Rugby recruitment leans on detailed data as clubs adopt Oval Insights — 22 October 2026

Alex Sanderson and Phil Dowson, directors of rugby at Sale and Northampton respectively, described on 22 October 2026 how their clubs are increasingly using detailed match data to guide recruitment decisions, while third-party providers such as Oval Insights supply the underlying information.

Angus Campbell of Oval Insights said: "I've watched more rugby in the last five years than I think I'll ever watch in the rest of my life." His team, based in an office on an industrial park outside Leeds, monitor live feeds from multiple matches and code events in real time; two people tag primary actions as they happen and a further four add finer detail afterwards. For each match the operation produces about 2,000 individual events and roughly 10,000 pieces of information for every match in each significant top-tier tournament, which feed into Oval's Advantage database; all 10 Prem sides, just over half the United Rugby Championship (URC) teams and a significant number of Top 14 clubs subscribe. Campbell and Oval's customer success manager Sam Kisbee work with clubs to extract value from the data.

Clubs are applying a 'Moneyball' approach used in other sports to rugby recruitment, using metrics to map player profiles to game models; Alex Sanderson said: "When you have got a raft of possible players, stats are always a big factor to help understand which of them fit your game model. We know how many metres we make post contact, what our defence depends on, and what attacking decisions we make and you can map those metrics. You can create a spider graph to find players that fit the 'shape' that you want for a particular position." Sanderson oversaw a large squad turnover at Sale this summer with 12 new players arriving, and Sale signed Courtney Lawes, who has returned to English rugby at the age of 37 after two seasons in the French second tier, with his ProD2 numbers cited as influential in offering a one-year deal.

Phil Dowson set out Northampton's approach to replacing Lawes with the club's game model at its centre: "We also have a game model around what we want different positions to look like. If you can't get everything you need in a position, at a price point you can afford, you have to make amends elsewhere. So to replace Courtney Lawes, we needed some line-out ability, some turnover ability, some ball-carrying and also some leadership. The game is now being coded in so much more depth than previously and the challenge is to use that to separate the wheat from the chaff. We try and find people who fit the bill, trim the list depending on what we can afford and then do due diligence by looking more deeply at their performances."

Oval has built models that flag players who outperform expectations in specific game aspects, but clubs are also sourcing outside expertise: Sale are bringing in an artificial intelligence company recently acquired by their billionaire owner Simon Orange to work on injury prevention and player availability with plans to add recruitment later, while Northampton have sought input from the world of Formula 1 via Ayao Komatsu, who has rugby experience and has discussed his data approach with Dowson. Komatsu, who "turned out for Old Wheatleyans and Loughborough when he moved from his native Japan to study in the Midlands in the 1990s," and who was a scrum-half in his youth, influenced Dowson's view on combining data with human judgement: "For Ayao, the most important thing is the driver," says Dowson. "How does he feel? For Haas, the driver's backside is the best receptor of data. Even in a sport like F1, which is so data driven, he is still going to the human element of it. That is something that resonates with me."

Sanderson stressed the limits of statistics in isolation and the need for character assessment: "That data dive and performance analysis will only get them to the door, really," says Sanderson. "Then it's all about character. It has to be about character, because there's quite a lot of players that consistently look quite good, but won't be the right fit for the group." He and Dowson both emphasised that coaching observation and squad cohesion remain part of selection beyond what databases can capture.

Oval's operation grew from co-founders Gordon Fairley and James Tozer working as a two-man band, coding games themselves from a flat in Balham and producing bespoke reports; as the business expanded over six years it changed its delivery model and now provides tools rather than single-client scouting to avoid conflicts of interest. Campbell said: "We have to now say 'we'll give you the tools and whoever uses our tools the best is going to find the gold the quickest'", and added that, occasionally, the team will still note transfers and comment internally: "Ever so often though you will see a player move and we will say to each other, 'that's a good signing'. Or, alternatively, that it isn't!"

Rugby faces hurdles in matching the data-driven progress seen in some other sports because actions are more collective and definitions can be subjective, making contributions harder to attribute — a forward's role in a rolling maul is not as clear-cut as scoring a home run in baseball, and Opta's surveys with example clips do not always produce consensus. Cash and limited access to ultra-wide stadium camera angles also constrain some tracking initiatives, while Premier League budgets can offer greater resources to develop machine learning; nevertheless, the databases and the thinking about how to use them are deep, and statistics are increasingly shaping scouting departments around the rugby world.