Damien Comolli began his football career playing at Monaco academy. I believe Thuram and Petit were also there at the time, as was Arsene Wenger. Seeing the superior standard of the stars in the making around him, Comolli felt he was not destined to make the grade as a player so decided to aim for a change of direction, moving into coaching from an early age. As luck would have it a departure of the U16 manager at the club offered him chance to fast track his progress, the budding football fanatic maturing swiftly to prove his worth leading not only the U16s but younger sides also at U7-U10 levels. Worth nothing here is his victory in the state championship whilst there.
He developed a strong working relationship with Wenger. A useful guide to have in the game as a youngster no doubt, and ever since as they remain friends to this day. In 1996 he joined the manager in north London at Arsenal where he was appointed as a scout. From what Comolli himself says of the move, it seems more like Wenger was happy to give him any role, and the scouting was simply what seemed open at the time due to the incumbent tired of making constant trips to France. No problem for Damien, he grew quickly into the job, expanding his expertise to include coverage of the English leagues in the process.
Six years later it was time to broaden his challenges, returning to his homeland to take up a role as Sporting Director for St Etienne. For whom he proved a valuable developer, expanding commercial partnerships, helping to guide the side to a respectable 6th place league finish as well as a strong cup run. His work was not unnoticed, with club owner Daniel Levy luring him back to England to take up a similar position at Spurs in 2005.
This is when I remember first hearing about him. I can still see his younger face in my fading memories marked as a villain in the shadows by the prone to xenophobic press (“these pesky foreigners coming to tell us how to run football!” etc etc), and the scepticism with which his appointment was met by some sections of the british punditry and management community. There was definite stigma attached to the ‘continental’ idea of a SD at the time. Harry Redknapp comes to mind as a vocal critic… The die was cast. Comolli was given scope to essentially run the club. Recruitment, medical staff, scouting, youth sector and probably more, all fell under his command.
His time at Spurs was far from a comfortable ride. Some signings were criticised as the team struggled for good form. Sacked coach Martin Jol was very public in his angst, stating that Comolli had signed players without his approval. A few notable moves which are more positive from that period include Modric and Berbatov. The SD himself has in recent years lamented his own arrogance at the time, mocking his ‘big head’ approach to assuming his experience meant he knew better than everyone else, when he didn’t. With negative experience has since come reflection and opportunity to improve. Comolli was sacked by Levy in 2008 with the aforementioned Redknapp appointed as head coach.
Back to St Etienne for our intrepid Damien to reprise the SD role where he fared less well than his previous stint.
We are not crying into our handkerchiefs,” Caiazzo told the News of the World. “You need some humility in football and Damien was convinced he was right 100 per cent of the time. There was never any question of dialogue. “Damien enjoyed total power in his first year with us. His was the last word on all transfers and that is how he wanted it. “The manager at the time, Alain Perrin, had not even seen some of the players he was given. Damien was his boss.
“His powers were much reduced in January after the failure of his transfer policy the previous summer and he was not pleased. “I would have fired him then but my co-chairman defended him for months, even when results were poor. “It was a mistake bringing him back to the club.”
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11669/6536485/st-etienne-chief-slams-comolli
Despite the rancour of his employer as St Etienne, it was Comolli who decided to part ways when ambition to return to the big time caught up with him in 2010. Liverpool came knocking and whisked him away to the riviera of the north aka Merseyside to become their new Director of Football Strategy. Which morphed into Director of Football a year later. Despite some impressive signings, Suarez especially, he was let go in 2012 when he skulked off into the shadows to lick his wounds and plot his comeback…
Two years of mixed fortunes came and went at Fenerbahce (2018-20) where he moved forward with his data focused approach before joining the Redbird revolution at Tolouse. A club jokingly known as ‘To Lose’ even by their own supporters, so dire had their rut of failure long become. Comolli was made President, and it was in this role he dived more fully into the data driven model alongside specialists from Zelus (american company also part owned by RedBird).
“We analyse 70 leagues, but with the promotion we will have more investment margin. Even if we will not be able to buy Premier League or Bundesliga players, we have for example detailed information on players up to the English fourth division and German third division,”
“We have more than 40 thousand players in the archive so we know everything. We buy data, but we process it with our own algorithms to make it into exclusive statistics. RedBird? I am associated with them because we all wanted to work with this method.
