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By Luke Whitworth

Half of the practitioners at elite sports organisations believe there is limited integration between their data analysis and coaching teams.

That is according to a straw poll of attendees at a recent Virtual Roundtable hosted by the British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences [BASES] and the Leaders Performance Institute.

The perception is worse when it comes to analysis and recruitment, with over 60 per cent of attendees suggesting that their analytics and recruitment teams do not work closely at all.

Yet 63 per cent also believe that improved data and computer literacy across their staffs would directly impact performance.

The sense that there is room for improvement gave the session its title: ‘Mobilising Performance Analysis in Practice’. It was the second in our three-part collaboration with BASES called Advances in Performance Analysis and centred around two case studies.

The first was delivered by Julia Wells, the Head of Performance Analysis at the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], and the second by Mat Pearson, the Head of Performance Insights & Data Strategy at English Premier League side Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Five areas where data literacy can improve performance

Before Wells and Pearson delivered their insights, attendees were set a further task: ‘as a consequence of improving data or computer literacy, describe what you would see as being the most significant impact on performance’.

The responses were varied but five stood out:

1. Improved efficiency: save time and, with that time-saving ability, you have more space to explore and analyse the insights to then act upon them. Similarly, greater efficiency means less education on metrics and processes for those who don’t have expertise in the area. Finally, there will be fewer mistakes.
2. Better accuracy: this leads to better decisions, thus allowing one to be more evidence-based in wider decision-making.
3. Observing trends over time: if done well, this leads to more engagement from coaches and athletes in the process and allows for data trends to be seen over a longer period of time.
4. More evidence-based decisions: an ability to create general reports at user level with an ability to drill down and ask more specific and sophisticated questions of data.
5. Easier benchmarking: there is room for more programme guidance and testing if things are working. It leads to more objective-based player assessments rather than just the subjective.

How the UKSI are mobilising performance analysis work-ons in meeting common challenges in data analysis

The first session highlighted the four biggest challenges facing people who use data analysis in sport. To kick off her presentation in the second, Wells explained how the UKSI is trying to tackle those four challenges (plus another).

Challenge 1: integration

Go back to basics. That’s the approach of the UKSI, who have placed an emphasis skill development, support structures and a clear data strategy.

It goes like this: the relevant staff members are upskilled in areas such as collecting the right data, using the correct formats in the right places before the interrogation and analysis even begins. This is then supported by a clear data strategy geared towards performance planning. For example, roles such as the data & insight lead and the performance data lead are embedded within the organisation to better help those leading programmes with the direction and the integration of their data. Thus, the strategy can come to the fore and everyone can better understand what needs collating and why within the team.

Challenge 2: data collation

Wells described how easy it can be to stay on the “hamster wheel” of collecting data without taking the time to critically reflect and pause. Can you, for example, call upon efficient processes for collecting data and wade through the myriad datasets potentially available? She recommended asking “quality questions”: why are we creating the data, what is its purpose, what decisions is it informing, particularly in the coaching process? Teams should do this periodically and continue to plan, do and review. Wells also encouraged engaging in conversations with key leaders in the environment to discuss what to start, continue and stop. It’s important to intentionally carve out those opportunities as part of your performance planning.

Challenge 3: communicating data insights

Wells stressed the critical nature of human engagement in the process and regards communication is a highly technical skill, despite the views of those who might see it as a ‘soft’ skill.

She shared that the different performance departments within the UKSI work closely with the psychology team to help elevate understanding of self and others. Wells said, if we can better understand the people we work with, it will support how people can get the best out of each other.  As part of this process, they’ve tapped into better understanding one another’s preferences in order to be more impactful in how they support each other.

Challenge 4: buy-in

It is not uncommon for senior stakeholders to not perceive the value of the work being done. This makes it incumbent on analysts to critically assess their impact and share the meaningfulness of their work. “It’s our job, and it’s our role to be critically analysing why and presenting that back,” as Wells said.

On that note, alignment to the sport’s strategy helps to provide a clearer connection. If this alignment and connection isn’t there, you’ll naturally get disconnection so it will be more challenging to get the buy-in.

In addition, relationships are just as critical when generating buy-in. Wells advocated inviting leaders and key stakeholders into your world and shadowing them. When they immerse themselves in better understanding the process you’ll find that it can quickly lead to them becoming a voice for you in wider conversations.

