Football Data Scientist

Football Data Scientist at Club Brugge

Club Brugge aims to become the most innovative football club in Europe in the coming years. We strongly believe in the power of data to make optimal decisions both on and off the field. To achieve our ambitions, we are looking for a talented Football Data Scientist within the Club Innovation department. 

This challenging position is part of the Football Data Science Team, which is responsible for researching, developing, and implementing cutting-edge models and metrics within our Sports Analytics Platform. This state-of-the-art platform centralizes various types of advanced football data for analyzing players, teams, and matches, and evaluating potential signings. 

Your role as a Football Data Scientist

As a Football Data Scientist, you will be responsible for researching and developing advanced models and metrics for analyzing player and team performances and evaluating potential acquisitions for Club Brugge. You will work in a diverse team that prioritizes innovation and quality, in close collaboration with the Football Data Engineers in the Football Data Science Team and the football analysts at Club Brugge and Club NXT. You will work from the Basecamp in Westkapelle (Knokke-Heist), with occasional opportunities for remote work. 

Your responsibilities include the following tasks. 

• Developing, evaluating, and validating statistics and metrics for measuring and comparing the performances and playing styles of players and teams. 
• Developing, evaluating, and validating statistical models and machine learning models for various applications, including identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and playing styles of players and teams, valuing players on the transfer market, and simulating competitions. 
• Exploring and researching new types of advanced football data (including skeletal tracking data and behavioral data) and new data sources (for example new data providers). 

What makes you the ideal candidate

You have a degree in Computer Science, Informatics, or a related field, and a background in software engineering or data science. With relevant work experience or the ability to demonstrate your knowledge and skills through previous achievements, you are passionate about football (data). You work result-oriented with attention to detail and are proficient in both Dutch and English.

Additionally, you possess the following technical skills:

• You have experience conducting academic research and are familiar with academic and popular literature on football analytics. 
• You have good programming skills in Python and experience with libraries for processing large amounts of data such as Polars and Pandas. 
• You have experience with processing advanced football data, such as event data (e.g., StatsBomb, Opta, Impect or Wyscout) and tracking data (e.g., Second Spectrum, Hawk-Eye or TRACAB). 
• You have experience visualizing insights from data and communicating those insights to people with a non-technical background. 

Feeling inspired? Don’t wait any longer and apply now!