Junior Data Scientist

Closing Date of Applications – 28/10/2024

Our Story

Established in 2013, City Football Group is the world’s leading private owner and operator of football clubs, with total or partial ownership of twelve clubs across the world. City Football Group also invests in other football related businesses and serves as a global commercial platform for our partners, whilst fulfilling our purpose of empowering better lives through football on a local and global scale, consistent with what “City” football has meant to people for over a century.  

Our Winning Team

At City Football Group, our Football Intelligence (FI) team are continuing to evolve and enhance the impact of data-derived insights on the decision-making across our football clubs. Through our continued investment in Data Science, machine learning and simulation we are testing and refining footballing principles and building solutions that enable key stakeholders and performance practitioners to make better decisions faster.

This role will work collaboratively within the Football Data team with a focus on player recruitment across our group of clubs. The successful candidate will support the development of new predictive models, explore diverse datasets to identify robust patterns, and extract import features that inform critical decision-making. Good communication skills are essential for clearly presenting insights to non-technical team members, including scouts, sporting directors, and senior management.

Alongside strong technical skills, this role requires an individual with insatiable curiosity, imagination and creativity to come up with ideas to tackle football performance challenges and has the drive and discipline to learn and develop new skills.

City Football Group is a flexible work environment. While this position is based in Manchester, partial remote working is permitted.

This is Your City 

As part of our team, you will be entitled to 26 days annual leave plus an additional day off for your birthday, private healthcare and a simply health cash plan, an annual discretionary bonus, plus a range of partnership and lifestyle discounts. 

Your Impact

• Collaborate with the Football Intelligence team on research projects related to recruitment and squad planning across all CFG clubs.
• Play a supporting role in developing Statistical and Machine Learning Models to identify talent, inform development pathways and understand & predict the football transfer market.
• Support the quantitative models that will evolve our understanding of football from a recruitment, physical and on-pitch perspective.
• Support the development and automation of report generation tools.
   

What we are looking for

Essential

• Undergraduate degree (1st, 2:1 or equivalent) in a quantitative discipline (maths, statistics, physics, computer science).
• Demonstrable experience in designing and training complex statistical models.
• Highly proficient coding in python, particular for data analysis and model development.
• Excellent communicator, including in presenting technical results to a non-technical audience.
• Ability to work in an agile manner suited to the innovative and fast-paced nature of the football industry.

Desirable

• Masters or PhD in a quantitative discipline (maths, statistics, physics, computer science, or equivalent).
• Evidence of working with and deriving actionable insights from football data either as a hobby or within previous employment.
• Experience in econometric or financial modelling.
• Experience with big data tools such as Databricks, Spark, Hadoop or similar.
• Experience with Azure, AWS or GCP cloud services or equivalent.

City Football Group promotes equal opportunities in employment and we positively welcome applications from all candidates regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

We will screen all applicants and select candidates whose skills and experience seem to meet our needs. We will carefully consider your application during the initial screening and will contact you only if you are selected for an interview. 

Employment is subject to the provision of proof of eligibility to work in the UK.

Due to our safeguarding promise, all UK based CFG roles will be subject to a DBS check upon commencing employment with us. This will be either a basic, standard or enhanced check depending on the job role and responsibilities.