Zelus’s Kapuściński appointed Data Engineer at Tottenham

Kapuscinski will report into Tottenham’s Head of Football Insights and Strategy, Frederik Leth. The club advertised the Data Engineer job on TGG in the summer. 

The role responsibilities were: 

• To develop and maintain robust, scalable data infrastructure and ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines that underpin the club’s analytics platform, ensuring data from diverse sources is accurately ingested, processed, and made readily available for analysis across all football departments.
• To continually enhance our technical infrastructure through innovative engineering solutions, focusing on the scalability and reliability of systems that support the club’s data platforms, ensuring they are well-integrated and capable of handling evolving analytical demands.
• To collaborate effectively with Data Scientists and Analysts to support the production and integration of advanced machine learning models, facilitating the seamless transition of bespoke metrics into insights on player and team performance.

Clubs are becoming more aware of the importance of implementing good data engineering as well as data science. James Young, Sunderland’s former Head of Data and Analysis, spoke about this at TGG’s Big Data 2021 Webinar.

He described data engineering as “moving data around and storing it in ways that can be leveraged” and added “it’s an old adage that if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out.

“Unless you have nailed down the quality of the data you are holding, you won’t get anything useful out of the other side. If anything, you could get something misleading.”

Dominic Jordan, Manchester United’s former Director of Data, has welcomed the increase in the number of Data Engineering roles in football. Responding to a recent TGG job advert for a Data Engineer at Leicester City, he said: “A very nice looking job. As the Data Science space in football matures, you will be seeing a lot more of these.”