European Football Championship 2008: Analyze this...

PRLog (Press Release) – May 29, 2008 – What can you assess from the information generated by the Castrol Performance Index?

First of all, you have the distance covered by every player, so you can see straight away whether it was a game of high intensity, and which players have outstanding capacity and stamina. And you can see what kind of position they take up on the pitch.

So it’s not just distance and speed: it will provide quite intricate levels of analysis?

Yes, you can get technical information as well. That also means how many balls every player won, how many passes every player made. Did he pass the ball forwards, backwards, sideways? Did he make short passes, long passes, mid-range? Did he pass the ball accurately in the final third? You don’t need to be a football specialist to know who is a good player: this will tell you.

So can having this information help make you a better manager?

A better manager, yes – but it’s not only this that makes a good manager. The Castrol Index is concrete information: it’s not subjective. You must also see if a player can fit in your team. It’s about whether he has the qualities you want to add to your team, and that’s only one aspect. We know that in certain games the level required is very high: if a player can’t reach it, he will leave a deficit somewhere in your team – and in the big games you’re always punished on your weak points. That can be in the first minute or the 90th… you can be punished at any moment.

So with these statistics to reinforce my gut instinct, I could use this to help me pick a great, championship-winning team?

You could. But it’s not only useful in an evaluation of the performance of the players, it’s for prevention of injuries as well; when I see that a player consistently drops out when he has played many games, I know to give him a rest before he gets injured.

You were instrumental in bringing out one of the earliest versions of player analysis…

I worked on one [system] in France with a friend of mine. He created a process to identify the good performances out of a team – though some are more obvious than others.

What is it that draws you to measurements and statistics?

I like football and I like to know more. We try to get it as right as possible, and these concrete measurements can help improve your judgement.

For more news on the European Football Championship 2008 please visit http://www.castrolindex.com