Why data boss did a ‘Gemba walk’ when he started at Man Utd
Written by
Training Ground Guru
March 13, 2025
Chris Shumba, Manchester United’s Head of Data Operations, has explained the importance of doing a ‘Gemba walk’ when he started working for the club.
Shumba joined United in March 2023 from Manchester-based online retailer N Brown Group, where he had been Lead Engineer. He has a fascinating story, having grown up in Zimbabwe and worked as a cleaner and social worker before pursuing a career in data analytics.
Speaking at TGG Live 2024, Shumba remembered starting at United, having never worked in pro football before.
“I was really excited to start my role,” Shumba remembered. “I had all these IT, architecture things before I started, I interviewed for this role for about four months and probably got to meet everyone in the organisation.
“But they were a bit like, ‘You’ve never worked in football.’ When I started, one of the reality checks I got was that technology doesn’t really matter, it’s really about knowing the organisation.”
This is when he decided to employ the idea of the ‘Gemba walk,’ which had been developed by Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno in the 1950s in order for staff to stand back from day-to-day tasks and walk the floor of their workplace.
Shumba said: “I’d try and get meetings with anybody I could around the training ground – physical performance team, medical, any director I could get, finance, video analysts, IT, security – and the question I would ask is, ‘What is a normal day in your life?
“Many people don’t get to know what the day is like in football clubs, because it’s so secretive. It’s a high-performance environment and you can’t just walk in, there are processes for everything.
“I would ask, ‘What data do you need? What information? What decisions do you make? Who are the providers you work with?’
“And I would note it down in my Excel sheet. It kind of came from this concept of a Gemba walk, which is Japanese for ‘the real place’ and is essentially a workplace walk-through to identify productivity gains in practice.
“This allowed me to find out the level of abstraction of the stakeholder, of each department. You get to know which teams speak data and which don’t; which ones you could just send an Excel sheet and they know what’s going on, which ones you could send a pitch plot and they know what’s going on.
“You get to understand that communication language with the different departments, it’s so important. I had to really do this before I started to build any cloud infrastructure, otherwise… whatever we build would be very useless.”
TGG Members and Analytics Members are able to watch (and read a transcript) of the whole of Shumba’s presentation at TGG Live, which was titled ‘The crucial role of data infrastructure.’
Man Utd’s Analytics team
Manchester United have a five-man data science team, consisting of: Alex Kleyn (Decision Scientist), Max Adema (Decision Scientist), Andrew Davies (Machine Learning), Nick Grimshaw (Senior Data Scientist) and Jacob Dunlop (Football Strategy and Reporting Analyst).
Shumba manages a team of data engineers from DXC Technology, who partner with United to create their data infrastructure.
“I collaborate with the data scientists, I do data engineering, platform engineering, data strategy, data architecture, data modelling, IT security, cost control,” Shumba explained.
“I do a lot of things and there are not really enough hours to do my role but you just have to make it work. I enjoy it, I absolutely love it. The most important thing is you have to be teachable and that’s what shocked me about football.”
It seemed surprising when United’s minority shareholder, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whose INEOS company are in charge of football operations at the club, told Gary Neville earlier this week that “we haven’t got” data analysis.
“The absolutely number one issue for the club… is to get recruitment right,” Ratcliffe said. “That needs data analysis and all that type of stuff, which we haven’t got, as you know. Some of the best clubs have.”
However, an overarching data strategy has been lacking, largely because of an absence of continuity in terms of the person in charge of that. At first it was Director of Analytics Dominic Jordan, but he was sacked in August 2024. Then it was Deputy Football Director Andy O’Boyle, who exited in September.
Then Richard Hawkins, the Director of Football Insights and Technology, before Sporting Dan Ashworth, who was sacked in December last year after just five months in post.
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