New Norwich City sporting chief Ben Knapper on Arsenal role

Knapper will succeed Stuart Webber at Carrow Road when he officially begins his new job on November 27, before taking the reins for the January transfer window.

The highly-rated 36-year-old cut his ties with the Premier League club last week after a 14 year stint, most recently as Arsenal’s loans manager.

Knapper, along with manager Mikel Arteta and technical director Edu, helped turn the likes of Emile Smith-Rowe and William Saliba into first team players at the Emirates, and generated tens of millions in the transfer market through the sales of Joe Willock and Folarin Balogun.

Knapper’s break in professional football came as a first team performance analyst at Scunthorpe in 2007.

The Hull University graduate returned to Humberside at the end of last year to offer an in-depth insight into his career, and work with the Gunners.

The revolution in data and analysis within top level football

It was something that when I entered the industry it was a lot more video analysis based, and that was kind of the skill set of most analysts, myself included. It was all about trying to use video to help understand the game on a deeper level.

And then my next job after kind of working for Scunthorpe United was a company called Prozone Sports, who at the time where the market leader in providing data to the football industry. And that was when it was starting to gather pace.

Fast forward 12 or 13 years and it’s incredible now the level of objective understanding that’s done, and modelling and advanced analytics and data science. These are all functions now that are just commonplace in football.

(At Arsenal) we’ve got a huge internal infrastructure of developers, of data scientists, of programmers, literally they are so vital now in the modern game, because there’s so much data available and it’s about trying to use that in a smart way.

We’re fortunate because a lot of the challenges that clubs have is that there’s almost too much data, and you don’t have enough resources in the clubs to leverage it in a smart way.

We’re well-resourced in that area. We have a data processing centre in south-east Asia, where we find lots of games from all over the world that generate data for us, that we use to drive all of our player recruitment processes, all of our opposition analysis, all of the work I do in loans and player trading. All of that is really underpinned by advanced analytics.

It’s huge now and it goes back to the rules of the game, and the scoring system, and it’s so important that you understand the game on a deeper level, because that surface level information that people see, goals and assists and those kinds of things, just really don’t tell the story. The evolution of what we’ve seen in football is indicative of every industry.

The use of data is something you’ve seen everywhere, but certainly in football, it’s really gone into overdrive in the last decade. I’ve been fortunate to go on that journey at a club like Arsenal that has been close to the forefront.

Liverpool is well regarded in terms of their approach to leveraging advanced analytics and how they can utilise that to help drive a more effective football operation. Data is now literally a part of every single aspect of our football operation.

Loan strategy at Arsenal

The first thing I would say is why are you trying to use the loan system? We use it for two real purposes. The first purpose is for player development. We want to try and use it as a vehicle that can help us improve our players by giving them different challenges that can help them make the transition from being an Under-21 player to a first team player, hopefully.

That gap between those two teams is huge. Some can make the step all in one, like Bukayo (Saka), other players they can’t, or maybe there’s not a space in the first team for them.

Then we have to explore other ways of giving them different challenges that can help stimulate them to continue to develop, because if they just stayed in the 21s, where there may be a really strong player and it’s quite easy for them, it is not going to be conducive to helping them develop and achieve their potential.

The second way is from more of an asset management perspective. So we’ll use it to try and drive value in our players. That sounds a little bit crude, I guess it is, but that is part of it. In some cases, maybe we’ve taken a player that isn’t playing so much with us and we can loan them to another club.

The decision around that is quite nuanced, we look at lots of things, whether it’s playing style, or the head coach profile. Hopefully it goes well, we can increase their market value and sell them for a huge profit. That’s the other lens.

Making deals

In terms of how we would structure deals it’s all for negotiation. If you talk about loans, typically it’s a young player and it’s going to be about development, and the football project is going to lead the decision.

We are not going to market and being ruled by binary numbers, in the sense if you don’t pay X you’re not going to get this player on loan. That would be us prioritising the financial side of things over potentially their development. When we go to the market we look for the best football proposition for the player.

When you move up the chain into dealing with bigger players, first team players where the market for those players is much bigger and the financial side becomes a bit more important because the numbers are bigger.

They can have a big impact on your club’s revenue because player trading is a huge swing factor in that. That’s looks a little bit different at that level.

But it’s really interesting because you can leverage the loan system for both of those reasons, and it’s something that we’re trying to do smarter all the time. Players like Emile (Smith-Rowe) or William Saliba going out on loan was about player development, and then there’s other players where it’s using the loan system to drive value and sell.

Somebody like Joe (Willock) would come to mind with an example like that. If their journey doesn’t end at Arsenal we have given them a platform to kickstart their career. There is also a strong moral component. We want to try and help our players have a springboard into the industry.

Savvy player trading

How important it is to do smart work on the football operation side is underlined by how much of the club’s revenue that aspect takes up. By the time you pay player salaries and you’ve spent money on transfer fees, that’s probably going to be north of 80pc of the club’s revenue. It just means it’s so important to get those decisions right.

You could do amazing work on the operational side for a year, and that can all be just completely blown by making poor decisions, in terms of awarding a player a silly contract or paying over the odds for a player on a transfer and it just doesn’t work. And that’s where I think the industry has really started to move forward.

It doesn’t mean that we get them right all the time, of course, but it’s a lot about risk and minimization of risk. How can you do as little work as possible to ensure you have those processes not to make those mistakes very often?

If you are a club who cannot make mistakes in the transfer market, and with your player trading activities, then you give yourself a chance to be a pretty successful team on the pitch but also as an organisation more broadly.