Quantitative Analyst - Club Football

We have a fantastic new opportunity to join our team at Smartodds as a Club Football Quantitative Analyst. Based in North London, Smartodds provides in‑depth research and analysis on sporting events around the world, supported by world‑class, bespoke software platforms. We are proud of our collaborative and dynamic culture, grounded in our core values of Boldness, Open‑mindedness, Ownership, and Togetherness. We are a supportive and collaborative team - our environment is open, inclusive, and focused on doing great work together.

As a member of the Quant Team, you will join an exciting environment predicting outcomes of professional sports on behalf of our clients. We focus on football, baseball, basketball, cricket, tennis, American football, ice hockey, horseracingand golf.

In this role, you will join our newly created Club Football team – a specialised sub‑team within the Quant Team – developing statistical models exclusively for football. You will work closely with our partner clubs, including Brentford FC and Mérida AD, to improve performance through two core areas:

• In‑game strategy optimisation
• Ratings players for the purpose of recruitment and development

This role combines rigorous statistical modelling with production engineering. You will take models from research through to deployment, writing well‑tested, documented code that integrates into our internal libraries. The atmosphere is collaborative and academic – peer reviews, research talks, and further education opportunities – but unlike academia, the market and club performance provide immediate feedback on model quality. This makes the job challenging but also very exciting.

You will have plenty of autonomy to execute your models from idea to code to validation to (hopefully) deployment. However, this autonomy operates within a structured framework: established coding patterns, weekly check‑ins, high test coverage, and strict reproducibility standards.

We highly value the personal development of our team members and you will therefore be allocated dedicated time to improve your skills and gain the necessary experience that will enable you to progress into more senior roles.

While we are open to applications from anyone who meets the minimum requirements, we would be especially keen to hear from applicants with substantial research experience and a demonstrable passion for football analytics.

• Contribute to identifying promising research directions; ensure research is carried out to the highest standard
• Build models for in‑game tactical optimisation
• Develop player recruitment models based on client needs, including player rating systems to quantify ability and performance
• Contribute to discussions and efforts to identify weaknesses and potential improvements in existing models across all sports
• Support club clients and internal stakeholders by developing, maintaining and supporting the mathematical libraries behind our range of tools and models, and software that delivers model predictions into production
• Perform statistical analysis of datasets, testing well‑defined hypotheses and effectively communicating results to various stakeholders

Required

Technical

• Either MSc in Statistics or a related field (e.g., Data Science or Mathematics) with 3+ years of relevant work experience (e.g., sports quantitative analyst for a club, betting syndicate, or bookmaker; or a PhD or equivalent). Candidates from adjacent fields (Computer Science, Engineering, Finance) are welcome provided they have solid applied statistics experience.
• Applied statistics: solid understanding of GAMs, GLMs and ideally state‑space models.
• Model diagnostics: ability to evaluate predictive model performance using appropriate metrics, quantify and communicate predictive uncertainty.
• Strong programming skills in a high‑level language such as R (preferred) or Python. Must write production‑quality code, not just analysis scripts.
• Clear written communication and documentation (including mathematical), can implement formulas from specs and code from formulas.
• Demonstrated passion for working in sports modelling and sports analytics:…