The Grand Rewrite
If all the world's a stage, each day is a script rewrite. Some rewrites are easier than others, and – this is the segue – the same is true for data pipelines.
That's where we're going to start, in this rattle through of things that I've bookmarked on LinkedIn: Manchester United and London City Lionesses.
United are hiring three roles, all earmarked as 'senior' in the job titles (data engineer, data scientist, software engineer). There will be no jokes, referencing the men's team's current travails, none at all. If you want jokes, there's enough in the Get Goalside piece from 2022 when they were hiring for decision scientists.
There are a number of different avenues that you could go down with a data department at your disposal, let's list as many as possible:
- Identifying general undervalued (or overvalued) areas in the transfer market
- Looking for players who fit specific role-based requirements for the first team
[...]
- Optimal C-suite engineering (retain as few of your bosses as possible, as many as needed)
Meanwhile, WSL side London City (actually their ownership group, Kynisca) are hiring for an 'embedded' data scientist and data engineer, and who'll work on-site either in London or in Lyon.
The idea of data staff being 'embedded' with a team's performance staff seems to be slowly growing. There was a time, a few years ago, when people talked about the rise of the 'analyst-coach', a coach who got analysis and got numbers who'd help bridge the gap, and this is a similar idea just starting from the other side of the river.
Both (or all five) of the job ads are better written than job ads you'd see even a couple of years ago. That said, it's interesting - within the broader context of football data roles - that the London City data engineer role "will own and evolve the data foundations that support performance analysis, innovation, and decision-making across our multi-club football ecosystem", and asks for "2+ years of experience building data pipelines from APIs or external data sources".
I don't highlight this to put Kynisca in a bad light (partly because the company is named after Cynisca of Sparta, first woman to win at the Olympic Games, and I know the beginnings of an ancient curse when I see one). I only mention it because there are football clubs who will have hired people to produce their data pipelines with far less experience than Kynisca are aiming at. Those pipelines are gonna be in more of a need of a rewrite than most, at clubs who will likely be less familiar with the concept of tech debt than most.
In the grand marketplace of job roles, that probably leaves a gap (in 2-5 years' time) for experienced freelancers. This is another segue. Nick Meacham of SportsPro Media posted the other day about what feels like a spike in 'advisors' (in the sports industry more broadly):
It feels like every other day I see highly experienced leaders — people who’ve spent decades in sport, made mistakes, learned lessons, and delivered real success — struggling to land another full-time role at a similar level. [...] Instead, many are moving into advisory work, taking on projects for the very organisations or investors who won’t commit to them permanently.
The gig economification of the C-Suite?
Football data, at least, seems to be successfully swimming against the current. The United and Kynisca roles seem to be for the long haul, and the English FA recently had an ad up for a Head of Football Intelligence and Innovation.
As far as football data and technology is concerned, senior leadership roles are still very much being created for the first time. The wheel is not being re-made, it's being put together for the first time. Wheel re-inventions are happening though, and aren't necessarily such a bad thing, because PlayerData have collaborated with Mitre on a GPS-enabled football. As an English child raised on the BBC, the urge to say "other tracker-enabled footballs are available" is strong, but the only other one I'm aware of is the Adidas-Kinexon one.
Putting a chip inside the ball is the best football technology development since the Ronaldinho crossbar advert. A tracker in the ball and on boots (such as PlayerMaker; again, the BBC urge strikes) and you've got tracking data that can be used... anywhere? Any league in the world could have its own centralised (you'd need to coordinate between teams) tracking data deal. And maybe, down the line, automated offside and goal-line technology systems?
Now, maybe that's a naïve dream. But sometimes you gotta dream. There's two interesting, related datapoints from a part of the industry that's had to dream (another segue): women's football fans. This past week, an Unofficial Partner podcast interview with Nikki Doucet (CEO of WSL Football) and research from Even Sports (of the unofficial Fantasy WSL app) both indicated that English women's football has a lot of fans who follow multiple clubs.
In a way, this is unsurprising. Research and anecdotes tell us that many fans were energised by the England team; the England team has players from multiple teams; and we all know that young'uns follow players like old'uns follow clubs anyway. I was struck, though, by the degree of it. Doucet said that users of the new WSL website often select '3 or 4' clubs to follow; Even Sports' data - which, granted, comes from fantasy football players - had 46% of respondents watching 'as many games a week as possible'.
I don't know what to do with this information other than file it under 'interesting'. I feel a similar way about La Liga putting out actual research papers.
Another day, another blog, another rewrite. Keep rewriting.