An English soccer club calls them the Whizzkids, and that suits them just fine. University of Twente students Giels Brouwer (Business Administration), Anatoliy Babic (Applied mathematics) and Remco van der Veen (Business Information Technology), with their various backgrounds, are the co-founders of SciSports. Since September 2012 they have been selling optimum selections to football clubs based on scouting and mathematical modelling. End of January sees the closing date for transfers for Dutch clubs. And it is this week that they were chosen to be among the USA’s Kairos 50, the most promising startups in the world. “The transfer window for Dutch clubs closes at midnight on 31 January. So clubs have only two more days to recruit players, and it’s very hectic at the moment”, says co-founder Giels Brouwer. “We’ve not had our company SciSports (Science and Sports) very long yet, but we’ve already advised various pro clubs on their selections. We’ve been talking to FC Twente, NEC, Huddersfield Town and Queens Park Rangers (QPR), for instance.”
Recruit players or shed them?
Brouwer explains: “There are daily reports in the media these days that PSV Eindhoven wants to recruit Adam Maher from AZ Alkmaar. Using our scouting models (SciSearch and SciSoccer) we can say why Maher would not make the biggest contribution to the current selection. That’s not to say, though, that Maher isn’t the best player on their shadow list. PSV already has enough players in his position, and if they want to buy someone they would do better to focus on a different position. We can use our models to produce a report recommending how PSV can best improve. To give another example, we can show why it was a good move on FC Twente’s part to sell Leroy Fer to the English club Everton if they were able to buy Djuricic and Claudemir for the same price (or less).”
Algorithm to select the most suitable player
“In other words, we’re creating a ‘Sustainable Moneyball’. Moneyball (a movie featuring Brad Pitt) changed the baseball world with its use of statistics, and we’re changing the soccer world by using scientific models that are club-specific and therefore sustainable. We help scouts, technical directors and coaches to select the best players by filtering out noise from the statistics and providing them with easily digestible reports on players that suit their clubs. The algorithm that selects the best player has been adapted from a NASA algorithm to find the best team of astronauts (and the best investments) rather than the team that merely has the best astronauts. As Louis van Gaal once said, “I don’t want the eleven best players, I want the best eleven.”
Talking to Bill Clinton and Bill Gates
The three young men received word from the USA this week: their startup has been selected as one of the Kairos 50. That suddenly makes them one of the fifty most innovative student companies in the world. “This competition has a lot of prestige internationally, for one thing because all the top universities (including Harvard, Oxford and MIT) have their own Kairos departments and many world leaders such as Bill Clinton and Bill Gates are associated with the organization.” They are set to fly off to New York in February to meet the other top spin-off companies. “We shall be presenting our company on Wall Street, where we shall have the opportunity to spar with 150 world leaders, among other things.”
Press information
University of Twente, Press Relations Department: Janneke van den Elshout 06-13 95 00 17 or Martine van Hillegersberg, 06-20 43 26 74.
See links for more information on Kairos 50 and SciSports.
|