His stewardship of the club earned promotion from the second division within two years, laying the foundation for a fairytale French Cup victory to add to very respectable league finishes. They had been unfortunate in the play-offs of his first campaign, yet made up for it the next season breaking many records en-route to the ligue 2 title.
The French side represent a unique model where every aspect is driven by data analysis. It informs and guides everything from recruitment to physical conditioning to even the actual coaching of the squad. This is where many coaches would baulk. Can you imagine Conte or Tudor happily been told not just which areas of their tactics need improvement, but how they should be improved?
Comolli has stated that he doesn’t send scouts to watch games, they watch videos then investigate targets on a personal level. They want to know who they are, what their culture and character look like, feel like, as a human being away from the pitch. What is their favourite restaurant? What is their family like? When was the last football match they watched and enjoyed greatly?
Employed at Toulouse is the ultra important Head of Strategy and Culture, Selinay Gurgenc. Everybody has to buy into the agreed culture, the President included, to such a degree that Comolli has employed a ‘truth teller’ to keep him in line, to follow up on the projects across the club and ensure the President adheres to the culture and values he expects of everyone else. Make no mistake, the culture and identity of the club is as important as the data in his methodology.
He cannot abide mediocrity and will dispense with anyone he deems more focused on serving their own interests than the club’s. When possible he has spent time with successful sports clubs across the planet, from baseball to rugby e.g. the NZ All Blacks. His mission is always to improve.
Community is also of great importance. Connecting the club to other sporting institutions in the area, growing the women’s game, seeking to raise attendances and interest, integration of a team within a regional community.
One of the first assessments made by Comolli at Toulouse was to interview everyone personally in depth, then in groups. Evaluating the shared sense of direction, values, culture and more importantly the challenges faced. He had hoped that he could change the culture with the same people in their positions when he arrived, but the rot proved too deep and widespread. He had to change many of the people to bring about the needed improvements and it worked.
This is a man not afraid of making sweeping changes at a club. A highly demanding berserker driving all aspects of the group towards success and development. He is also accustomed to working with a vastly smaller budget than he will be given at Juve. His career is not without periods of failure, which must be considered, mainly during his second coming at St Etienne and in Türkiye.
The strong achievements at Toulouse, undoubtedly the greatest responsibility at the top of a club he has been given, are clear and ongoing. He has overseen incredible progress with small resources by seeking competitive advantages in areas other clubs are lacking.
“It’s quite simple to explain,” he says. “We have a lot less money than everyone else, so if we try to do the same as everybody else with less money we are going to fail.
“My obsession is how to find a competitive advantage in the market and that is by using data and numbers when we recruit coaches and players, and using data when deciding playing style and when to rest players or to train players more. We use data to optimise our transfer budget and wage bill.”
I cannot stress enough how everything in his model is data driven. To such a degree that even after achieving a superb 13th place finish back in the top flight, Comolli sacked his coach…
Of last season, and the decision on Montanier (he was sacked), Comolli said the data model had told them that – even with the 19th-lowest wage bill – they should have finished 11th. “That [finishing 13th] made us really uncomfortable. It’s very, very, important for us that the club improves on a daily basis in all aspects.
‘We base every decision we make on data’
This approach includes driving the tactics, the coaching, the set pieces, the movements and actions of players within a game. It is precisely why I don’t believe Conte would have fit, nor can Tudor. Neither would be comfortable in a role where they have another manager within the structure telling them how to do their job in such detail.
This is a very different way of running a football club to what any of us have known before at Juventus, or likely any other club. For whilst data analytics are increasingly part of the modern game, I know of no other but Toulouse who are 100% data driven.
To bring him into Juve to become our General Manager can only be with the hope that he can adopt a similar successful model. It is reasonable to assume he will need to make adjustments, as the challenges, environment and ambition for Toulouse are markedly different to that of Juve. One of which could be to allow a coach to have more autonomy than a glorified trainer. However, many of the demonstrably positive results achieved in France (shrewd recruitment at low cost, tactical innovations, etc) would be very welcome if repeated and there is certainly the potential and need for us to make the qualitative leap required to return to challenging for top honours. We can but hope that Damien has honed his ideas in recent years and brings to our story not only an expansive wealth of experience but the best version of his methods.
Whilst the furore of Conte’s apparent refusal to return continues to flare up amongst the fanbase, others in despair of how we have become a shambles, some blaming Elkann, some even blaming poor Max…it may be the case that something far more seismic a change is underway at the club.
