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(Pinkun)

Norwich City majority shareholder Mark Attanasio is set to buy football analytics company src ftbl as the club continue to ramp up their commitment to data.

As first reported by Training Ground Guru, the move will see the company become the Canaries in-house analytics arm that will help with aspects like recruitment, performance analysis and transfer strategy.

The company have been external advisors to City for three years since Ben Knapper became sporting director. Attanasio's group Norfolk Holdings are working to finalise a deal with the US-based business.

src ftbl were founded in 2022 by former Arsenal vice president of analytics and software development Sarah Rudd and her husband Ravi Ramineni, who now works for LA Galaxy as director of quantitive analysis.

Rudd worked with Knapper during his spell as lead analyst and then loans manager at Arsenal, before reuniting at City with src ftbl offering external advice utilising data.

src ftbl co-founder and chief operating officer Cole Grossman, who played as a professional footballer for Real Salt Lake, Columbus Crew and Norwegian side Stabæk, has been spotted alongside Knapper and other City officials at recent matches - most recently their 1-1 draw with Sheffield Wednesday.

If completed, this will be only the second deal of its kind in English football after Arsenal Chicago-based StatDNA in December 2012 in a deal that was reported to be worth more than £2m.

That saw Rudd become employed by the Gunners. She praised Knapper's ability in data during a podcast appearance.

“Ben was there from day one of StatDNA,” she told the Training Ground Guru podcast.

“He is incredibly well-versed in using data to analyse the game and is now using it in a recruitment context, so I think that was a clever shift in terms of the personnel doing the scouting. He focuses on loans, but I think he’s also involved in recruitment, particularly within the UK.”

City's data journey is one instigated by Attanasio, who has enjoyed immense success in baseball, tapping into stats to help the Milwaukee Brewers punch significantly above their weight against teams with better resources.

"I'm mindful that if I look at our analytics programme in Milwaukee, it really started in earnest in 2014. So we're about 10 or 12 years in. This is not equivalent - I'd say that we were at that point about a year ago, and we're at the equivalent of 2018 now.

"We're starting to get up the curve, but one of the challenges is that as you get more steeped in it and hire more people, in the beginning you don't know what you don't know," he told the Pink Un podcast in July.

"We have many more professionals working on it now than we did last year, but at Milwaukee we've got over 40.

"If you go to guys on the pitch with a notebook full of stuff, that's very, very hard to translate. There's also a lot more motion here than baseball. There it's the most point-to-point measurement of all the sports, and here it's a little more complicated than that.

"I'd say that if it's a 90-minute match, we're in minute 20, maybe more than that."

Posted By: DrDublin, Nov 13, 10:25:20