Ipswich Town: Kieran Maguire on using Brighton’s Jamestown Analytics

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire has explained how Ipswich Town may look to use Brighton’s recruitment system ahead of their Championship return.

It has been widely reported that the Blues have used Jamestown Analytics on their rise up the Football League pyramid. Created by Seagulls owner Tony Bloom, data is used to recruit players and staff.

Town were unable to access the system as one of Brighton’s Premier League rivals last season, but could now resume their relationship following relegation.

“What Jamestown say is that they will operate with one club per division because they don’t want a conflict of interest with two clients being recommended the same players.

“Jamestown, if Ipswich choose to re-engage with them, will do the nerdy stuff. They do the filtering of players. For example, Ipswich will say, ‘Right, we want a left-back with the following attributes. Age, 19-22. Strength in the following four areas, because that’s how we intend to play this season’.

“Then they will send it off to their magic box. Nobody knows the secret recipe of Tony Bloom, it’s the closest guarded secret in football.

“It will churn out a list of names, and then what will happen is that the club will do their own background checks. The old All-Blacks’, let’s say, ‘No idiots policy’.

“On the back of that, they will make a decision in terms of price, length of contract, whether it will be a cultural fit coming to the UK, language skills and so on.”

Kieran McKenna has signed 43 different players over seven transfer windows and only two of them – Jens Cajuste (Napoli) and Ben Godfrey (Atalanta) – have come from clubs outside of England.

Speaking last December, the Blues boss admitted clubs like Brighton and Brentford were ‘way ahead of us’ when it came to using data for recruitment.

Recently, Town chairman Mark Ashton told the EADT and Ipswich Star that he was ‘trying to take people out of quite big clubs’ to add to his recruitment team.