Make a virtue of necessity. Lincoln City have done it brilliantly over the past few months: we are talking about a small club operating in the lower reaches of English football, League One and below, for more than half a century. Then came the breakthrough: the Imps won League One and secured promotion to the Championship, a level they had not reached since 1961. They did it as underdogs, with the 17th-largest budget in the division and a squad that, on paper, was hardly built for such a target, even if those behind it believed otherwise. A football fairy tale? Not quite. There was method, personality and a few ideas that were decidedly out of the ordinary.
“Until 2019, we were one of the big clubs in League Two,” Lincoln City chief executive Liam Scully explained in this interview with the Telegraph. “After promotion, we stayed the same financially as well. In other words, a small fish compared with our new opponents. But we didn’t want to stop aiming high.” So how do you do it without a new injection of money? “We found ourselves having to create a lot from very little. And so we turned to two decisive ingredients.” The use of artificial intelligence to build the squad efficiently, and making the most of set pieces. Long before they became the trademark that helped Arsenal win the Premier League.
To make it work, Lincoln City turned to Chris Howarth, founder of an AI-powered data analysis platform called Insight Sport. It is essentially a simulator of game situations based on real data, and it estimated that, on average, a team scores once every 33 corners. “But with the right adjustments, we were able to bring that frequency down to one in 16.” Lincoln remained an unusual league leader even during their triumphant run: little possession, the initiative left to the opposition, but a lethal propensity for scoring from dead-ball situations. Not only through the methodical study of attacking spaces, but also by choosing the right players. And not necessarily the most sought-after ones on the market — quite the opposite, in fact.
AI models allow clubs to sift through the available player pool with considerable precision according to the parameters they are looking for: quality from set pieces, presence in the penalty area, the ability to get free of an opponent’s marking. By cross-referencing the data, Lincoln were able to identify a group of players suited to their game and available at a relatively low cost. Add a high-level team of data analysts — led, in a curious case of namesake, by a man called George Bush — and the Imps found themselves a step ahead of the others. They secured promotion to the Championship with a net seasonal loss of £2 million, when achieving the same objective usually requires between £15 million and £35 million. A small piece of club management, then. Now that the new season is almost here, everyone knows how Lincoln City intend to make their mark in the Championship. It will not be easy, but they have already shown where they can find an advantage. These days, that can be enough.