Match of the data: meet the tech company changing football analysis

Ruben Saavedra grew up worshipping Barcelona. Now the CEO of Metrica Sports provide the Spanish giants – and dozens of other clubs at all levels – with the tools to improve their performance. And it all started with tracking the behaviour of rats, he tells Andy Martin

Three up top: Ruben Saavedra, flanked by Bruno Dagnino, left, and Enzo Angilletta (Metrica)

Who among us has not sat in a pub thinking, I’m sick of my job and I’d rather concentrate on watching the fabulous FC Barcelona playing on the screen? Few, I imagine. But how many of us have watched a game, knocked back a beer and then come up with a genius idea which Barcelona (and many other elite teams) would want a piece of? Only one springs to my mind: Ruben Saavedra, co-founder and CEO of Metrica Sports, which applies scientific data analysis to the understanding of football.

Saavedra was born in Barcelona and might have played for them except for two reasons: firstly he was no good at football; and secondly he preferred to play basketball (the second sport in Spain). But he first went to the Camp Nou at the tender age of seven and signed up as a club member – a lifelong committed fan. This was in 1988, even before they had won their first Champions League final (not till 1992). And he is fanatic enough to remember in what minute the goal was scored that clinched the title. “You can change your car,” he says. “You can change your wife. But you can’t change your team.”

When he realised he was not that good at basketball either, Saavedra buckled down to his studies and ended up taking biotechnical engineering and medicine at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. He was bilingual in Spanish and Catalan, but decided to come to London to improve his command of English. He realised he still had a long way to go in terms of pronunciation when he walked into a pub and ordered a beer and the barman couldn’t understand a word. “I thought, I’m in a pub – what else could I want?” He honed his linguistic skills in Beckenham and Slough, working for a couple of pharmaceutical companies, then took off to Holland to do a PhD at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.