Ruben Selles talks recruitment at Sheffield United

Ruben Selles spoke to The Star's Danny Hall abiut the recruitment process at Sheffield United amid talk of a data-deiven approach

Transcript

00:00I was interested in your statement, there's a lot of talk about data in recruitment and that sort

00:05of thing at the minute with the way the owners want to go about things. As the man in charge of

00:09the team, how much of an input do you have in that process? You know, identifying players,

00:15siding players, do you get a say in that? Do you get a big say? How does that sort of work?

00:19Yeah, I think so what we are working now, we create a recruitment process where we have

00:25obviously the data part of it with the analysis and the algorithms that we wanted, but we have the

00:32final decisions. I think you have to have the final decisions for the players that are coming,

00:37but that is only a part of the journey. I think people get, not confused, I would not say confused,

00:43but people get like, you have a model, now it's statistical, they will pick everything. No,

00:49it's not as, I guess you use ChatGPT or any other application like that. It's just to be more

00:55effective in what you do. So if you need to send a message or write a letter, you just tell it and

01:00then it just gives you a version and you can modify a little bit. We are talking about the same,

01:04so we are a technical staff and as a club now we just put together that vision that we want

01:10this kind of player for every position and we have the requirements in terms of the statistical

01:16that translate in football. So let's go and identify what are the best players for that model

01:22and then let's see if that is statistical, just match with the football vision, the video and the

01:30analysis and let's see which kind of person we are bringing and then let's make a decision.

01:34And that, and the order is not exactly like that because we will have some players that we can

01:39identify by coming from our side and then we will check that because the personality is exactly the

01:45personality that we want to bring and we then identify if with the data we can support the action.

01:50And it's not going to be check, check, check, go with the three, then it's done. It's never going

01:55to be like that. It's not going to be never a hundred percent, but it's going to be some kind of

01:59levels and some given goals that you need to manage on that. So it's a tool that will support us,

02:04not only the recruitment actually in the controlling the fatigue, in the terms of controlling the load

02:09of trainings. So those elements are there to give us those marginal gains. And if we do

02:17use that in the proper way, we can get our team in a better position with more availability for the

02:23players that will miss with more points, with better finishing situations. We believe in that.

02:29But football is football. We should never forget that.