Hey Chris. This is such an incredible opportunity and great to hear folks like you are spearheading the charge. I’ve a friend who’s leading AI at Real Madrid and it’s fascinating to hear what they’re trying to do (without him revealing the secret sauce to me!)
Does your team and department taking of analytics primarily on the footballing side? Like player performance? How does your teams work typically get incorporated and what does the day to day look like? Do you manage your own tech stack as well?
> Does your team and department taking of analytics primarily on the footballing side? Like player performance?
Yes, we work primarily on the footballing side and across the spectrum in that space: Player/team performance for the men's first team, women's first team, and boys academy age groups U16 and up, player recruitment / squad planning, etc.
> How does your teams work typically get incorporated
We produce a mix of interactive tools, regular static reports (e.g. opposition analysis, post-match analysis, etc.), and live dashboards that come from specific stakeholder requests such as coaching staff or execs, or that we build proactively to address a specific football-related question.
> what does the day to day look like?
It really varies from day to day and role to role within the team. A data engineer might be adding another data provider to an entity resolution ETL pipeline, a research scientist might be incorporating feedback from first team coaching staff into a work-in-progress model, a data analyst might be putting together an in-depth opposition analysis report for an upcoming match, and an operations analyst might be helping train operators on a new data labeling task.
> Do you manage your own tech stack as well?
We do manage most of our tech stack, although we get a lot of support on front-end from a great sister team in the IT dept.
There definitely is hope for AI aiding with the less subjective elements of refereeing, such as offside, ball out of bounds, keeper moving off of line before a penalty is taken, etc.
It has already had a big impact for ball crossing the goal line judgments if you put computer vision in the broader AI category (e.g. Hawkeye in the PL)
There's a pattern of referees giving unreasonable red cards to Arsenal, and those same referees getting lavish trips to the Dubai, which is where the owners of our title race rivals for 2 previous seasons are located.
It's a similar conflict of interest, if not outright corruption as Justice Clarence Thomas getting free all expenses paid fishing trips and other goodies from a billionaire who wants to influence Supreme Court decisions.
Hmm, well the super secret stuff we’re working on comes directly to mind, but if I set that aside, boring entity resolution is actually a big pain point.
Regardless of their sophistication, 3rd party data products in football tend to rely on manually collected and maintained player metadata. It can be unreliable. If I could reliably have a durable unique ID for every player, manager, and team in world football along with reliable timestamps for every moment each said player entered and left play, that would be pretty great. When joining together disparate data sources, discrepancies in things this simple cause all sorts of pain downstream.
I'm not going to underestimate the dedication of football fans. And I do feel someone could get by on £150k if they had to. Obviously they'd need to live an ascetic lifestyle, eating only porridge and drinking only lukewarm water. With luck they'd make it through winter.
It's more than I make, and I own a house! The idea that someone could be a big football fan, but would refuse to take a job making less than the equivalent of that magic $250k a year seems like such a misalignment* of values. I agree that you see it a lot on HN, and elsewhere.
6k mortgage for a modest house in any decent area in US, 3k per kid private school, 3k other monthly expenses, 2k food: that’s already 17k/mo with just 2 kids. Plus vacations, plus setting aside at least a few thousand a month for retirement.
I can do jobs like this one but I can’t consider any job offers for less than 500k (total comp).
> Are houses and private schools cheaper in London?
They are cheaper than that everywhere in the world. I think you need to realise that you are in the upper 0.001% of earners in the world and your expenses to the rest of us seem absolutely ridiculous.
$6k per month mortgage?
My entire expenses are less than half that, I have 2 kids and I consider myself to be middle class and doing ok.
First of all, thanks for sharing numbers. I live in the UK and often hear folks from the US touting huge salaries and I figured living costs must be higher but never knew by how much.
Second, this is absolutely wild to me. Is this your monthly expenses? I live in a pretty decent sized city in the UK and my mortgage is just under 1k per month. There's no way I could even attempt to spend 2k a month on food. That said I don't send my kids to private school, the state schools in my area are very good.
The idea of earning anywhere close to 500k is utterly mind boggling to me.
Don't think of the above comment as normal. It represents perhaps .01% of Americans. The other ~99% would be just as flabbergasted after reading it as you are.
As far as income is concerned, some of us have the skills to demand that kind of comp even in the current job market, but it's rare - and more rare now than it was 2-3 years ago.
As far as expenses, it's trivially easy to slash those expenses by about a factor of 3 by living somewhere other than one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the US, and in an area with a decent public school system. 2k/month on food is also insane even for a family of 4 and implies a lot of eating out. I feed myself and my fiancée on about $450/month even buying fairly expensive ingredients, but I enjoy cooking.
