Recruitment Data Analyst Intern @ AFC Fylde
Last time I reviewed a data science job in football I was writing about arguably the biggest club in the world. This time it's AFC Fylde who have just won the sixth tier of English football and been promoted to the fifth (with a 100 point season by the way). That contrast tells you something about how deep football's data culture is beginning to run.
Fylde are hiring a Recruitment Data Analyst Intern, working with the Director of Football and Head of Recruitment. I must say I was impressed by the language they were using. According to the job spec they have a Club DNA, a defined playing style, they operate a recruitment database, they access external data sources and they're building dashboards and scoring models. It would have been unimaginable a few years ago for a club in the fifth or sixth tier of any country to have data play such a big part in their recruitment. That's the good side.
On the downside this is a full stack one person role, albeit within a limited part of the club, recruitment only. They're talking about sourcing and cleaning data, maintaining the database, building scoring models, building dashboards and comparison reports and documentation of model logic (I love the mention of documentation by the way). Technically it's very light though, with Python and R for example only listed as desirable rather than essential, and perhaps understandably no mention of things like software engineering practices. So this is currently a relatively small operation but one that maybe is "looking at the stars".
I would be remiss not to flag that this is an unpaid internship rather than a full time job. That's not something I support, I'll be honest about that. But I also haven't spoken to anybody at AFC Fylde so I don't know the realities behind what that means in practice. But suffice to say I think people should be paid a real wage for doing any work that's going to have a real effect on any business.
Location is given as the club, and no closing date that I could see.
