For hiring teams
You need someone rare in football.
Tell us about the role, the team you're building, and what's been missing from previous shortlists. We'll come back with how we can help.
AI & Data in Football
AI and Data Recruitment for Football.
Specialist hiring for the people who are quietly reshaping how clubs scout, train and play. Performance analysts, data scientists, ML engineers, heads of analytics - the rare ones who understand the game and the model.
The state of play
Football's Data Department Grew Up. Quietly.
The shift inside football has been quiet but total. Premier League clubs are running data product teams. EFL sides have hired their first heads of analytics. La Liga and the Bundesliga have built in-house tracking pipelines. Recruitment, training load, opposition prep, in-match decisions - none of it lands the way it used to.
The work has outgrown the people available to do it. Performance analysts who can also build a feature pipeline are rare. Data scientists who read a pressing structure without a translator are rarer.
The combination of technical depth and football literacy is the only thing we hire for - and it's the part everyone else misses.
The work
Football-Specific Hiring, End-to-End.
Every Football search is run by Kev personally. Twenty years hiring data and AI talent, four of them now exclusively in sport.
Football roles we hire
- Performance Analyst / First Team Analyst
- Sports Data Scientist (Football)
- Recruitment Data Analyst
- Football Data Engineer (event, tracking, GPS pipelines)
- Computer Vision Engineer (broadcast & tracking)
- AI / ML Engineer (football applications)
- Head of Football Analytics
- Director of Data & Analytics
Who we work with in football
- Premier League and EFL clubs
- European top flights - La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Eredivisie, Primeira Liga
- MLS franchises and US ownership groups expanding into Europe
- Football federations and governing bodies
- SportsTech vendors - tracking, scouting, recruitment, fan platforms
- Investors and groups doing technical diligence on football acquisitions
The process
Brief, Scout, Shortlist and Sign.
Most recruiters work the funnel - fifty CVs, ten phone screens, three shortlists, one hire. We work like a scouting department: a small number of genuinely qualified candidates, presented with full context, after we've already had the difficult conversations.
- 01
The brief
A proper conversation about the role, the technical stack, who already sits in the football data team and the wider strategic context. Job specs come out of this - not the other way round.
- 02
The scout
Targeted outreach across our football network and adjacent industries. We're already in the conversations the people you want are having. We don't post and pray.
- 03
The shortlist
A small number of qualified candidates, each with a written summary covering technical fit, football literacy, motivation and honest reservations. Full picture, not the pitch.
- 04
The signing
We support the offer process, manage counter-offer conversations and stay in the loop through onboarding and beyond.
Field notes
Insights From Inside Football.
Long-form conversations with the people building it. Practitioners we've worked with, hired, or learned from - talking about what actually changed inside their clubs.
Guide · Mar 2026
AI in football clubs: 2026 hiring trends
What we're seeing across active Premier League, EFL and European football searches. The shapes that are emerging, the roles that didn't exist last season, and where the talent gap is biggest.
Animo Group
Read guideAll insights
More From the Field.
Interviews across football, motorsport and the wider sports data world.
Browse all insights
Next step
Hiring Inside Football?
For candidates
You work in football data.
If you're an analyst, data scientist or ML engineer in football - or curious about a move into it - get in touch. No pressure, no spam, just a conversation about the market.
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