Senior Data Scientist @ Ludonautics and Soccer Data Scientist @ Swish Analytics
Today I'm posting two adverts that I wouldn't normally review in detail for different reasons. But both are potential routes into football ultimately and reading them side by side tells you something interesting.
The first is a Senior Data Scientist at Ludonautics, a consultancy similar to the one I work for at Twelve Football. I like the framing here a lot, though there's actually very little technical requirement for what's listed as a senior position. I'd speculate that's to spread the net as broadly as possible, which I'd applaud: most job adverts include lots of "requirements" that aren't really required and which narrow the pool of potential applicants quite a lot. But I'm speaking from the outside here. What it does say is that you'll need experience working inside a professional football club already, and that makes sense given how the role is framed. The language is largely about what I'd call decision science, helping expert practitioners make better decisions. The model of being good analytically, at coding and modelling, but also critically understanding football and speaking the language of football decision-makers, has been extremely effective at Twelve.
Contrast that with the other role, a Soccer Data Scientist at Swish Analytics, an American company (obv) working mostly in sports betting, and you'll see how stark the difference in framing is. The language here is much more precise and built around long term solutions. It's the language of the West Coast startups I used to work in: ideation, feature engineering, rigorous offline and online experimentation, software engineering best practice. And the technical requirements are probability theory, inferential and Bayesian statistics, MCMC methods and so on. There's a lot here (probably too many, see above).
You can see how different the requirements are. When you're working in gambling you really are building for a long term edge. The way the other role is framed, you're building more for how most clubs actually operate.
Reading these two side by side gives you an insight into maybe why clubs whose data analytics development has been associated with gambling companies have often been able to embed it for long term success. The work that informs the experts potentially has a lot more rigour, a lot less focus on noise and requires finding long term edges and embedding them. And that's simply in contrast to how most football clubs operate.
Ludonautics is hybrid in London. Swish is fully remote across Europe. Neither has a closing date as far as I can tell. And as ever it's worth reading all of these applications very carefully. Especially the Swish one, which made me chuckle.
