Farioli’s research group analysing football trends | OneFootball

Thursday’s meeting takes on a special significance for Francesco Farioli, who will face the only team among the top five leagues that he has ever managed. Nice identified a young 34-year-old coach in Turkey and entrusted him with the mission of bringing the club back to European competitions—a goal that was achieved—before his stint at Ajax and his arrival at the Dragão, where he started the season in great form. Below, we describe how the current leader of the Dragons ended up in the south of France.

The results achieved at the modest Karagumruk were decisive in attracting attention, but they weren’t enough on their own: several evaluation interviews followed. Better to hear it from the man himself. “At the end of the season, I had my first interview with the sporting director, Florent Ghisol, and Dave Brailsford [an executive at INEOS, the company that owns Nice and Manchester United]. They did an analysis with the data, and from the list, a few names came up, and I was one of them,” he explained. The recruitment process followed. “It was quite a long interview, about five hours or so. The next day, I had another interview with Jean-Claude Blanc (CEO of INEOS Sport). Then, I had another meeting with Florent, together with the CEO (Fabrice Bocquet) and the president of Nice (Jean-Pierre Rivière). There were many meetings and many hours, but I was very happy because they gave me the opportunity to express myself. They were very well prepared for everything and fully aware of who they had in front of them,” Farioli said in November 2023, in an interview with “The Telegraph.”

A graduate of the University of Florence, with a thesis titled “Football as a Renaissance: the aesthetics of the game and the role of the goalkeeper,” Farioli maintained a more philosophical side at Nice and created a WhatsApp group for the coaching staff that he called the “creative laboratory,” a name he kept at FC Porto, although he renewed his assistants. At the same time, he set up an independent research team on the same app, aimed at tracking global football trends and compiling data and analyses on leagues, players, and clubs.

“I have a small parallel group of people who are not part of my coaching staff, but who work remotely. It’s like a research group, because it’s impossible to analyze everything when you’re working at a club. They work with the future in mind, watching games and studying trends and things like that—what’s happening in Brazil, Argentina, Portugal. Then, we discuss everything; it keeps me very up to date and gives me a perspective on what’s happening in the world. That helped me a lot with my first impact in France, because when I arrived, of course, I didn’t have the same knowledge as I did after a few months. There’s a ‘guy’ in Scotland who watches British football and is also passionate about South American football, one in Italy, one in Portugal, and another in Spain,” he revealed. A group that, certainly, also contributed to Farioli’s adaptation at the Dragão.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.