Born to Use Video: How SC Paderborn Use Analysis to Fuel Their Recent Success

Modernising game analy­sis, devel­op­ing play­ers and pro­vid­ing a coach­ing path­way: SC Paderborn 07 are using video analy­sis to improve every aspect of their club.

We are amidst a suc­cess­ful era for Paderborn, who have achieved con­sec­u­tive pro­mo­tions back to the sec­ond tier of German foot­ball, and now to the top-flight Bundesliga. Video analy­sis was an inte­gral part of not only the team’s prepa­ra­tions for match­es, but also the devel­op­ment of play­ers and coach­es of the pitch.

Paderborn sports direc­tor Markus Kroesche was first exposed to video analy­sis dur­ing his time coach­ing in the Bundesliga where he saw how much val­ue it could bring to his club.

“I was famil­iar with video analy­sis and espe­cial­ly the Sportscode sys­tem, since my days in Bayer Leverkusen,” said Kroesche.

“I got exposed to it for the first time, and we had to trans­fer this to Paderborn.”

Before using Hudl and Sportscode for video analy­sis, Paderborn were sim­ply play­ing video clips on a sin­gle screen which didn’t allow for coach­es to per­son­alise analy­sis for par­tic­u­lar play­ers and positions.

“Our sit­u­a­tion was that only some­times we got video mate­r­i­al, or rather the video was sim­ply played and shown using a start-stop func­tion,” said Kroesche.

“That means the coach­es were not in a posi­tion to pre­pare scenes to show to indi­vid­ual play­ers and the result­ing qual­i­ty of analy­sis using video scenes was just not as high as it is now, where the most impor­tant ele­ments are cut together and pre­pared accord­ing­ly. The mes­sage has become much bet­ter and more effi­cient, and that’s also deci­sive for us as a club.

“Naturally this sys­tem per­mits a much improved, more qual­i­fied analysis.”

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“People perceive more through video than when it’s just written down, and I think what we have now is a giant step forward.”
Markus Kroesche, Paderborn sports director

Paderborn’s cap­tain, Christian Strohdiek, has been a Paderborn play­er for over a decade. Recently he’s seen the lev­el and detail of video analy­sis grow.

“In the pro leagues, analy­sis is more impor­tant. We get exam­ples of the opponent’s strengths and weak­ness­es,” said Strohdiek.

“We high­light these points which are shown to the entire team to ensure that every­one can pre­pare for them.”

It’s the spe­cif­ic aspects of analy­sis that impress­es Paderborn’s cap­tain the most, though.

“We can pre­pare specif­i­cal­ly for the key play­ers of the oppo­nent, we look for things such what side of the pitch the oppo­nent will come down, or cer­tain move­ment sequences,” said Strohdiek.

“Does he turn to the left or right? Or does he com­mon­ly play with the inside of his foot or his out­step? People per­ceive more through video than when it’s just writ­ten down, and I think what we have now is a giant step forward.”

Assistant man­ag­er Danilo de Souza spent sev­er­al years as a pro­fes­sion­al play­er in four dif­fer­ent coun­tries. His knowl­edge of video analy­sis honed dur­ing his play­ing years now helps him devel­op his coach­ing career at Paderborn.

“I always had a pas­sion for video analy­sis. Before I even had this job, I col­lect­ed and analysed over 1,000 match­es myself,” said Danilo.

“Back when I was still play­ing, I watched every game where I thought I could learn some­thing and analysed it to maybe draw some lessons to become a bet­ter player.

“That’s how I start­ed doing this coach­ing job, and of course video analy­sis trained my brain and eyes to see bet­ter and notice things oth­ers could often miss.”

Hudl and Sportscode are an integral daily component of Danilo’s role as assistant manager, which is a hybrid role of coach and analyst rolled into one.

“We as coach­es use Hudl and Sportscode dai­ly to pre­pare for our next oppo­nents, analyse our last match, and to pre­pare for train­ing ses­sions,” said Danillo.

“We get a chance four to five times a week to show the play­ers video on the Hudl plat­form, to show where they can improve a spe­cif­ic exer­cise in train­ing. We use sta­tis­tics from Sportscode to present find­ings to our team.”

Danilo is adamant that the video analy­sis tools at his dis­pos­al are essen­tial to his coach­ing position.

“For me Hudl made my work so much eas­i­er and for time man­age­ment it’s essen­tial to analyse a match with speed, because we train and play sev­er­al times per week,” said Danilo.

“A match lasts 90 min­utes. But it takes a lot longer for a coach when you take the time for analy­sis into consideration.

“In terms of speed and time fac­tor, Hudl is the best there is. It would take three times as long to do what we do with­out it.”

Not only is Danilo util­is­ing video analy­sis to grow his own career, he’s also using it to nur­ture Paderborn’s tal­ent of tomorrow.

Aside from senior squad, Paderborn are now using video analy­sis in their Under 21 and Under 19 pro­grams. With plans for the Under 15 and 17 age group to come.

10 of Paderborn’s first team squad is under the age of 23 and cur­rent­ly there are three home­grown play­ers in the team — Strohdiek, Sebastian Schonlau and Sergio Gucciardo.

Gucciardo joined Paderborn’s acad­e­my in 2015 and at 19 years old has already made four appear­ances as well as pick­ing up two caps for the Turkish Under 17 side.

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“We want to see as many players possible so we have a bet­ter idea of how they’ll be when they graduate to the senior squad and how we can best integrate them. Through Hudl we can view footage of the players daily and produce a database of the best clips for each player.”
Danilo de Souza, Assistant manager

Danilo is quick to cred­it video analy­sis to the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and train­ing of the next gen­er­a­tion of Paderborn players.

“It’s very impor­tant for us that the youth teams work with Hudl, first­ly to keep every­thing uni­form, and cru­cial­ly to improve and facil­i­tate the shar­ing of videos,” said Danilo.

According to Danilo, a key issue for youth coach­es can be mon­i­tor­ing all their tal­ent effec­tive­ly, which is solved through effec­tive shar­ing of video summaries.

“Truthfully, we don’t always have a chance to see these young play­ers live, because some­times we will have a simul­ta­ne­ous match or we train at dif­fer­ent times,” said Danilo.

“We want to see as many play­ers pos­si­ble so we have a bet­ter idea of how they’ll be when they grad­u­ate to the senior squad and how we can best integrate them. Through Hudl we can view footage of the play­ers dai­ly and pro­duce a data­base of the best clips for each player.

“These playlists are avail­able for us to view in under 5 min­utes, which has made our job so much easier.”

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