Chelsea make new signing from Barcelona as Clearlake look to get back on track | OneFootball

Chelsea have made a new signing from Barcelona as Clearlake look to get the club back on track and fix up the inconsistent form.

Chelsea had a terrible January transfer window and have had a poor run of form as a result. They didn’t do much in the January window other than complete some loan deals out really.

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Joao Felix was one of the players who went out on loan to join AC Milan and despite a good start there, he has not had a good review in the last couple of games.

One player who is getting rave reviews though is versatile defender and midfielder Rentao Veiga, who joined Juventus on loan last month so he could play as a centre back. He is having a superb time there right now, and Juventus fans are urging their club to buy him on a permanent deal come the end of this season when his loan is up.

But it is not the players that Chelsea have improved here, they are improving their set of staff as they raid Barcelona for another one.

Chelsea hire Fernandez

According to Training Ground Guru, former Barcelona Head of Analytics Javier Fernandez has joined Chelsea as Director of Data Science.

They go on to say that Chelsea have been focusing on beefing up their data science capabilities since the takeover by Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly in May 2022.

And then they quote some quotes from Behdad Eghbali from back then:

“We’ve looked at it and we think European sports is probably 20 years behind US sports in terms of sophistication on the commercial side, sophistication on the data side.

“I had one super high-level Sporting Director at (one of) the world’s top three clubs tell me, when I asked about their approach to data, ‘The data’s my eyes, I pick players on my eyes.’

“He has six scouts, no data. We know of good sports teams in any league here (the United States), there’s 10, 20, 30 data analysts and wide use of data. That’s one area we think there’s a lot of runway for European sports.”