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Grimsby are every bit the 21st century football club

I have to admit I enjoyed last night’s battering (as every media outlet is calling it) of Manchester United, but there is a little more to the Cleethorpes-based club than meets the eye: https://www.thetimes.com/article/d25b79a8-fea2-4842-a99f-58cdc2b4a9b3

In every other respect, though, United’s Carabao Cup second-round opponents are every bit the modern 21st-century football club: buoyed by ambitious investors, cutting-edge data and progressive coaching. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is Grimsby’s nascent partnership with Jamestown Analytics, the guiding hand behind Brighton & Hove Albion’s much vaunted recruitment.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the United co-owner, was memorably scathing in his appraisal of United’s data department last season, which he described as being in the “last century”. Yet Grimsby appear to have snared a competitive edge in their search for talent that the other clubs in League Two — or United, for that matter — can only dream of.

Jamestown is an offshoot of Starlizard, the gambling consultancy founded in 2006, with close ties to the Brighton owner, Tony Bloom. Jamestown chooses its partners, not the other way round, and Grimsby’s “council-estate kid” co-owner turned tech entrepreneur, Jason Stockwood, and Andrew Pettit, a venture capitalist whose family owned a butcher’s shop in the town for almost a century, impressed Bloom with their vision for the club during their voyage to an FA Cup quarter-final in 2023, where they lost to Brighton.

Coaching was not always in manager Dave Artell’s plans. Afternoons spent on the sofa after training with his home-town club, Rotherham United, watching American crime dramas like Murder, She Wrote and Diagnosis: Murder, prompted an application to study for a bachelor’s degree in forensic biology, a postgraduate certificate in biomedical sciences and a bachelor’s degree in forensic and analytical science.

A diploma in football management from the University of Liverpool is more relevant, but this is a club whose hard hit surroundings can be misleading.

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