phases one and two. Everything in terms of final player selection, negotiations, dealing with agents, and in terms of actually selling the club to the player, and direct contact with the player, direct contact with the club, direct contact with the agent, is the role of us.
“So I think there can be a little bit of natural suspicion when you announce something like that. Lots of clubs have arrangements in place. MKRT Insights; we're probably one of about ten of their clients. I think people think that perhaps that's not a sensible approach for a club at our level.
“But arrangements of that nature are becoming more and more common place at our level, it's just we've talked about it a little bit more. For example, Grimsby Town are with Twenty First Club, Oldham Athletic are with Stats Bomb. They'll be provided with very similar services to us.”
The podcast will be released on In-Play Sports channels soon.
