About me

Most of my senior career has actually been spent on one problem: the gap between organisations having access to data and actually using it well. This is mostly perceived as a technical problem, but in my experience, it usually isn't.

The difficult part is almost always organisational: getting the right information to the right people, in the right format, at the right time, and doing so consistently enough and in a trusted enough way that it changes decisions.

I've worked across a few different worlds to get here. I was Chief Data Scientist at a West Coast US startup specialising in transportation analytics, Director of Data Science at a FTSE 250 UK online retailer and the first ever Director of Data at Manchester United, where I helped the club win 3 trophies and I built the data organisation that's still in place today.

I'm now Chief Data Officer at Twelve Football, where we work with over a hundred clubs globally. Twelve is an AI company that makes football intelligence understandable, actionable and personal. Our football intelligence platform, Earpiece, uses natural language so partner clubs can access recruitment, self-analysis and opposition intelligence without needing to be analysts. (Earpiece has a free self-serve trial, if you want to try it for yourself). Alongside the platform, Twelve works directly with partner clubs on consultancy and building internal analytics capability.

I also co-founded Field of Play. It’s the largest independent sports analytics conference in Europe, held annually in Manchester UK, and focused on how analytics is applied in practice in football and other sports.

I sometimes speak about my work in public, but not as often as I might. The reasons are listed below.

My work has been in most newspapers and I have featured in several books on football analytics, including The Table Always Lies by Christoph Biermann and Expected Goals by Rory Smith.

This site was originally set up to host pieces I wrote about jobs advertised at football clubs, which kept generating more questions than I had time to answer. That's still part of what you'll find here, alongside occasional longer writing about data, AI and football.

I will keep putting content on LinkedIn. I'm very occasionally on Bluesky. I never post on Twitter or any other platform.

Why I turn down most offers to speak

I typically don’t speak at conferences or appear on podcasts where women are significantly underrepresented among speakers and contributors. In practice, that usually means at least 25% women. That applies across football, analytics, technology and any other field where women have historically been underrepresented.

I started doing this when I was working primarily in technology, before football. Some of the women I worked with were very clear about how working in tech was different for them than it was for me, in ways I genuinely hadn't thought about, let alone experienced. It really changed my thinking.

From that point on, whenever I've been involved in events, as an organiser, attendee or speaker, I've tried to make sure there's a broad range of women's voices represented on stage.

Football is regrettably worse than most other industries in this regard, which is why I end up turning down around 95% of offers to speak in public about my work.