He played one more game in the league and scored one more goal, two more games in the cup but one less goal, 10/34 for Ambrose, 10/31 for Miovski. Roughly the same, basically. Difficult to say what that tells us, other than data doesn't tell us much about a player! In theory, we should have been able to take data from Ramadani and Miovski, and populate that back into other data in the Hungarian league to get a good feel for what works between the two leagues. Because that is the key issue we have when scouting. We could look at actual performances of Devlin and McGrath and have a very good idea what they offer in the SPFL playing against SPFL players, but we can't make those same assumptions when buying foreigners. The other difficult is knowing whether they were just good because a team could carry them, or if the quality was of their own making, which you can get a fairly good idea of when buying in Scotland. I seem to remember that Ambrose's YouTube reel was even fairly gash, but I could be wrong! Are there reasons, such as failure to settle in the city, extreme nerves etc that could have effected him? Possibly. Or is it more likely that the Hungarian league, for the most part, is at a level below SPFL and that a player like Ambrose could manage 10 goals at his peak, whereas Miovski was being under-utilised by his teammates abilties and had acres of development potential? I'd guess the latter. It'd be really interesting to hear how the club used its data, not only to find Miovski, but to feed it back in to find Ambrose. What sort of quality checking occurred beyond the data by watching in-person, and looking for areas where we see opportunity for improvement. I'm hoping the club can really build on their recruitment strategy, but it does feel a little like data-based guesswork at times! A bloody difficult job, certainly.
An interesting comparison for Ambrose might be Rudden for QP at the weekend. When he was coming through for Partick, he looked very good: scoring goals, making a nuisance of himself and being strong and aggressive. Dundee (I think) took a punt on him to make the step up, but he never managed it. He was always lacking the pace over ten yards, the touch to take it down quickly and bring others in, or the quick feet that might win him space. A good all-round performer, that could be made better with fitness coaching and so on, but with a limited ceiling at Championship and maybe lower end Premiership with a lot of work. I think Ambrose has a similar ceiling. The couple of good layoffs he had at the weekend were after 2 seconds to get the ball under control, and safe offloads to a guy in space - something Rudden could easily have done at the other end. Only one of the two scored their only chance (although Ambrose did well with his header).