Recently I have suggested sports lawyer as a good career for an ambitious youngster, but there are other off the pitch options. Professional football clubs’ share of UK hiring has tripled over the past five years, with a jump in demand for data experts as Britain’s top teams use their growing financial strength to expand their off-field operations.
The clubs have emerged as a bright spot in an otherwise
sluggish British jobs market, now accounting for more than seven in every
10,000 roles advertised, up from 2.4 per 10,000 in 2020, according to data from
recruitment website Indeed.
Data and analytics make up five per cent of the roles
advertised by Premier League teams this year, according to job analytics firm
Lightcast. This is double the share two years ago. The hiring boom has been
fuelled by the deep pockets of Premier League clubs, which have seen revenues
soar off the back of strong performances in European competitions and lucrative
new commercial deals. “Data and analytics is an area where clubs have increased
their focus to try to find an edge on rival clubs in areas like player
recruitment and opposition analysis,” Jack Kennedy, senior economist at Indeed
told the Financial Times.
Brighton and Hove Albion, Newcastle United and Manchester
United have increased hiring for data and analysis roles the most over the past
five years, according to analysis of job postings by Lightcast.
Current openings include a scouting insights analyst at
Tottenham Hotspur, described as “a key role in shaping the club’s player
recruitment strategy through data-driven analysis and insight”, and a position
in Brentford’s insights and strategy department.
Kennedy told the FT that Brentford and Brighton, both
promoted in the past decade, “really punch above their weight” as they tend to
be more effective at using data. “Both of those club owners made their money as
professional gamblers so they’ve always been very data-driven and applied that
to owning football clubs,” he added. “The legacy clubs can almost buy their way
out of trouble so if they make a signing that doesn’t work out, they can just
spend £100mn on another player. Smaller clubs cannot do that.”
Joris Bekkers, a football analytics and tech strategy
consultant at UnravelSports, said the rise in hiring was probably down to a
combination of factors, including expanding budgets, the buzz around AI,
younger and more innovative decision makers and clubs recognising that the
workload has become too great for a one-person data department. “Teams no
longer have just a single data scientist, but they might have multiple and they
might have data engineers and a whole separate data department,” he added.
The growth in football recruitment is at odds with the wider
UK labour market, with Indeed’s mid-year report showing an 11 per cent decline
in postings since the start of the year, leaving figures down a third on the
pre-pandemic baseline.
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