Quantitative Analyst - Club Football

As a member of the Quant Team, you will join an exciting environment predicting outcomes of professional sports on behalf of our clients. We focus on football, baseball, basketball, cricket, tennis, American football, ice hockey, horse racing and golf. 

In this role, you will join our newly created Club Football team - a specialised sub-team within the Quant Team - developing statistical models exclusively for football. You will work closely with our partner clubs, including Brentford FC and Mérida AD, to improve performance through two core areas: 

• In-game strategy optimisation
• Ratings players for the purpose of recruitment and development

• Contribute to identifying promising research directions; ensure research is carried out to the highest standard
• Build models for in-game tactical optimisation 
• Develop player recruitment models based on client needs, including player rating systems to quantify ability and performance 
• Contribute to discussions and efforts to identify weaknesses and potential improvements in existing models across all sports 
• Support club clients and internal stakeholders by developing, maintaining and supporting the mathematical libraries behind our range of tools and models, and software that delivers model predictions into production 
• Perform statistical analysis of datasets, testing well-defined hypotheses and effectively communicating results to various stakeholders 

Skills & Experience    

Required 
Technical 

• Either MSc in Statistics or a related field (e.g., Data Science or Mathematics) with 3+ years of relevant work experience (e.g. sports quantitative analyst for a club, betting syndicate, or bookmaker; or a PhD or equivalent in Statistics or a related field (e.g. Data Science, Mathematics). Candidates from adjacent fields (Computer Science, Engineering, Finance) are welcome via either route, provided they have solid applied statistics experience. 
• Applied statistics: Solid understanding of GAMs, GLMs and ideally state-space models.  
• Model diagnostics: Ability to evaluate predictive model performance using appropriate metrics, quantify and communicate predictive uncertainty  
• Strong programming skills in a high-level language such as R (preferred) or Python. Must write production-quality code not just analysis scripts 
• Clear written communication and documentation (including mathematical), can implement formulas from specs and code from formulas 
• Demonstrated passion for working in sports modelling and sports analytics.: Evidenced by personal projects, MSc project in a related area, or statistical analyses of sports or teams 

Working style 

• Collaborative team player, with a constructive approach to receiving and applying feedback 
• Understands the importance of reproducible research and properly tested code 
• Thorough and reliable, with a verification mindset 
• Ability to work autonomously while communicating proactively any blockers when needed
• Self-directed researcher who generates hypotheses worth testing and sees connections across domain 

• Ability to work in the UK

Preferred 
Domain: 

• A strong interest in football demonstrated by previous attempts to model outcomes or analyse data 
• Experience with player-level modelling 
• Exposure to tracking data (physical metrics, positional data) 
• Good understanding of sports betting markets 

• ​30 days holiday (in addition to bank & public holidays)
• ​In-house chef*
• ​In-house masseuse*
• ​Team sporting events
• 25% discount on Brentford Football Club merchandise
• ​Cycle to work scheme
• Employee Assistance Programme
• ​Interest-free travel season ticket loan
• ​Offsite trips

• ​Pension - Employer Contribution starting at 5.5%, and employee starting at 2.5%
• Income protection – 75% of salary (subject to terms & conditions)

• Dedicated time for professional development - conferences, courses, meet-ups, networking events (at least one annually)
• Private Medical Insurance - including  coverage of any excess payment
• Health Cash Plan via Medicash
• Life Assurance (4 x times earnings at time of death)
• Enhanced Company Sick Pay
• A discretionary annual bonus​

• Increase in Employer Pension to 6% (to a minimum employee contribution of 3%)
• Enhanced Maternity Pay
• Enhanced Paternity Pay

• Increase in Employer’s Pension to 7% (to a minimum employee contribution of 3.5%)