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In the first week of the UEFA Champions League group stage, Gian Piero Gasperini’s Atalanta, the best Italian from the previous edition of the tournament, will play in the small Danish town of Herning. There, in the middle of the Danish peninsula, they will face Midtjylland, the winning team of the last national championship that takes its name from the region in which it is located, Central Jutland. Herning is a city of less than 90,000 inhabitants immersed in the countryside: nothing to do with the capital Copenhagen, the city where Denmark’s most successful teams are based. However, for about six years, Copenhagen has not won as much as in the past.
With only 20 years of history, Midtjylland quickly established themselves as the best Danish team, winning three championships in the last six seasons and also gaining visibility in the European cups, where this year they reached the Champions League groups for the first time. in its short history. However, what makes Midtjylland special are the ways it got here.
The victories began in 2014 with the purchase of the company by Matthew Benham, an English investor and player, former owner of the small London team Brentford. After studying physics at Oxford, having worked for Bank of America, and enriched by betting, both as a professional player and as an entrepreneur, Benham entered soccer identifying some aspects of the game hitherto neglected by all, but potentially capable of reversing relationships. of power.
Anders Dreyer in a friendly against Reims (Aurelien Meunier / Getty Images)
This is how, first in Brentford and then in Midtjylland, Benham and his collaborators began to view football differently, first applying statistical models to gain unexpected advantages over richer and better equipped competitors. But what he did not immediately succeed in Brentford in a highly competitive context such as English football, he quickly achieved in Midtjylland in the more balanced Danish league.
In his first year with the new club, entrusted by Benham to Rasmus Ankersen, a former Danish footballer expert in sports statistics, Midtjylland won his first national title, sending the championship statistics plummeting. He scored 24 more goals than the runner-up, almost exactly reflecting the 25 goals scored from set pieces, more than double that of other teams, whose maximum was 11 goals. Behind this disproportion was the intuition of Benham, who noted that set pieces could be exploited more and better. Earlier that season, coach Brian Priske, who has since become head coach, was tasked with coaching the team specifically on set pieces, which he did with decisive results to win the championship.
Ted Knutson, former chief analyst for Benham’s teams and founder of the site State bomb, wrote in 2018: “I think we have broken Denmark.” It so happened, in fact, that the surprising result obtained by a small and unknown provincial team was analyzed far and wide, and the secrets came out. In two years, every team in the Danish league improved their set pieces to almost the level of Midtjylland, whose specialist Brian Priske was even hired by Copenhagen to win the championship.
The clear difference made by set piece work could not be kept hidden for long, but in the meantime Midtjylland had already turned its attention to other neglected aspects of the game: for example, the line-outs, for which Thomas Gronnemark, a former athlete of the Danish national bobsleigh. Through the study of schemes designed for different situations, similar to those very detailed in American football, and the training of technique, in one season Midtjylland significantly reduced the number of turnovers in the development of lineouts and scored 35 goals. in related actions. Gronnemark now collaborates with the English champion Liverpool.
Brian Priske and Midtjylland on the bench in a friendly match against Hamburg (Martin Rose / Getty Images)
While it was decided in Brentford to dismantle the youth sector, given the limited benefits of retaining one in London’s busy and competitive local football, Midtjylland has empowered it, expanding its research and recruitment network and networking with numerous clubs. satellite from Jutland. The results of these investments have been seen in recent market transactions involving players who grew up “at home”, from Paul Onuachu, sold to Genk for 6 million euros, to Rasmus Kristensen and Andreas Poulsen, sold to Ajax and Borussia Mönchengladbach for about 10 million.
Meanwhile, the first team continues to be built following new statistical models, much like Expected Goals (short for xG) in the early years, a model that reduces a team’s offensive potential into a single statistic and reveals classifications that are often different to the ratings. commonly used.
The most appropriate example remains that of Finnish midfielder Tim Sparv (now in Greece), who was under observation in 2014 because his previous team, Greuther Fürth, was among the great European teams in the overall Expected Goals ranking. Danish management evaluated the team in detail and noted that Sparv had performance ratings similar to those of a player in a major league. He bought it and it became essential in Midtjylland’s first victories, thanks to which he became the captain of the first Finnish team qualified for the European Championships.
In Midtjylland, data is not only used in the field. As Ankersen explained to guardian, at game intervals, before talking to the players and possibly the press, the coaches in charge receive messages highlighting the most relevant data collected by the staff during the games, in order to communicate more effectively both with the press as with the team in the dressing room: “We can win and receive praise, while our data tells us that we played terrible and we were very lucky: this is the message we must convey. Nobody wants to say that he was lucky to win, but in football success turns luck into genius.
– Read also: A different football, Brentford football
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