Jake's Road Report is Gemini Sports founder Jake Schuster’s weekly update from professional football's frontlines. He travels globally, meeting club executives to share candid insights on AI's role in football. These raw, actionable thoughts are delivered weekly, with meeting details kept confidential and specific intel omitted.

—-

Martín Zubimendi was one of Arsenal's key signings this past window. He was a known entity, sure—but he was playing for a mid-table team. His stats weren't anything particularly eye-catching. On paper, you'd look at his numbers and think, "Ok. I guess?"

But now Arsenal is killing it with him.

Here's the thing: his stats still don't look great. Yet anyone with eyeballs and a brain can watch him play and see how good he is. As a defensive midfielder, he occupies one of the hardest positions to decipher. He has to make good passes, break up plays, provide cover, dictate tempo like any #6, but often times it’s the things that *dont* happen because of his movements, or the cascading impact of a clever little pass that isn’t “line breaking” or “chance creating”, which make him so incredible.

The stats that we have don't show he's brilliant. But clearly, he is.

This is where the analytics community should be getting excited, rather than confused. I recently saw an (excellent) Twitter account posting about #6’s where he showed up very average… I reckon we should be enthusiastically trying to figure out why someone like Zubimendi is so effective. We should be working to quantify what makes him so elite and well-rounded. That would help us all immensely.

This is exactly the kind of work analytics departments should be freed up to do. Digging deeper into the hard research. Solving the puzzles that matter. Not being stuck on menial tasks like pipeline automation and application building.

This is the stuff that actually moves the needle. Figuring out what makes a player like Zubimendi so indispensable to a top club when his numbers may suggest he shouldn't be. Understanding what others can't yet measure? This is where real competitive advantage lives.

So here's my call to action: Go figure it out.

Clearly the people at Arsenal figured something out. Maybe they built a proprietary model that captures his spatial awareness and defensive positioning. Maybe they identified patterns in how he facilitates transitions that don't show up in traditional metrics. Or maybe their Spanish head coach had Zubimendi on his radar for years, and knew deep down what he was getting.

Either way, someone understood his value when “the data” didn't make it obvious.

That gap—between what we can see and what we can measure—is where your analytics team should be spending their time. Not rebuilding dashboards for the 5th time this year. Not debugging data pipelines. But solving the most interesting and pressing problems that could help you find the next Zubimendi before anyone else does.

Because the clubs that figure this out first? They're the ones who'll be signing players everyone else overlooks, paying rational prices, and ultimately, watching them become indispensable to their squads.

The rest will simply keep wondering what they missed.