Martin Paterson: Notts County head coach on working with data and a technical committee

Martin Paterson is a head coach who does not understand data at a club where data analytics means everything.

Not that the new Notts County boss sees that as a problem.

“If you ask me about data, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer that makes sense because I don’t deal with the data – I don’t understand it,” Paterson told BBC Sport.

“I am a person who works quite simply on the football side of things. I don’t pretend to have skillsets that I don’t.”

By taking the job as head coach at Notts, Paterson made himself “one cog” in a new-look technical committee that will help influence how the Magpies operate at every level, from recruitment to team selection and tactics.

It is a committee that includes the club’s owners, Chris and Alex Reedtz, its director of football Roberto Gagliardi, newly appointed director of performance Dr David Rhodes, as well as Paterson’s coaching staff.

With the Reedtz brothers owning football analytics company Football Radar, the club is built on a data and statistics empire.

“I’ve worked at clubs, for instance at Barnsley, where they are completely data driven in terms of their recruitment, so the players turn up and they are the best players according to the data and we coached them,” Paterson said.

“Here it’s a more collaborative conversation between the head of football, myself and then the owners – we are all together making team decisions.

“You will find everybody uses data now days, we have some really big clubs in the Premier League that are solely data.

“I don’t understand it [data] and how they can figure the best players within it, but what I do understand is that when players are brought to me, it is facts that they are telling me about the players – ‘this player is good at this, he scores goals, he defends well’ – and then we select the best out of the three that they give me.”