Town chief will mix 'old school' scouting methods with the latest data analysis in his search for new players

Luton boss Nathan Jones will use a combination of the latest data plus some ‘old school’ methods of scouting when it comes to strengthening his Town squad after the appointment of Jay Socik as head of recruitment analysis last week.

The 30-year-old, a football data analyst who has been helping the Hatters on a freelance basis over the past year, was part of a reshaping to the club’s recruitment department, former Fulham and Charlton chief scout Phil Chapple on board as head of scouting operations, meaning Mick Harford will now devote all his energies to his role as assistant manager.

There has been plenty of impetus placed on the role of statistics and data when signing a player in the modern era, with Championship title challengers Brentford in particular adopting a ‘Moneyball’ approach, which was introduced by US baseball coach Billy Beane at the Oakland A’s.

He would use stats to find and bring in undervalued players, with the idea working so well it ended up as a Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt back in 2011.

Jones won’t be exclusively sticking to the data though, preferring to marry it up with getting out and watching whoever he wants to bring in himself.

The boss said: “It’s not just purely Moneyball. I’m not sure Brentford were just purely Moneyball, I think they would have eyes on people and watch them.

“I don’t mind the phrase ‘old school’ because I’m an old school manager like that.

“I like to get out to games, I like to watch players, I’d like to see for myself what we could be potentially getting.

“You see a lot more than just data with what they do on the pitch.

“You see their body language, how they interact, their movement off the ball and those are things that you think, ‘I can harness that.’

“Whether it’s old school or due diligence, we never sign someone just off data.

“You have to look at them and see how you could affect them, because if somebody has fantastic data but comes in and it’s not the character that we want then we don’t sign because we have a formula and a process here.

“We’ve got someone as assistant manager and first team coach who would like to get out to games and like to have eyes on players.

“Then that’s backed up by a fantastic eye in Phil Chapple and it will be flagged up and backed up with the data side of what we do.

“So we’re coming at it from all angles and, with all that, hopefully there won’t be too many mistakes, as we haven’t in the past.”

Jones and his Luton staff have already been using such data to back up their initial thoughts of a player, as speaking about the additions made in the summer, he continued: “We’ve tapped into that. Jordan Clark came up high on the data, but he also came up high on the fact that we’d seen him play for three or four years so, it’s a no-brainer for us.

“(Kiernan) Dewsbury-Hall came up on the data, but I’d watched him 10 times live, no-brainer.

“(Rhys) Norrington-Davies, was slightly less on the data, but I’d watched him and felt that we could improve him and we could get a load out of him, it proved the right one.

"In terms of Elijah (Adebayo), we’ve seen him, he has something different, he has real good data and we think he had something different.

“It’s been in use for the last four or five signings in terms of what we’ve done, but we also trust what we see with our eyes.

“Someone once told me, ‘always trust what you see with your own eyes,’ so that’s a good thing.

“When you sign a player, if you look at a winger and think, ‘he doesn’t get past 11k (kilometres),’ that doesn’t class as one for us.

“We want a winger that’s up, down and pressing with 11k, but he might be in a side that sits off and doesn’t have to go after a team.

“When he gets it he might be efficient that he links and just has little bursts and delivers real quality.

“Now, on the data side, you might say, ‘he doesn’t do 11k, so he doesn’t tick our box’, but you have to take into consideration what you see with your eyes and what team he plays for and so on.

“So that’s where data comes into it. It’s not pure, and it’s not exactly everything we do, it’s just a backup tool to the final decision-making process.

"It’s another string to that final decision-making process – and it’s a good one.”

With the very latest data at their fingertips then Jones is hoping it will give them a head-start on other sides when it comes to bolstering their squad, as they don’t have the financial clout that their rivals in the second tier possess.

He added: “We have to be different in what we do, and we have to get in early on signings because we are financially at a disadvantage.

“Sometimes that isn’t a disadvantage because we don’t shop in the same supermarket as a lot of the Championship sides, we can’t do that.

“But what we do is, when we do get those ones, we get hunger, we get people that are usually on their way up and that’s what we want to do.

“We’ve always liked hunger, athleticism and quality here and now we’ve got to go again because this is a new league and we don’t just want to survive in this league, we want to thrive in this league.

“To thrive and to push boundaries on our budget and what we do, takes a heck a lot of work, but that’s our next goal.

“We are hopefully establishing ourselves with another year in the Championship and then we want to go one better than just establishing ourselves.

“We want to push a few, we want to surprise a few, we want to shock a few.

"That comes with work, recruitment, confidence and all the things we do on a daily basis.”