Ted van Leeuwen will retire as technical director of NEC at the end of October. Here is what the technician had to tell about the various aspects of scouting.
Ted van Leeuwen said, “Modern football is all about data. An aspect of football that Van Leeuwen has never been a big fan of. “I don’t abhor data, but it’s just a tool for me.”
“I was in Italy just after corona. At clubs that are good at scouting. At Atalanta Bergamo, for example, where they have a whole team with Marten de Roons and it all functions excellently. What is their secret now? They are actually from physical scouting and believe that the entire trend with data will not last very long.”
“Look at all the Americans buying clubs now. They firmly believe in data, but one club of theirs is even worse than the other. AS Nancy has been relegated, Barnsley, Esbjerg. And to say that FC Den Bosch is doing much better?”
The account of the football director could be regarded as a plea for the naked eye.
“The question is: what do those data say? Then you sometimes hear that a player has only run nine kilometers in a match. But maybe that was because his team was attacking a lot or had to defend more. We are inundated with all kinds of conclusions from data, but it leads to a wrong view of football.”
“When De Bruyne gives a brilliant pass from his own half, Foden puts the ball back and Mahrez scores, then that pass by De Bruyne can often not be found in the data, while that was the great work, the genius,” goes the former td of Vitesse onward. “A player may have walked thirteen kilometers, but were they also smart meters? Cutting a passing line is also not recognized by a computer.”
According to Ted van Leeuwen, data never tells the whole story
“The Italians also have all those systems, but in the meantime it is mainly real scouts who do the work. Now take an assumption of the ball. Does a player just take it or do it in a direction where no one is? Or does he always turn backwards, which means that you should not take such a player if you want to play forward? Data doesn’t tell you those kinds of things.”
