West Bromwich Albion’s little-known year long process behind Ryan Mason’s squad building

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West Bromwich Albion’s sporting director has revealed the one key change to their transfer strategy that has dictated the Championship side’s window activity.

West Brom had a busy window, selling Tom Fellows to Southampton for £10million and bringing in Birmingham City captain Krystian Bielik amid other deals.

Ryan Mason’s first season in charge is going well, with the Baggies sitting second in the Championship heading into the first international break, and their star Isaac Price is thriving for the Republic of Ireland.

Now, the club’s sporting director Andrew Nestor has detailed the steps the club took to ensure Mason and co. had the best chances at succeeding this season – and he’s sworn by using data for recruitment.

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West Brom sporting director Andrew Nestor says data team’s ‘shadow squad’ played huge role in transfer window

Asked about his view on the importance of data in recruitment in an interview with Albion’s YouTube channel this week, Nestor said: “There’s [been] a lot behind the scenes, this has been a year-long process. I really wanted to utilise my past network and relationships when taking on this task.

“The first thing was bringing in a data team, that was quickly embraced by my colleagues here, we’ve really built a nice process between our scouting team and our data team, built a platform where all our information lives, and there’s a great work flow between everyone in the group.

“It enables us to quickly evaluate players, as well as identify players. We build a strategy window by window, and that feeds into what we call a shadow squad. That’s managed by the scouting staff. They’re players who check every box across data, scouting and finance, and if they’re attainable.

“We can look one or two windows ahead. We don’t deviate off our shadow squad, so in each position we identify a handful of players we’d want to sign and we go for those players and we don’t make exceptions as we don’t want to fall into the traps of making long term mistakes.”

Nestor has been at the club since last summer, with the former Bologna director and Tampa Bay Rowdies president being CEO of Bilkul Football Group, Albion’s parent club.

West Bromwich Albion players on international duty

Price is among the Baggies aces on international duty this month, with the 21-year-old looking to add to his 22 caps.

Mikey Johnston has also been called up for the Republic of Ireland, while Chris Mepham is with Wales.

Callum Styles played all of Hungary’s 2-2 draw with Ireland. Aune Heggebo will be representing Norway over the break.

Every club in the Championship has at least one player playing in the World Cup qualifiers this month.