“We base every decision we make on data,” he says. “From whom we appoint as a manager to whether we keep him. Our player recruitment and whether we decide to sell or extend the contract. Our [playing] strategy, our set-plays. Our playing style is heavily defined by data and after that we look for a manager who is going to implement our style. Where we press, how we press, what time of the game we press. How we attack, from where we cross, from where we shoot and from where we don’t shoot. I would say data takes precedence on coaching.”
A move towards a system of management wherein the role of coach is diminished in responsibility, or at best altered. Less tactical autonomy, more a cog in a machine working as one from the top to the bottom of the club. With nobody more important than the collective culture and values.
Briefly on my own ideas…I do not believe reducing the role of coach to that of essentially a trainer following decisions on how to train the squad largely/solely emerging from others interpreting data is a surefire path to success. The bond between players and coach is a tradition that Comolli’s model breaks away from if not challenges deeply. I can understand the thinking behind this approach and am fully aware of the already long established widespread use of analytics in the sport. Regardless of my personal old school passion for a boss as a leader, a patriarch, a wily tactician, a source of inspiration and passion who fights for every ball with his players and will go to war by their side, it is clear that success at the highest levels can also be found though more simply putting the right players in the right positions and letting them perform. I suspect Zidane’s success at Real may be close to this, though there is also the vitally important factor not found in any data analysis with that setup, for how do you quantify into algorithms the impact on a squad of having one of the greatest players of all time as their coach? Suffice to say I have my concerns of Mr Comolli, though given the last 7 years of enduring our steady decline, ruin, then relaunching into further disappointment, my curiosity is piqued by this seemingly innovative attempt to reawaken the sleeping giant. Who can say for sure that it won’t work?
We only need to look towards the current Premier League champions for a reference point – Liverpool’s considerable recent achievements were built on a balanced combination of data analytics, strong emotional intelligence/ personal skills of a coach and AI. It is through seeking this balance where Comolli – who helped start the winning cycle on Merseyside – will succeed or fail at Juve I suspect.
I am particularly interested in the recruitment process using data to source (think scout!) players across many leagues in ways that would be impossible to do with humans unless we employed a small army.
“The one billion dollar question for clubs using data in football is how the skillset of the player translates from one league to another,” Comolli says. “We are more comfortable with some leagues that the player can translate his skillset to Ligue 1. But as time passes and we collect more data we get more and more certainty in terms of translation.
“I’ll give you an example – we see really interesting talents coming out of Egypt but for us they are expensive. Maybe in six to 12 months we will be able to do deals on this market – that we are not totally comfortable doing now because of the translation [factor]. Same thing with the Turkish second tier.”
Players signed for Toulouse such as van den Boomen and Suazo are prime examples of how this system can unearth true gems in lower/lesser leagues across the planet. It stands to reason that a club of our stature, with much greater resources and potential for glory could reap deep value from such an approach.
Our rumoured new GM is an extremely driven man. He seeks to surround himself with those more intelligent than himself. With people motivated to develop, improve and buy in wholly to the club ethos. High value players are his target, whilst understanding there can be a fine line where they operate which they need help to stay upon, as does himself.
“I believe in a team of extremely bright people, who support the board in making decisions. Football being more and more complex and global we will see a massive influx of brains of people who have not played it, including gender.
“All the scientific research on group intelligence shows that it works better when the group is diverse, including females. That’s what we do here. We have the first female senior scout [Julia Arpizou] in pro football, our head of strategy is a female as well and she is probably one of the most senior in French football and that’s because they are very good people and bright.”
When speaking of his personal life, Comolli is candid and quick to heap praise on his family. He has two daughters. One of whom is totally deaf, has attended university, learned a new language and is now continuing her academic career in another country. The other has suffered serious abuse, then studied to become a solicitor to help others in need. They both share their father’s iron clad resilience and determination to grow and develop.
He cites his girls and especially his wife as amazing, always inspiring him to become the best version of himself.
If not able to exist in the football world, he indicated he would be working with people trying to escape from poverty, or perhaps as a diplomat to try avert wars between nations. He is very much a man who wants to make his work really matter.
