Analysis-Based Recruitment - Best Practice

A 10-point plan to create a successful recruitment strategy in franchise cricket

Understanding best practice in analytics-based recruitment was one of the major topics in my recent Cricket Analytics Seminar, so I thought I’d write about it further here for my next post.

If you missed the Seminar, a recording of the three-hour discussion is available for purchase. Please make a £15 payment on PayPal to Daniel.weston79@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll send the recording to you via email.

My view is that such an approach is rarely implemented in either franchise cricket or short-format international cricket (including ODIs), so there is plenty of competitive edge available for those teams and decision-makers who adopt this approach.

So, when starting from scratch (which most teams need to do), here is my 10-point plan for best practice for analysis-based recruitment for T20 franchises.

1 - Creation of a ‘Blueprint for Success’ document which will be a long-term guide to use both now and in the future to establish a playing identity by understanding which strategies and types of player drive success in the relevant league.

The first and arguably the most important area for any T20 franchise team is to understand ‘what works’ in their relevant league, and also for their home venue.

While a general understanding of drivers of success is a positive, it’s important to differentiate between various leagues. For example, the type of player required to achieve success in the Big Bash (with many venues having big boundary dimensions) is going to be different from that in the T20 Blast (mostly batting-friendly conditions, particularly in the South Group with small boundary dimensions).

We’ve actually seen BBL teams make this mistake quite a few times in recent years, picking inexperienced English batters playing one of their first overseas T20 leagues. Despite the talent and high ceiling of these players, they’ve struggled to adapt quickly to the difference in conditions - the teams recruiting them should have been more aware of these differences.

Creating this blueprint assists with optimizing squad construction and avoiding costly recruitment mistakes such as the above example.

Moving forward, I will be increasing the volume of content on here (as well as other various platforms, including an imminent announcement), and some of this content will be behind a paywall - including the other nine points of this plan which continue below.

For an affordable monthly cost to subscribe to this Substack, you will be able to access all of my content.