Hello and welcome to episode seven of Tifo Talks, the podcast mini-series in which John McKenzie

speaks to interesting people from the game and beyond the game. Who did you speak to today, John?

And were they in or around the game? I'd say in the game this time, because I spoke to Dan Pelchin,

who has developed a football product which he is selling to football clubs.

Yes, Dan Pelchin's been on the podcast before, hasn't he? He has. And his product is called Traits,

and it is a means of player profiling using data. Data and numbers. That's right. So the majority

of the conversation was about data and numbers. Do you help me understand the data? I do. And it's kind of weird that because it sounds like you, but it also sounds like a robot. Yeah. Also, you would have thought if I was doing an impression of a robot, the robot would understand the data. Why am I doing an impression? It's like doing an impression of a wizard and asking to learn about magic. But maybe you were trying to be a robot who's trying to pass the Turing test. That's right. Trying to trick me into thinking that you don't. I don't understand data. Please inform Dan Pelchin. Yeah. So we talked a lot about data, the limits of data, but also the benefits you can have from using data in football. So it was a really good chap.

How does this conversation move on from the one that we had before in case listeners,

so that listening to this, I've already heard Dan speak on the C-F football podcast.

Yeah, I think we talked a lot more about some of the fundamental questions around data.

Obviously, Dan is someone who works in data and his whole company is based around using data to

give professional clubs an upside. So I asked him some tricky questions about the way that he

approaches things and asked him whether or not there were better ways of doing things. So for example,

he wanted to talk about examples of data working at football clubs. And I was like,

what about the examples we have of data not working?

Ah, yes.

That's a smart question.

That's the sort of traditional McKenzie twist.

Yes, I took his question that he suggested and I flipped it on his head.

And you threw it in his face.

Yeah.

Okay.

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