Manchester City appoint Power as Head of AI

Power replaces Laurie Shaw, who became City’s – and English football’s – first Head of AI when he joined the club in February 2021. Shaw, a former Head of Statistics and Model Development for the Treasury, was appointed Chief Scientist at Liverpool in April 2025.

Head of AI is a key role for City Football Group (CFG) as they vie with Liverpool to be the top club in England when it comes to data analytics.

CFG’s Director of Football Intelligence, who Power will report into, is Brian Prestidge, who was promoted to Director of Football Data in September 2023. 

After graduating from Sunderland University, Power worked for Stats LLC (now Stats Perform) as an AI Scientist for just over six years.

In that role, he applied machine learning techniques to tracking and event data and created new models to capture tactical behaviour in football.

He then spent a year as an AI Senior Manager at Stats Perform before moving to SkillCorner in November 2021.

Power delivered a Masterclass to our Premium Members on modelling sports as graph neural networks last December. In it, he explained that he is not a trained scientist, but is “very much a self-taught data scientist”.

He said that before landing a job in data, he worked for a local authority in Sunderland in sports development doing match analysis and coaching.

He also presented at TGG’s Big Data Webinar in 2020 on the subject of applying AI at scale to enhance insights, 

TGG MEMBERS: Manchester City staff profiles