Research & Development Data Scientist Football Association

National Football Centre, St George's Park

The FA is excited to be recruiting a Research & Development Data Scientist who will play a key role within the Research & Development function of the Insights team. The primary focus of this role is to design and build world-leading statistical and machine learning models that provide a competitive advantage to England teams.

The successful candidate will develop innovative methodologies to model diverse aspects of international football and deliver actionable insights to a wide range of stakeholders. Leveraging their technical expertise, the Research & Development Data Scientist will design, train and validate statistical and machine learning models, working closely with stakeholders to ensure cutting-edge, data-driven insights are effectively communicated and embedded into decision-making.

The Research & Development Data Scientist will play a pivotal role in creating and implementing advanced analytical models to provide actionable insights and empower informed decision-making.

• Play a leading role in designing and implementing world-leading statistical and machine learning models, drawing insight from football datasets including event data, optical and broadcast tracking data, and GPS/performance data.
• Creatively apply advanced techniques across a range of problems, using the freedom to experiment with many different approaches on long-term projects to provide genuinely novel solutions.
• Research emerging methods across statistics, ML/AI, and adjacent fields to evaluate their applicability to football modelling.
• Effectively utilise AI coding agents and tooling to accelerate the speed of development.
• Maintain high standards of statistical rigour, ensuring any findings that are communicated to stakeholders have been appropriately validated.
• Monitor model performance over time, refining where necessary to ensure continued accuracy and relevance.
• Contribute to a culture of peer review within the team, offering and welcoming constructive feedback to improve the quality and rigour of modelling work.
• Work closely with the Senior Data Architect and Development Team to ensure seamless integration of analytics reporting and models.
• Work within our existing cloud infrastructure, writing pipelines where appropriate to allow others in the wider Insights team to access key model outputs.
• Ensure model development and testing is well-documented, with code written to a professional standard.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders to translate complex model outputs into actionable insights through impactful data visualisations.
• Add to our existing web apps to deploy these visualisations and allow stakeholders to explore model outputs.
• Provide technical guidance and support to stakeholders to enhance their understanding and utilisation of these tools.

• Executes additional tasks as required to meet the FA's changing priorities.
• Comply with all company policies and procedures to ensure the highest standards of health, safety, and well-being can be maintained.
• As part of the FA's commitment to ensuring a safe environment for everyone in football, every employee will be required to complete a DBS check. The level of the check required will be based on the activity of the specific job role and in line with legislation and government guidance.

Essential for the role:

• A Master's degree in a highly quantitative field (mathematics/statistics/computer science, etc.). A PhD is desirable but not essential.
• Strong theoretical grounding in statistics and machine learning, with the ability to engage with the methodology behind advanced data science…