Department: Football Research & Strategy

Hours of Work: Full-Time

Contract Type: Permanent

Salary:  Attractive Remuneration Package

Location: Bodymoor Heath Training Ground (possible flexibility to be discussed with successful candidate)

Closing Date: Sunday 4 August 2024

1. The Department

Aston Villa Football Research & Strategy champions evidence-based practice, explores the Club’s future best practices and synthesises approaches across our football departments to help the Club drive towards our ambitious vision. We aim to advise and provide high quality knowledge to our stakeholders across the First Team and Academy (Men’s and Women’s) respectfully, methodically and efficiently, and in doing so robustly add the detail to our footballing dream.

2. The Role

You can expect to work and lead on a range of football-focused research projects that inform and affect decisions in a variety of football areas. While there is no “typical” project, some scenarios could be:

         Coaching & Analysis – causal understanding*: a Coach is interested in learning how a strategy or intervention affects our ability to score more goals (or concede fewer goals). You’ve been tasked with everything from understanding the research problem, through rigorously solving it, to providing actionable feedback to the Coach.

         Scouting & Recruitment – ML/DL models*: our staff want to improve our ability to observe and evaluate specific football actions. This requires us to build a new model that identifies an action or better values it, using on-pitch football data. You’ve been tasked with building and productionising the model that improves our understanding of players’ actions and presenting the subsequent analysis back to the relevant stakeholders to use within their processes.

         Football Research & Strategy – developing heuristics*: Our Academy, Emerging Talent & Loans and Global Football Development teams each want to better understand player development pathways in their respective areas. You’ve been tasked with a research project that analyses a wide range of football datasets, in order to check, challenge and/or confirm the heuristics used in player development, and potentially create new evidence-based principles to help these departments better develop current and future Aston Villa players locally and globally.

For further information about the Role, please see the Role Profile.

3.       The Person

We are seeking a curious, diligent and technically rigorous professional to join our team, with a research background and ideally with a research publication track record (in peer-reviewed literature and/or reputable conferences).

You must have a clear technical competency in any of the following:

*         Statistics (Bayesian/Frequentist)

*         Casual Inference

*         Machine/Deep Learning

*         Numerical methods

The successful postholder must be able to delve into the theory behind technical subjects and explain these appropriately to an audience as and when required. They must also be able to write clean, well-written code with an open-source mindset that can be handed-off.

The ideal candidate should also be a motivated team player, willing to support our high-performance codebase and able to contribute to our DevOps and DataOps cultures. They should relish independent learning and solving difficult problems, with a desire to support the Club’s success on and off the pitch.

As part of your application, please ensure you upload your CV and Cover Letter.

Right to Close Vacancy Posting Early

The Club reserves the right to close any advertised vacancies earlier than the advertised closing date if sufficient applications have been received.

Equality Statement

Aston Villa Football Club celebrates the diversity of its Club and embrace equal opportunities for all. We are proud to be a Disability Confident employer and fully support The FAs Football Leadership Diversity Code. 

We welcome applications from all candidates regardless of age, race, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, sex and religion or belief.

Safeguarding Statement

Aston Villa Football Club is fully committed to safeguarding children and adults at risk across our Club. As such, we adhere to Safer Recruitment processes and for some roles a satisfactory enhanced disclosure via the Disclosure & Barring Service may be required prior to starting in a role at the Club. For more information, please see Aston Villa Football Club | The official club website | AVFC - Safeguarding