England Men%E2%80%99S Insights Senior Data Scientist at The Fa
Job Description
The Football Association is recruiting an England Men’s Insights Senior Data Scientist to help drive evidence-based decision-making across the England Men’s performance programme.
This is a senior applied data science position focused on turning complex football data into actionable insights that directly influence player selection, development and performance.
Working closely with technical staff and the wider Insights team, the successful candidate will translate football questions into analytical problems and develop models, tools and applications that can be embedded into decision-making.
- Work directly with technical staff to understand football problems and translate them into analytical questions.
- Design analytical products that directly influence football decisions.
- Support the R&D team in developing advanced statistical and machine-learning models.
- Work across event, optical tracking, broadcast tracking and GPS/performance data.
- Use AI coding agents and tools to accelerate development.
- Apply rigorous validation to models and analytical findings.
- Provide technical guidance to help stakeholders understand and use data science tools.
- Collaborate with the Senior Data Architect and Development Team to integrate models and reporting.
- Undertake extensive data cleaning, wrangling, EDA and feature engineering.
- Develop impactful data visualisations.
- Contribute to existing web applications, enabling staff to interact with model and analysis outputs.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in a quantitative discipline, or a relevant sport-related degree with demonstrable data science expertise.
- Strong understanding of the full data science workflow, including:
EDA | Data Wrangling | Feature Engineering | Model Selection | Training | Tuning | Visualisation
- Demonstrable experience using data to answer football-specific questions.
- Advanced statistical and modelling capability.
- Experience working with football datasets including event, tracking and GPS data.
- Advanced proficiency in Python and/or R.
- Experience handling complex, uncleaned datasets.
- Experience with cloud computing environments; Google Cloud Platform / BigQuery is particularly advantageous.
- Strong experience working with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Excellent communication skills.
- Ability to work regularly at St. George's Park.
- Previous data science experience within professional football.
- Time-series analysis and forecasting.
- Bayesian inference / MCMC.
Where the FA's Research & Development Data Scientist role places greater emphasis on developing novel methodologies, this position has a particularly strong applied performance focus — taking sophisticated analytics and ensuring they influence decisions within the England Men's environment.
The pathway is clear:
Football Question → Data → Modelling → Insight → Application → Decision
For experienced football data scientists, this represents an opportunity to work with some of the richest datasets available in the game and see analytical work directly influence England Men's player selection, development and performance.
Benefits include hybrid working, private medical cover, pension, 25 days' annual leave plus additional leave, free lunches at St. George's Park/Wembley and access to selected Wembley events.
England Men’s Insights Senior Data Scientist | The FA (Job s in Sports Performance Analysis TheASPA)
Further details via:
FA Careers