Challenge 5: data illiteracy

Too often, practitioners can suffer in silence when looking for solutions. In the latest Olympic and Paralympic cycles, Wells and her colleagues are seeking to increase data literacy across the board. They have introduced an internal online data community that provides access to resources, promotes connection, and leads to the sharing of good practice.

Wells’ team also put together a ‘Data Leadership Programme’ which is focused on pulling together the data leaders in the various sports with whom the UKSI work to look at opportunities, challenges and future direction. Courses, with titles including ‘Data Camp’, ‘Project Automate’ and ‘Code School’, were created to improve skills and processes for coaches and practitioners to help them be more efficient. In her mind, this has been crucial to enable people to be upskilled; and all support staff should be able to ask a good question and have the data skills to answer them.

How data analysis is supporting coaching and recruitment at Wolves

Pearson explained that he and his colleagues at Wolves are trying to align the club to ensure there is consistent evidence available and better identification of the trends impacting decision making from a data point of view.

He focused on two key areas: coaching and recruitment.

1. The integration of data analysis with the coaching process

In the environment, the analysts are part of the multidisciplinary team. They are very much now voices in the room and, with it being a specialised discipline, all analysts must have an impact on decision making.

To that end, Pearson’s team have moved away from leaving the coaches to find the solutions themselves. Instead, analysts are encouraged to go and find solutions, present them to the coach, and then have good conversations to better find the optimal outcome.

Part of the challenge we can face, said Pearson, in particular with performance analysis at first-team level in professional football, is that many environments can be quite coach-led, which is in keeping with the nature of short tenures. The coaches will lean into their viewpoint as a way to exert their control. Therefore, education is important and, in particular, how you communicate with them to ensure the message lands. That said, Pearson observed that coaches in modern day football are more attuned to data and performance analysis and are much more data literate and comfortable with technology.

A key learning when integrating performance analysis and data work with coaching is to make insights as contextual as possible. If you provide insights to a coach that are out of context, you’ll lose them straight away.

2. How data can support the game model, recruitment and selection

Pearson told attendees that some of the biggest strides in performance analysis and the wider data team have been in the field of game modelling, recruitment and selection decisions, with the obvious caveat that subjective input is still valued immensely.

The team have worked to create objective measures against the game model. In better understanding this, it has provided an additional layer of information related to individual player requirements for the game model. These insights are helping to inform both selection for matchday but also the recruitment of new talent. When thinking about the recruitment process in particular, Pearson said this process has helped to educate scouts and other recruitment personnel in the attributes for which they should be looking.

Visuals have played a key role in this process too, particularly in being able to show what it looks like to play in this particular style that the coach or manager wants. They’ve worked to make the playing style more objective.

By John Portch with additional reporting from Joe Lemire

Ellie Maybury, the Founder of the Soccer Herformance consultancy, has spent two decades working as a sports scientist in the women’s game.

She cut her teeth at the Football Association and Birmingham City Women in her native England before crossing the Atlantic in 2015 to join US Soccer. She served the federation in several roles and would spend four years as the Head of High Performance for the USWNT between 2019 and 2023.

In June, she came on the People Behind the Tech podcast to discuss the gains made, particularly during her time with the USWNT, but did not attempt to mask the problems that face female players in comparison to their male counterparts.

“Female athletes want to be equipped with the information that’s going to help them succeed,” said Maybury, who now works with a multitude of players, coaches, clubs and federations. “Quite honestly, the way in which we can deliver information at the moment is very grey.”

The ‘grey’ stems from the male bias in sports science research. Females have tended to be lumped in with males and so there is limited understanding of what female athletes require when it comes to training, preparation and recovery.

Maybury mitigates the grey on a daily basis and we return to our chat to lift three quick wins for any practitioner in women’s soccer.

1. Be honest about existing limitations

There are numerous unknowns in female athlete health so it’s better to take control of that narrative. “[Players] want a black and white answer where really a lot of our knowledge and research in this area is still limited,” said Maybury, who stressed the importance of building trust and managing expectations. She may have an answer tomorrow, in six months’ time or she may still be searching in a year. “I’d rather be comfortable saying ‘hey, I’m going to hold on this. I can’t give you everything you need right now’, than rely on something that maybe has come from a different environment or, deep down, looking at the information, I know isn’t going to give them the most accurate, honest answer”.

2. Embrace the subjective…

You may have fewer resources than you like, but don’t dismiss what you’ve long been doing. Subjective data is critical. “It’s something I will always rely on and have always relied on,” said Maybury while explaining that tech supports were scarce when she first worked at Birmingham in 2007. “Although the game has transitioned and technology has transitioned, I really try to hold onto some of those key lessons and experiences I had when we weren’t as fortunate and lucky enough to have technology at our hands.”

