So... every club's a tech company now

Ok, I lost the battle. Although Get Goalside's position has always been that it's a little odd for small businesses to all have their own tech wings, that is what is happening.

Manchester United were hiring recently for a platform engineer, another recent job ad reminded me that Derby County's Sporting Intelligence unit use Palantir (which the Supporters Group recently questioned), and if 'hackathon on the lake' hosts Como 1907 don't make building out your own tech infrastructure seem alluring then I don't know what will.

Why, despite what some blogger says, are football clubs all spinning up their own mini-Googles?

There are many ways you could slice the lemon, but from a club's perspective you just want an edge. That either comes from having access to data nobody else has, doing better data science than anyone else, or doing better 'process' than anyone else. In the world of widespread data but a relatively adolescent (and walled garden-laden) data market, you can still get data no-one else has by transforming it in various ways in your own data system. Data science naturally follows from access to this, for which you need the engineering in place. And by 'process', of course we mean dashboards, and we all know that your dashboards are better than those dashboards that someone else cooked up.

This is all a serious consideration clubs have to make. As everyone well knows, you can't have your cake and eat it a second time, and the time you spend building your internal system is time you can't spend on actually doing data science or process. A case in point: a recent rash of LinkedIn activity about mapping players across data sources. People could be doing so much better things with their time. So much process being lost in time.

Interestingly (and understandably), it seems like the shape-shifting is happening on the other side of things too: tech companies becoming more like clubs. 'New wave' data companies like Impect, Skillcorner, Gradient, Kognia, and presumably others who need to do better marketing* all have a reaaaal strong smell of the boot room. The bet they have all seemed to take is 'coaches don't speak data language; we will speak coach language instead'; although it's worth saying that, as many a Duolingo user will know, deciding to speak a language is easy, pulling it off is harder.

*or more targeted at me, personally

This morphing of both sides of the market is creating a Rorschach blob. Look at it from one angle, and it's a wonderful opportunity for people to work more closely, more easily, more successfully. Look at it another, and everyone's starting to look a bit like each other, doing much the same things. Everyone's syncing datasets, moulding source data into methodology, excusing themselves from validating the methodology because a cron job needs fixing. Emailing a data provider, adding a new exception to a once-apparently-simple rule. Creating reporting systems and dashboards.

Dashboards are the crabs of information design.

For the moment, at least, this situation probably makes the useful hiring profiles different and weird. If the professional space is wanting to build out like tech and tech is wanting to take on the expertise of the pro space, product, process, and domain data know-how is the new triple threat. Good data scientists aren't necessarily good at UX, but slick product-builders don't necessarily understand the ticking heart of a football club's day-to-day. Everyone's sure going to be learning a lot, at least.

The transfer of experience will benefit the best, for sure. There are things from software system design that can be applied to general organisational processes (what parts of the system are tightly coupled), things from football analytics that can be applied off-pitch (xG's very skewed value distribution, and relationship with variance). The best male tennis player right now spent his childhood skiing. People can thrive in different environments. Smart people who've been around different areas of this ecosystem should be in demand.

But I know when a take has run its course. Y'all wanna build your own software, I get it. I see why. Particularly with AI in your back pocket (although token costs can go up as well as down). Fittingly, in this footballing era of midfielderfication, the football industry is increasingly as one, in a footballtechification. Let's see how the next chapter goes.