What is clear is that Comolli (if signed) represents a complete revolution of how we are run as a football club, both on and off the field. I am unsure how much of his data and algorithms he will be able to bring with him to Juve, especially given RedBird – who own Toulouse as well as part of Zelus – are also the owners of AC Milan. Yet I will assume the success of that model is what has attracted Juve upper management with a version of the same primed to bring sweeping changes across our own club in the coming months. The data-sets and algorithms are likely available to purchase. You don’t bring a specialist data-driven GM without bringing his access to the data.
I am certainly interested to learn when we first contacted and began serious discussions. Primarily because so different is the managerial setup and hierarchy of the Comolli Toulouse model that it seems very clear that Conte would not be an easy fit, nor Tudor, nor many other coaches who demand more traditional autonomy with their squad. It will probably not be a carbon copy transplanted from France to Italy, though given we can only speculate presently I won’t go into attempting more details on this.
It is our current coach I feel the most sympathy towards. To see such a tidal wave of hope and growing excitement for Conte race towards the shoreline, looking likely to swallow him up whole, then abruptly abate, he perhaps would have presumed he was well placed to finally be confirmed in the role…Whereas the club have other ideas. It is possible this was conveyed to him weeks ago. I hope they have kept him abreast of all developments that impact his future. He deserves that respect.
My own general inkling of what Elkann, Chiellini and company are up to is quite positive, due to what I perceive to be serious, focused action taken to address longstanding issues – our finances, recruitment, coaching, physical conditioning and all in between. Comolli and his number crunching methods may not have been what we all had in mind when hoping for change, nor is he a guaranteed solution, yet he very much does offer a different approach to meet head on all of our problems.
Given the expected responsibilities of our new GM, it stands to reason that he (and his team) will be very much involved with the decision of our new coaching setup. As well as with all staff throughout the club. He will need to make his surveys, take interviews and decide who fits the collectively agreed culture and demonstrates the motivation to succeed.
This is why we are seeing names like Silva and Genesio bandied about in the press. They may be a better fit for the new model to be implemented at Juve and have been spat out by the algorithms when set against data-sets of our current squad (strengths, weaknesses, age, height, etc etc).
Unlike many others, the deflation of Conte’s apparent refusal to return to Juve came and went for me fairly lightly. I was unsurprised, disappointed though also glad to then learn of Comolli. The two stories are clearly connected, with plenty of fans offering commentary to fill in the gaps between. I will avoid that, and seek to focus on our club, which rather than a complete shambles, I see more as a bubbling geyser, heap of primordial goo, heating up to soon give birth to something new, unprecedented…and intriguing.
Whatever is underway I suspect there is a clear plan. Discussions ongoing behind the scenes to ensure due diligence is performed before confirmations are made public. Comolli’s structural changes cannot be established in a flash. If he is to be tasked with delivering a new culture, a new project, he must be given time to work. Yes, this means we are left behind on the face of it when it comes to the most talked of targets. And it is depressing to see other clubs snapping up great signings we had hoped would come to Juve. I understand this yet will also request that you consider the following…
The margins between players lined up in the data-sets are often minuscule. What this translates to is that the system does not give you targets 1, 2 and 3 with large gaps in attributes between them. It gives you thousands of players from around the globe for a specific skillset targeted, with very little to choose between them at the upper end of the scale. What Comolli has stated previously is that this means losing out on top targets is no longer a major issue, there are plenty of other viable options nearby on their lists.
The human aspect – how those skills could fit into Serie A, our squad, our culture – is precisely why Comolli is fierce in his quest for assessing suitability of players well beyond what can be recorded on the pitch. Essentially profiling the character and mentality of the staff at all levels of the club. Gathering intelligence. Players, physios, coaches, chefs! So worry less of missing out on Gyokeres, David, De Bruyne, Osimhen, Retegui…for perhaps this very minute, Comolli has the scouting team heading to Ecuador to seek a 2nd division striker, not to watch him play but get to know him, take him to his favourite restaurant for a meal, meet his dogs, ask of his inspirations in life and favourite authors!
I believe Matteo Tognozzi may return in a role close to the SD, which would be pleasing given his former success and experience with Juve. My own hope for that director position remains Ricky Massara, who is apparently on the shortlist with Diego Lopez, probably others.
The rush for answers is understandable from the fans, as is the need for the new GM to be given support, resources and time to show what he can do. Firstly, to get the new team in place off the field, then on the field.
It seems we are on the edge of a brave new world.
(follow me on X HERE)
Resources on Comolli
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cevg23n1mzdo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEdNXPMscLE
