Viscidi helped Prandelli build a match and data analysis department for the first team, which was then expanded to oversee all the age groups within the youth sector. Throughout his time at Fiorentina, Prandelli had worked with a match analyst from Opta called Antonio Gagliardi. “We took him on because I made the following recommendation to the Federation: ‘Why should we pay a company to give us Gagliardi instead of paying him ourselves? Why don’t we hire him?’.”
Gagliardi is one of the sharpest minds in the Italian game, trailblazing match analysis within the FIGC. Andrea Pirlo recently appointed him to his Juventus coaching staff and Viscidi first became aware of him when he was at SICS, one of the pioneering data companies in Italy. The pair of them devised a metric — l’indice di pericolosita, or threat index — to measure performance.