Coach Colbert uses a system called FIAT for Football to carefully analyze game footage and player performance. However, the current implementation is limited due to constraints on staffing and time. Colbert seeks advice on improving the analysis to better inform training strategies.

1. FIAT FOR FOOTBALL
A New IT Outsourcing Based
Solution
for the Bradford United Football Club of London
Bradford United is one of the best known teams in British
Premier League Football (Soccer).
In the past, it has won the league several times and even more
importantly, has been among the top five teams for well over
three decades. Tony Colbert is the current coach of Bradford
United and he has been mulling over a set of problems for the
last several weeks.
For a variety of reasons the current Bradford United team is
dominated by young and upcoming players. This has meant a
slump in performance in the current league as the new players
struggle to come to terms with a much more experienced and
strategically well developed opposition. However, Coach
Colbert, who was in part responsible for the recruitment of
young talented players, knows that a young side also means it
has the capacity to improve rapidly and dramatically if given
the proper guidance. As a matter of fact Coach Colbert’s

2. strategy during the recruitment seasons of 2009 and 2010 were
premised on this idea of rapid improvements in at least a
segment of new talented players. Towards this effect, Colbert
had also started a new regime in training and analysis that has
already seen some dividends. The problem Coach Colbert has
been mulling over is how to improve his training and analysis
infrastructure.
Named after his mentor, Carlos Amin Faridi, a legendary
Spanish-Algerian coach, Colbert uses a system for analysis and
training called the Faridi Information and Analysis Technique
for Football (FIAT for Football). FIAT involves a very careful
collection of information and post game analysis that helps the
coach determine what development each player needs.
For implementing FIAT in coaching Bradford United, Colbert
has a coaching staff of ten – four Assistant Coaches and six Ball
Monitoring Staff. On the morning of each game, Colbert meets
with his Assistant Coaches for two hours, with input from the
captain, to determine the opening line-up for the game and the
potential pattern of substitution as the game proceeds. At the
start whistle the entire staff is strategically located all along the
sidelines as required by FIAT guidelines and they follow the
game carefully taking notes intermittently on what different
players did faced with different situations on the field. For
instance, in a recent game between Liverpool and Bradford

3. United, one of the Assistant Coaches was able to spot that
Oliver Ridley, one of Bradford United’s mid-fielders invariably
ended up pushing the ball too far to the left of the target player
in long passes. The Asst Coach noted this thrice in the game and
each time he made a note of his observation and the exact time
on the game clock when he had noticed Ridley making the error.
Once the game is over, late in the night or early next morning
the notes from all the Coaches and Ball Monitors is
consolidated and overlaps eliminated to create a draft version of
the Video Segmentation Input Note (VSIN). It is handed over to
Colbert for any additions or deletions to the notes list. Colbert’s
first post-Game activity, again as laid out in the FIAT system,
is an early morning meeting with the players for the standard
Post Game Player Feedback Meeting (PGPFM). During this
meeting, normally over breakfast the day after each game,
Colbert listens to the players and their own assessment of the
game. He uses this input to add notes to the VSIN. Colbert
finalizes the notes and hands the final VSIN back to the Ball
Monitors who then get on to the tedious task of locating and
isolating the digital video feed on each incident indicated in the
final notes.
All Premier League football games are monitored by 22 cameras
– each following one player.

4. At a minimum this means about 12 to 14 hours of video feed for
each game relevant to the players from any one team. The Ball
Monitors, armed with the final VSIN note and an AVID Multi
track video editing software, go through the 12 to 14 hours of
video feed to locate the incidents/plays identified in the notes.
As they locate and isolate each segment of the video feed
required, the Ball Monitors add further notes. For instance, in
the case of Ridley, three segments – Minute 11 Second 14,
Minute 23 Second 06 and Minute 49 Second 47 were the ones
that were isolated during the Bradford United-Liverpool
game analysis. As the Ball Monitor watched the three segments
again and again, he added the following notes in the margin
“Note Approach to ball. Left leg out of position”. Sometimes
these additional notes can be quite extensive as this is the first
time that anybody is watching the video feed with any degree of
attention. Once all the necessary video segments have been
isolated, the Ball Monitors hand over the CD and the Updated
VSIN notes to Colbert.
Colbert and his team of Assistant Coaches meet for their First
Post Game Analysis Session (FPGAS) and watch the segments
and analyze them for a range of issues – overall strategy
failures during the game, problems, if any, with individual
players execution of game strategy, failures, if any, of

5. individual players techniques, specific moves by players in
terms of speed, aggression level etc, quality of dribbling,
passing etc to name just a few of the things they pay attention
to. At the end of the analysis session two notes are drawn up.
The first is a note on Training Strategy that goes out as the
document that guides the coaches during the next few days of
training and the second a “Supplementary Requirements”
document that goes back to the Ball Monitors to extract further
video feed that is once again fed back to Colbert for the Second
Analysis Session (SAS).
Colbert has been painfully aware, each time he has followed the
broad structure of FIAT laid down by Faridi that its current
implementation is weak and incomplete. In terms of actual data
that he would like to isolate about each game, there is much
more he would like to see. For instance, he would like to see all
the tackles that a specific player makes to get a sense of the
consistency and technique a player uses in tackling a player of
the opposite team with ball possession. So also, he would like to
see how a specific player is moving under conditions of non-
possession of the ball as would he love to see speed of
movement while having the ball in-possession. The list of the
different parsings of the video feed that he would find valuable
is extensive and what has currently been implemented is limited
and patchy. In large part this is because of two factors: the

6. available length of time between any two games and if he were
to try and implement all his requirements it would need an army
of ball monitors to be working on the video feed. Already he is
faced with rumblings from the teams ownership about the
budget being out of control and so the prospects of him hiring
any new staff is next to nil. Colbert’s reasons for wanting such
an extensive analysis is simple. Not only does he believe that
Faridi got it right but football, unlike many other sports, is one
where the game is created and executed through many moments
that seem non-crucial to the final outcome. For instance, how
fast a player is moving on the field may not have anything
directly to do with the sole goal scored in a game but it may
have been central to the issue of why so few goal scoring
opportunities were created. With the current system of limited
video extraction he can only look at the “highlights” of the
game whereas the real analysis of the game may also lie in some
of the more inconspicuous moments of the game. Colbert, then,
has been thinking hard about how to crack this problem of
information shortage as he sees it.
Often there is just 72 hours between two games and therefore all
this has to happen during the first 48 of those 72 hours. On the
morning of the next game the coaches and the captain meet to
consider all the Post Game Analysis and decide on the Starting
eleven for the upcoming game. Once the starting eleven for the

7. game is identified, Colbert spends the last hour before the game
back with the FIAT video segments that involves each of the
players that constitute the starting eleven, makes some final
notes, based on which he has a brief word with some of the
players as to what they need to think of while on field and uses
the notes for the final pep talk before the players walk on to the
field.
Assume you have run into Colbert at a pub in London and he
has described the entire system as described above. He has
sought your advice, as an Outsourcing and Process Re-
Engineering expert on how to approach the problem he is
facing. Assume that Colbert’s description of the problem he is
faced with is the equivalent of him putting out an RFI (request
for information).
1.
Draw a Context Diagram for the FIAT for Football process
2.
Draw a top level Data Flow Diagram for the FIAT for Football
method
3.
Blow up any one

8. non-trivial
process into a first level Data Flow Diagram
After having drawn the above three models:
4.
If you were to write a response to Colbert’s problem, would
outsourcing be part of the solution? Explain. (Maximum 20
lines of text)