Some people are just used to a certain lifestyle and are able to support it, so they consider changing it to be unthinkable. I make similar to what the person you're replying to probably makes, but my expenses are about ~$65k/year, and that includes a decent amount of spending that I consider frivolous. It would not be hard to slash another $10k/year off of that with minimal sacrifice. Not until going down toward $50k/year or below would I have to start making serious compromises.
Several millions of people in US make more than 500k, so it’s not really that rare.
$450/mo on food is probably insane for a homeless person in US, or for an average person in Uganda. Why not slash this amount to, say, $50? I’m sure you can do it if you decide to grow your own food on some remote land. Why don’t you “change your lifestyle”?
I spend 2k roughly 50/50 on groceries and eating out. Nothing fancy.
Bottom line: should I move to a shitty area, put my kids to a shitty school, and cook more (which I do not enjoy)? Why? So that whoever owns arsenal can buy an even bigger superyacht next year?
A $1.8mm 30 year fixed rate mortgage is about $12k per month at today’s rates. That wouldn’t include taxes and insurance, just the principal and interest.
It also doesn't include that a $1.8MM mortgage usually implies a $2.25MM house that you just put down $450k on.
The median price of American homes is $400k. In California it's $860k. In the Bay Area it's $1.5MM. You can get a house in the Bay Area for under $1.8MM, but you need a $360k down payment, and you will likely face a tradeoff between good schools, safe neighborhoods, being within walking distance of anything, and having a nice sized house. Outside of NYC, these numbers are the upper echelon. If you disagree, you have very expensive taste masquerading as requirements.
On that point about home sizes, Americans are frequently surprised how much less space Europeans are fine living in.
You are confusing 6k and 12k mortgages: the former is to buy a modest house today in most decent areas in the US. The latter is to buy a modest house in Bay Area, where a large fraction of hacker news users reside.
A “modest” house to me is a median house: around 2k sqft, run-of-the-mill construction, cheap materials, 8 feet ceilings, <10k sqft lot.
It’s probably a little self-aware but what he’s describing is a lifestyle attainable by people with similar jobs and qualifications as what Arsenal is asking for, and it’s reasonable to expect it if that’s what you can get from other employers.
Also, housing in much of the US is criminally expensive, and some people have unreasonably snobby attitudes about what constitutes a “decent area” in the US. Or maybe he was just making an understated and backhanded joke about the London housing market, which I’ve heard to be similarly absurd.
> The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million
I have a feeling that data is wrong. If it's accurate it's definitely been pushed up by huge outliers on the top end (like £50+M properties in Chelsea and west ken that are zone 2)
I think the median zone 2 terraced house is more like £1m, can't find a statistic but I just bought a £1.5m house in hackney and there were 10 £1-1.3m properties for every £1.7m+
I live in NYC, on the UWS, in a nice (but not extravagant) 2 bedroom apartment. It’s about 1000 sq feet, and I pay $5k per month in rent. Buying a similar place in my neighborhood would cost me literally double that per month, after putting down $300k or more. My neighborhood has hundreds of thousands of people in it, all paying similar amounts (or much much more). My building has about 60 units, and I live in one of the smaller ones. Almost half of the units rent for $12k-15k per month. This is just one of hundreds of buildings in my neighborhood alone, one of thousands in Manhattan.
Of the ~350 apartments with at least 3 bedrooms for sale right in my neighborhood, only 77 cost less than $3mm. There are 52 for sale for more than $10mm, and those will almost all sell.
You’re catching flak, but I’m with you, I live in NYC and I wouldn’t even look at a job for less than $400k liquid total comp. And that would be cutting it close.
That said, people do it:
1. What constitutes a “decent area” varies from person to person.
2. My kid goes to private school (at more $5k per month), but some people live in districts where public schools are great.
3. Living in a no income tax state helps a lot too.
I could see a family being just fine on $10k per month take-home if they bought their house awhile ago, kids go to public school, they travel domestically, etc.
Plus, jobs like this are for people that have a connection with the organization. I can't see myself doing anything, however good the pay might be, for Arsenal. Would be very glad to do that for Chelsea.
Oh that’s a fascinating reaction I never thought of. I mean people might refuse to work for any gambling company or any arms maker, but I cannot I imagine someone offered a job in banking refuse say Goldman but take JP Morgan, simply because their family have been Morgan fans for generations and would never accept any other bank …
Not sure if you intentionally obtuse or simply don't get it. There is no reason to be a fan of an organization whose main goal is to be making money, but there are plenty of reasons to be a fan of an organization whose main goal is to be better at a sport than other similar organizations.
