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Scout, Monitor, Select: How the UAE National Team Identify and Develop Talent

28 Sep, 2022

5 Min Read

By Simon Caney

Karim Tayara may be only 29-years-old but he’s already steeped in experience when it comes to football. After completing a sports science degree at Brunel University in London, he joined English Premier League club West Ham United, working with their academy teams and their women first team, and the club’s boys under-23 starlets before moving back to the United Arab Emirates, where he is now the national team’s Performance and Video Analyst.

This broad range of work so early in his career means he is perfectly placed to understand how technology can assist teams in the modern game, and the UAE National Team have embraced this technology wholeheartedly.

That much is clear when Tayara is asked to give a rundown of his role, as he names a long list: “Working with coaches to help them with their analysis, whether that’s opponent analysis, set piece analysis, pre-match preparation, training analysis, looking at training and game model analysis, seeing how the team is playing, what’s the style of the coach, what’s going well, what’s going less well, post-match analysis for the team with support of the coaches to work out what are the best clips to show to the players, as well as live analysis with Hudl Replay.”

“We just started using Hudl Replay, so I can capture live data and code at the same time, which is amazing. On a match day at half time or when a game finishes I have clips to show the youth team coaches or the First Team Technical Staff. You can also livestream straight to the bench so the coach can use that information to work on different areas in real time.”

Performance and Video Analyst Karim Tayara has brought experience from abroad back to UAE's National Team setup.

Another key component of Tayara’s role is to help direct talent identification for the national team, using Wyscout. He says: “Obviously the first step is to watch players in games so first of all I’ll go to a game. Wyscout has good coverage of the UAE Pro League, so afterwards I’ll go into Wyscout and make a short video reel of that player, monitoring him across a few recent games. It’s also helpful for new coaches to have that information over more than one game, so that we can keep a database of players we are interested in.”

Tayara is also committed to assisting the First Team Technical staff with looking at players with the team’s style in mind, to ensure the players will fit into the system set out by head coach Rodolfo Arruabarrena. “There’s a big trend to look at certain statistical models when recruiting players, which is useful, but one of the most important things is how the player suits the style the coach wants to play,” he says.

“Say you have an offensive style and want to dominate possession of the ball, you might look at certain characteristics of how a player keeps the ball under pressure or how a midfielder plays in tight spaces.

Or perhaps with a goalkeeper you want someone who can build from his zone to the next so when he receives the ball he is comfortable with it. Or you might look for a striker who is aggressive when he presses and reacts well when he loses the ball.

“They are not necessarily direct examples from the UAE team, but it always comes back to the certain principles the coach wants, then using those principles to see who fits into that category.”

Wyscout allows the UAE National Team to access video and data from any player around the world that they want to track for selection.

When working directly with players, Tayara uses Wyscout and Hudl Sportscode to monitor and analyze their performance.

“Let me use Sportscode and how we work with youth teams as an example,” he says. “With youth teams the focus is on individual development so I do a lot of work with them on strengths and weaknesses. I might record a training session and we’ll have some tasks for certain players and I’ll analyze the session on the basis of that, make a few clips on Sportscode, maybe use Studio too, and then we can show the player what he did well and what he can do better.

“We use Wyscout more for the first team players. We can look at players in their club games and if they have done something we like - or don’t like - we can take the clips from Wyscout, review them before a training camp and then show the players. It allows them to see and understand much better what we want them to do.

Hudl Sportscode allows the UAE coaching team to create individual development plans by breaking down match footage into individual clips and playlists tailored for each player or position.

Studio is becoming increasingly important to the UAE’s efforts, helping players visualize their performances and how they can improve. “Telestration is really, really important these days,” says Tayara. “It makes video analysis so much better as for a long time we didn’t have access to something like that – but the quality is really good, I can add it to the video I’m showing players and coaches and they love it. It’s really helpful for them - whether it’s game model analysis, opponent analysis or training analysis, it just makes everything so much clearer. It’s also really easy to use, which is great.”

When combining all three products – Wyscout, Sportscode and Studio – Tayara says he is able to save time and be much more efficient. All first team coaches, their assistants, goalkeeper coach, youth team and Olympic team coaches have access to the tools so he can direct his data wherever he needs.

An example of the drawings that can be layered on top of game footage using Studio.

“Wyscout allows you to access all teams across the world, clubs or international. I can download them, which is very quick. I like to watch the full games, from the first minute to the last, then I can upload to Sportscode, which is also quick. I can make my codes and my analysis and export them, create a database and use Studio to add animation. So it’s a really quick workflow.”

210,000 full matches, 550,000 players and teams on the platform - learn more about Wyscout - The Football Platform.

Studio allows Hudl Sportscode users to quickly add professional, dynamic drawings and graphics to multiple camera angles of footage. Watch our case study with Bundesliga heavyweights VfL Wolfsburg, where they run us through their analysis workflow with Studio.