Liverpool hire Manchester City Head of Data Shaw
Written by
Training Ground Guru
April 10, 2025
Director of Football Data Laurie Shaw is leaving Manchester City after four years to become Chief Scientist at Liverpool.
Shaw joined City in February 2021 as their Head of Football AI, as the club mounted a major investment in data science in an effort to catch industry leaders Liverpool.
The Scot has a PhD in computational astrophysics, has developed trading systems for a £30bn hedge fund and was also once a policy advisor for the British government.
For the three-and-a-half years before joining City, the Scot had been a Research Scientist and Lecturer at Harvard University, specialising in the analysis and application of spatiotemporal data in team sports.
However, he was known to football analytics enthusiasts through his EightyFivePoints blog, which applied data science to the analysis of football, as well as his appearances on Professor David Sumpter’s Friends of Tracking YouTube channel.
Shaw, who was born in Manchester and moved to Scotland at the age of nine, graduated with first-class honours in physics from Imperial College London before completing a PhD in astrophysics at Cambridge University in 2006.
At City, Shaw worked under Director of Football Intelligence Brian Prestidge and was promoted to Director of Football Data in September 2023.
Shaw is expected to begin work at Liverpool within the next few weeks. The club have been on an analytics hiring spree in the last few months, advertising for a Performance Insights Lead, Lead Data Scientist and Junior Data Analyst. Ruairidh McGregor recently joined as Performance Insights Lead Engineer, having previously worked for UK Athletics and Rangers.
Liverpool’s analytics department is headed up by Director of Research Will Spearman.
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