Jobs
Sport Scientist, Data

Wolves

Sport Scientist, Data

Salary

Competitive

Location

The Sir Jack Hayward Training Ground, Douglas Turner Way, Compton Park, Wolverhampton, WV3 9BF

Closing date

April 30th
Apply

The club

We are Wolves; progressive, determined, bright, unified and humble. A pack that is hungry for success. Wolves is one of the fastest growing professional football clubs in the UK, and also boasts one of the richest histories in the beautiful game.

Formed in 1877, Wolves was a founder member of the Football League, and was one of the country’s most successful sides in the fifties and sixties. During a two decade spell the Black Country’s most decorated side won three First Division titles and one of its four FA Cups.

Fast forward to 2022, three seasons at Molineux saw Wolves clinch the Sky Bet Championship trophy with 99 points, followed by a seventh-place finish in the Premier League, which included memorable wins over Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Arsenal. The next season saw the team complete a memorable double over the reigning champions, equal theprevious season’s seventh place finish and reach the quarter finals of the Europa League all as part of the ‘longest season’ in league history, either starting before or finishing after all other teams.

But this post is about what we will do next, not what we have done.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and adults at risk. We expect all colleagues and volunteers to share this commitment. This means that the post-holder is required to apply all relevant policies and uphold the Club’s commitment to safeguarding children, young people and adults at risk and to ensuring that Wolves is free from discrimination and harassment.

Job purpose

There has never been a more exciting time to work at Wolves. The club is in the process of developing practices, strategies and teams to deliver success at the very highest level. In parallel to this, we as a club are also aiming to create the ‘best in class’ backroom and support staff to compete with the very best.

The club is in the process of developing its Physical Performance department, enabling even greater quality and depth in the service provided across the club. The role will work collaboratively across all aspects of football insights, performance and medical. They will be applying cutting edge sport science techniques to provide key insights and help us make optimal evidence based interventions.

In addition to excellent sport science delivery, this role will require proven technical skills across programming, statistics and data visualisation techniques as well as a passion for problem solving.

Key responsibilities

  • Lead on the collection and presentation of wellbeing and readiness testing for the Mens First team.
  • Lead on physical performance testing, identifying and implementing best practice by understanding fully the current state of play in technological advances around testing methodology.
  • Develop a system to allow key stakeholders to request tailored ‘special projects’ that ensures you are able to prioritise appropriately and give clarity on timelines for completion.
  • Ensure that where possible, data workflows are optimised to allow performance and medical staff to work as efficiently as possible (integrating use of API’s etc)
  • To where required, support the delivery of certain physical performance and recovery sessions.
  • Work closely with the performance and medical staff across the academy and loans departments to ensure everyone is working in alignment using the same systems and processes.
  • Optimise the processes for extracting, transforming and merging data from a variety of sources.
  • Accelerate the use of data-driven insights by practitioners through the development of visualisations and deployment of interactive tools (e.g.Power BI, Tableau etc)
  • Lead in the set-up and maintenance of data processes and front-end visualisations
  • Lead short-term and long-term data driven projects to identify current trends in elite football
  • Lead on research and innovation across the Performance team including staying abreast of developments in this space (AI, Machine Learning, technology etc)
  • Support in the development of relevant internal CPD opportunities for the wider staff group.
  • Lead on the Performance Department integration with Kitman Labs Software.

General responsibilities

  • Compliance with Club policies
  • Compliance with the Club’s health and safety procedures
  • Compliance with the Club’s safeguarding policies
  • To promote the Club’s values
  • To work consistently to embed equality & diversity into the Club
  • To undertake such other duties as may be reasonably expected
  • To maintain professional conduct at all times

Safeguarding

This role carries a specific safeguarding responsibility. This means that the post-holder is required to apply all relevant policies and uphold the Club’s commitment to safeguarding vulnerable people.

Key relationships

  • Head of High Performance
  • Head of Physical Performance
  • Head of Performance Insights and Data
  • Head of Academy Performance Support

Scope of job

Working within the Performance Department, the successful candidate will play a pivotal role in developing our data analytics provision within the physical performance space. They will be responsible for developing and administering our readiness monitoring and physical testing processes whilst supporting in the implementation and usage of training/ match movement tracking systems.

The post-holder will also be expected to manipulate, analyse and understand complex data sets relating to physical performance and testing. They will support the data ingest processes as and when needed to deliver meaningful insights and impact decision-making processes.

Person specification

Knowledge: the level and breadth of knowledge to do the job e.g. understanding of a defined system, method or procedure, legal or regulatory frameworks etc:

Essential

  • Experience of testing, monitoring and sport science processes in an elite sporting environment.
  • Experience of managing large sports-specific datasets.

Desirable

  • Experience with conducting research using event and tracking data (Statsbomb, Opta, Second Spectrum, PFF, Skillcorner)

Technical/work-based skills: skills specific to the job e.g. language competence, typing skills, coaching skills etc:

Essential

  • High level proficiency in Power BI
  • High level proficiency in Tableau
  • High level proficiency in using Vald systems
  • Experience using APIs returning JSON, XML, CSV formatted data

General skills and attributes: more general characteristics e.g. flexibility, communication skills, team working etc:

Essential

  • Strong attention to detail
  • High level communication skills
  • Positive attitude towards challenging tasks and able to solve problems independently.
  • Team player and ability to meet deadlines under pressure
  • Ability to manage multiple tasks at the same time
  • Learning mentality, looking to constantly improve and pick up new skills/attributes
  • Promote, adhere to and implement the Club’s Equality Policy and to work consistently to embedequality and diversity within Club

Experience: proven record of experience in a particular field, profession or specialism:

Essential

  • Relevant experience within sport science and data collection at the elite level
  • Relevant experience of processing and generating insights from football / sport related data
  • Relevant experience of working within an elite sporting organisation.

Qualifications: the level of educational, professional and/or occupational training required:

Essential

  • MSc in Sport and Exercise Science (or related)

Desirable

  • BASES Supervised Experience or BASES Accreditation.
  • UKSCA, NSCA or ASCA Accreditation.

How to apply

Please complete our Application Form and Diversity Monitoring Form, then email them to jobs@wolves.co.uk 

Please include the job reference code (Ref: PH-00-10042025) and the job title in the subject line.

Please note, we reserve the right to close any advertised vacancy before the stated closing date. We recommend applying to our vacancies early, to avoid any disappointment.

For safeguarding reasons, we are unable to progress candidates who have not applied with our application form. Thank you.

#onepack