The latest issue of FC Business featured Iterpro with a 2 pages about how a digital solution of business intelligence can bring value to the football industry stakeholders. We asked our customers how Iterpro is helping them on daily basis and how they are moving from simple athlete management to “asset management”
Iterpro has built a system which aims to improve communication between football club departments. In this feature, they explain their ethos, we hear from some of their customers and learn how football clubs can reap the financial benefits of a data driven approach.
As elite teams have become more professional, each individual department has grown.
But the individual departments all require their own technology: There are GPS businesses with accompanying software, tracking technologies, performance analysis tools, medical and financial software tailored for football clubs, and much more. On top of these, there are several athlete management software businesses, which are great at collecting information but depend on experts at the clubs to spend time making sense of all their data.
We felt that because of all this specialist software, communication between departments has been lost. Our goal as a company is to display the most relevant information to the relevant departments. If a sports scientist compiles a detailed report on the entire squad, you want the manager and other departments to have an easy, consumable overview, without necessarily going into full detail.
By presenting the right information to the right people, we solve a big problem. Our customers agree.
Dr. Alberto Calicchio, Head of Medical at the AC Milan Academy, said:
“Iterpro has almost eradicated communication problems between staff members, and simultaneously expanded the opportunity to share data remotely with other departments. This, together with the possibility to analyse data and performance statistics, has been a huge step forward for us.
What I like the most is that every step, from medical and rehab to the return to play process, is easily understandable by an external figure. It’s not only for doctors and sports scientists. In practical terms, the manager, or eventually the Director, can check the players’ status in every moment, even if he doesn’t come to our training ground in Vismara. This is vitally important for us.”
This sentiment has been repeated across all of our clients. Simon Barjie, Performance Manager at AC Monza, said:
“Since Iterpro was implemented at Monza we noticed that we became way more time-efficient: being able to collect and interpret data in order to give prompt feedback to the coaching staff – as well as individual players – has been something extraordinary. We now have a clear general overview, but at the same time a specific real-time snapshot of the squad, which allows us to effectively share information between departments (coaching, performance, medical).”
This absolute focus on communication has fed through to our development – when we crunch data, we aim to provide actionable insights and clear overviews. This allows clubs to make better decisions, faster.
Andrea Tedesco, Assistant Manager at CS Universitatea Craiova said: “Sharing information is progressively becoming crucial in football since important decisions need to be taken in a very limited amount of time. Iterpro has revolutionised the way we work”
We aim to bring the whole club into the system.
As we created Iterpro with the primary goal of connecting departments, it is integral we connect all departments. By making it easy to understand and present information, any department can benefit from the system.
This is partly what distinguishes us from a typical athlete management system: These systems are generally just collecting data without making much sense of it, we turn data into information. Rather than collecting data for clubs to make light of as they wish, we enable different departments to use the platform by presenting information that is relevant to them. Through working closely with our customers, we continue to build new features and integrations with third parties.
We have an integration with Wyscout which gives the scouting department access to information on almost every professional on the planet. Then, we have a transfer dashboard on the Iterpro platform, which can be used to run simulations on the transfer window and really understand how these transfers will impact on club finances. In this way, we are of benefit to both the scouting and finance departments.
We connect the finance department too, helping them leverage data to go from player management to asset management. Every transfer and wage is an investment and the player is often the main financial asset for a club .
In other industries, businesses would not spend millions on assets without having a thorough and ongoing assessment of how these assets are performing. They do everything possible to generate the greatest yield. In football, at least historically, clubs don’t think that way, and Iterpro is bringing about a step-change in mindset in order to help our customers achieve a competitive edge.
Player contracts are logged on the system, and we have bespoke contract and clause builder functionality. Finance departments can receive alerts when a player is getting close to triggering an extra payment, be it a performance related bonus for the player, or an addition/reduction to his transfer fee. It is also easy to see how injuries have affected return on investment on specific players, or for the whole squad.
Some of our customers requested an app to display the same data as the platform but in a more condensed version, to enable immediate, ad hoc information presented in our simplified way. This all helps with decision making, and again, it feeds information from across the club. Directors or key personnel at clubs have found this extremely useful.
Extra revenue opportunities
We’re finding more and more of our customers exploring ways to leverage the Iterpro platform to realise the maximum potential value of their data. These customers include leagues, federations and clubs, all of whom can benefit in different ways.
To give an example, a league recently came to us asking how we might help their member clubs reduce insurance premiums.
As such, we are focusing on the financial benefits we can provide to our customers. This comes in the form of both product development, but also in the growth of the company: we’ve partnered with a significant player in football finance to enhance our offerings further and have made recent senior hires with experience steeped in the finance side of professional football.
We continue to welcome aboard new customers and are keen to hear from any clubs, leagues or federations (and their partners) who are looking to improve communication and decision making.