I don't think the distinction is about whether the organizations make money; the distinction is about entertainment. Professional sports are primarily a form of entertainment. Sports fans are a bit like music fans in that regard. The rivalries in sports can get toxic sometimes, but there's weird snobbery in music and other arts as well.
Having done a bit of consulting for Chelsea FC, I wouldn't recommend working there in an office job. Poor pay (I doubt anyone below "Head of"/CxO even touches 6 figures) and very average working conditions.
I thought at first that you might be bantering but after reading your last sentence I am not sure anymore. I don't think being associated with Arsenal at this posting is ever going to be a blemish on anyone's CV. They are higher than Chelsea in PL standings at this moment.
150k a year puts you in the 1% earners in UK, plenty to comfortable live on.
As you mentioned, having such a job in ones CV can only help.
But, I've been a Chelsea fan for most of my life, if I take such a job at Arsenal and do it properly, I'll be actively working against the organization that brought me so many emotions over the past 30ish years.
Actually in countries like Portugal or Germany, most clubs are owned by its members (or at the very least, 51% owned by its members), which can e.g. vote on its president.
You're not totally wrong about the 51% thing (although it's really 50% + 1 vote), but it's not like that is a panacea that keeps out corporate interests. Leverkusen and Wolfsberg are owned by Bayer and Volkswagen respectively (although I understand there's historical reasons for that) and Leipzig is 99% owned by Red Bull, but they only have 50% - 1 voting rights to comply.
That's extremely good for a job in soccer analytics. It's a really fun domain, you'd be working with very smart and bought-in people at Arsenal, and they have their own collection operation so control their own destiny in a way a lot of other places don't.
Aside from 3rd party data, we contract with a nonprofit in Laos where operators collect event data for us (~2000 data points per match) across roughly a dozen leagues worldwide.
Season tickets would likely motivate a lot of supporters with the right background to apply despite the low salary. But they only offer “preferred access” to tickets and I’m not even sure what that means.
If there would be opportunities to present to Mikel Arteta and other high level football personnel, that would also be very motivating beyond raw salary.
Sports analytics is a lot like video game development. Where, for better or for worse, salaries are much lower because pure passion for the domain is a huge motivator for people
the average UK salary is £32k. in London your average midlevel engineer salary band is 60-75k. Senior band is 75-110 - this includes principles and directors as well.
For total comp add 10% of bonus. given anemic uk tech sector most stock is yeah worthless so let's not count it - unless you work for Wise, Revolut etc.
the people making big bucks i.e £200k+ in tech - are in finance / hft / trading firms. then in government consulting.
150k GBP total comp is not especially competitive with a BigCo.
If that is just salary though, it might be competitive in London depending on the rest of the comp package (i.e. about the same again for equity, 20-25% bonus - so total about 300-325k GBP - would be Ok for mid/senior level IME)
What are you defining as a BigCo? In the UK I can only really think of FAANG, a small number of hedge funds / HFT firms, and more recently some AI firms that are paying that level of salary.
I'm also guessing that salaries in football might be suppressed similar to video games jobs. There'll be a lot of people willing to work under market rate because they enjoy the football environment.
I have a few reasons I want to go to the UK, and seeing an Arsenal game at their home stadium is one of them. It's not so much that it's my favorite team as that I (1) want to see a Premier League game, (2) their stadium looks beautiful and (3) I enjoy watching games from there because they are better equipped than average for telecasts.
It's a great stadium and loads of fun to visit as a gooner. Not all games are open to all though. Some require you to be a Red Member for a while before you can buy tickets. So keep that in mind.
Arsenal are doing very innovative things in AI and I believe have Karun Singh on their team who is extremely influential in the football analytics revolution that has occurred over the last decade. Exciting role (that due to other interests I cannot go for!)
I’m an Arsenal fan living in Australia, so I often watch the games the next day because they’re on very late at night our time. Until I’ve watched the game I keep off social media to avoid spoilers, and HN is one of the few things I’m very confident in reading knowing that nothing related to Arsenal FC would ever ever get posted here. Go figure.
I live 500m from Arsenal stadium. Unfortunately not only do I know nothing about football, I'm just a lowly data person and would never purport to be an AI specialist.
I’m Chris, Head of Analytics at Arsenal and hiring manager for this role (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-dove-43b7a85)
I’m happy to answer any questions about the role, our department, football analytics, working at Arsenal, etc.
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