Zahavi nodded, "Believe me, Daniel came here with sincerity!"

"When you come to the team, I not only hope to play to your strengths, but I also hope to help you grow! You have the potential to become a top three player in the world, but you also need the right guidance! I must have

You also know that I have only coached Crystal Palace for more than half a season, but I have a reputation and achievements in using young players!" Wen Sheng also boasted about himself.

"When you come to the team, you can play multiple positions and roles. I don't want you to be a single passer, but I hope you can grow with the team and one day become the brains of the team."

Wen Sheng began to tell De Bruyne and everyone present how he uses De Bruyne.

He talked for a long time, and De Bruyne listened very carefully. He is becoming more and more moved now.

For nearly two hours, Wen Sheng was talking.

De Bruyne gradually stopped being shy and began to ask his own questions. This kid has his own understanding of football and his own ideas.

After spending a lot of words, Wen Sheng finally satisfied De Bruyne and the others. De Bruyne himself gave Wen Sheng a very clear reply, saying that he was willing to go to the Crystal Palace and play under Wen Sheng.

Saying goodbye to the De Bruyne family, Wen Sheng and Zahavi drove to Ghent. Today they have to return to London, and Wen Sheng will have an important meeting tomorrow morning.

Sitting in the car, Wen Sheng rubbed his eyes tiredly, "I hope my brain cells were not wasted today!"

"Definitely not!" Zahavi admires Wen Sheng very much. He talks a lot and has his own unique insights into De Bruyne's future development. Of course, he doesn't know that Wen Sheng is just a prank on De Bruyne.

Just copy the usage and training.

"I hope so. As I said, we currently lack a passer and an organizer. I think this kid can help us to a great extent!" Wen Sheng took a long breath and said, "The rest is up to you.

Yes!"

"Don't worry, I'll take care of it. Just don't forget to pay me for the hard work!" Zahavi was full of confidence. His task was to work with Decost to lower the price. Wen Sheng demanded that his bottom line for this deal be a total price of 9 million pounds.

, how much price Zahavi and Decost can lower, how much profit they can get.

This low price is actually set relatively high, but there is nothing we can do about it. De Bruyne himself is very valued by Genk, and Genk is not a country bumpkin and is not that easy to deal with.

…

The next day, Wen Sheng met with Richard Clement, the sales director of prozone, a football statistics business company, at a hotel in London. Wen Sheng was invited to meet at this meeting. Clement planned to sell products to Wen Sheng.

cooperating.

Not only is this person looking for Wensheng, but sales staff from data companies such as statDNA, matalysis, and amisco have called Wensheng, hoping to cooperate with Wensheng.

At present, in world football, coaches’ sophisticated use of data is far from reaching the level of later generations. These data companies have just started, and there are not many coaches who are willing to cooperate with them. Now they are looking for ways to do it. Wen Sheng is a

Young, newly promoted Premier League head coaches have become the targets of their private pursuit.

In their thinking, young coaches like Wen Sheng may be much more receptive to using big data to help their teams, while those old men may not trust big data. Some data are of no use at all in the eyes of many coaches.

.

Wen Sheng is indeed different. He has long planned to upgrade the team's data analysis team, which was originally part of his summer planning.

Of course, he is not the first to try this. In fact, Sam Allardyce cooperated with Prozone when he was coaching Bolton Wanderers, and the results were pretty good.

Cooperation requires an experienced person, so Wen Sheng accepted Clement's invitation to have lunch.

After lunch, in the hotel room, Clement began to describe the benefits of football big data to Wen Sheng. He gave an example about corner kicks.

Football fans in England have an inexplicable fascination with corner kicks. Whenever the team gets a corner kick, the fans seem to see a very rare chance to score. They are inexplicably excited and inexplicable. Many coaches are obsessed with corner kicks and other set kicks.

Tactics are taken very seriously.

However, data analysis shows that the probability of the offensive team converting a corner kick into a shot is only 20.5%, and then 89% of the shots will be squandered by the offensive team. Clement said that in fact, the average number of goals scored per corner kick is 0.022

.

Wen Sheng really didn't know what was going on.

"Daniel, you know Guardiola's Barcelona, ​​right?! They rarely take corner kicks directly into the penalty area, but are accustomed to using short corner kick tactics to reorganize the offense!" Clement mentioned Barcelona.

Wen Sheng suddenly remembered it, and it seemed that it was indeed the case.

"As for corner kicks, Mourinho once couldn't understand why our fans here were inexplicably excited!" Clement mentioned Mourinho, who is now very popular.

Mourinho did once ask reporters: "Please count on your fingers, how many countries in the world have fans giving almost the same applause for corner kicks and goals?! Only here, only in England does this happen?

!”

Wen Sheng didn't know this story, but he felt a little unhappy when he saw Clement exaggerating big data like a flower.

So he said to Clement: "I also have an example here! Charles Rip..."

"Daniel, Daniel..., that's just a misunderstanding! Others misunderstood Mr. Rip's data analysis and words!" Of course, it is impossible for Clement not to know this man's name. Charles Rip is technically their ancestor.

Master.

Wen Sheng understood the origin of the long pass and lob theory of English football when he devoted himself to studying tactics in his previous life. The beginning of the story was this Charles Ripp.

Charles Ripp was born in Cornwall in 1904. He was an accountant. Inspired by Arsenal captain Charles Jones, he had an idea. Why not combine accounting with his interest in football to start a career?

!

This idea was very unique and avant-garde. Rip began to engage in statistics and eventually formed the basis of an academic paper - "Strength and Luck in English Football". This paper had a profound influence.

Data analysis has discovered many secrets of football. For example, there is one article in the paper: 30% of the ball rights regained in the opponent's penalty area are hit within the goal frame; and nearly half of the goals come from this.

Possession regained.

Another thing: Football is a sport in which possession of the ball is constantly exchanged. Most possessions end after one pass.

Probably referring to these two ideas, Charles Hughes, the technical director of the Football Association at the time, was deeply influenced and created his own football theory POMO (Positions of Maximum Opportunity), which means "theory of maximum opportunity positions". Hughes

In the 1960s, I discussed football theory with Britain's best missile expert, and he concluded that the simplest is the most effective. If more than three passes are made before a shot, the efficiency of football will be greatly reduced.

As a result, England's famous long pass tactic was born. There is no need to uselessly control the ball. You only need to pass the ball into the opponent's penalty area as soon as possible and then shoot.

His theory has actually done a lot of damage to English football, causing the ball control ability to become worse and worse, and the tactics to become simpler and simpler. Players consume a lot of physical energy in the process of chasing opponents with the ball, making them weak in the European war.

Only.

However, Liverpool, which dominated England in that era, had no trace of the POMO theory under the leadership of Shankly and Paisley, and neither did Nottingham Forest, which won the Champions League for the second time.

Clough, the greatest coach in England at Nottingham Forest, even satirized the POMO theory, "If the balls are flying in the sky, why not build the grass into the sky?!"
Chapter completed!