She added: “Our intention is to know enough about the athlete and their trends so that we can get ahead of any negative effects, whether it’s a bad night’s sleep or whether it’s issues with menstrual cycle symptoms”.

Maybury’s emphasis on the individual is shared by Richard Burden, the Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UK Sports Institute. At last September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step-Change in Female High Performance, Burden observed that case studies are undervalued in the hierarchy of evidence due to their small sample size. “I don’t care what the mean for the whole group is – I need to know why athlete X is different from athlete Y,” he told the audience at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. “Case studies are really impactful for us – if you can collect case studies then you start to build an evidence base. When trying to understand things like the menstrual cycle, generalised approaches just aren’t going to cut it.”

3. … and build a bigger picture of female athlete health

Female athletes have long been overlooked in the tech space. “A lot of the technology we have absorbed into the women’s game has come from the men’s game or from men’s sporting environments,” said Maybury. “Maybe some of the processes and metrics that we use with the associated technology get transferred as well.” That picture has to change, but never stop leaning into your relationships with athletes. “It really was about those side conversations and those continuing conversations,” said Maybury of her time with the USWNT. “Then [it was] the individual capacity to gauge buy-in and just continue those education messages.”

Listen to the full conversation with Ellie Maybury below:

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By John Portch

Women’s football is not the right environment for some coaches and practitioners, particularly expansion franchises.

That is the view of Lucy Rushton, the former General Manager of NWSL expansion team Bay FC.

“Of the people I know working in male football, 95 per cent probably would never consider coming to the women’s game,” she told an audience at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica. “And, to be honest, they probably wouldn’t be right for the women’s game either. I’ll say that. I think the person that you’re looking for, especially in expansion, is someone who’s willing to challenge themselves, willing to go outside the box.”

Bay represented Rushton’s first role in women’s football. She built her reputation in the men’s game in a series of scouting and analysis roles at the Football Association, Watford and Reading. In 2016, she left her English homeland to join Atlanta United as Head of Technical Recruitment & Analysis. The team won the MLS Cup two years later. Between 2021 and 2022, she served as DC United’s first female GM.

Back at Bay, the team were finding their feet following a tricky start to their inaugural season when Rushton unexpectedly resigned in late-June. Her departure shocked observers, but her achievements during the year she spent in southern California were considerable.

It is an exciting time for the club, who attract average crowds of nearly 15,000 to a stadium that is not their own. They speak enthusiastically of planning a new practice facility and stadium. Crucially, the ownership group have the means and the will to make it all happen.

But beyond supportive owners and astute marketing initiatives, what does it take to get a new team off the ground? The Leaders Performance Institute explores four factors put forward by Rushton.

1. A vision that informs your culture

Bay want to be the best team in the world and renowned for their people-first approach. They plan to get there by adhering to their B-A-Y values (Brave, Accountable, and You). Rushton explained each in turn:

• Brave: “being bold in the industry, pushing boundaries and innovating”.
• Accountable: people “being responsible for their actions and being willing to push themselves forward”.
• You: this stems from Bay’s desire to “celebrate each other as individuals so you can bring your true, authentic self to work every day”.

2. Finding the right personalities

Rushton believes it takes a particular type of personality to thrive in an expansion environment. “You have to have someone that’s more risk-OK,” she said. “To bet on themselves to go ‘I can go there and make a difference.” Her appointment of Head Coach Albertin Montoya showed that they can be male. “A lot of males would find it refreshing to come to a female team because it’s a different environment, with a totally different feeling, vibe, boundaries, rules.”

It is crucial, however, that you hire for diversity of background and experience despite the inherent challenges. “It’s much easier to sit in a room with people who are like you,” said Rushton. “It brings added work because you’re taking yourself outside your comfort zone – you have to be willing to do that.”

3. Elevate player care and support

Rushton explained that while male players tend to consider the bottom line above all else, female players are compelled to prioritise their living conditions. It led her and Bay to use all available mechanisms – housing, support staff, medical care – to tempt players to this corner of southern California. “How are we on a day-to-day basis trying to help them a) be in the best position they can be for the longest possible; and b) live a nice lifestyle out of football?”

It has given Bay considerable pulling power beyond the US. Three ceiling-raisers arrived in the form of Barcelona’s Asisat Oshoala, Madrid CFF’s Rachael Kundananji, and Arsenal’s Jen Beattie. Others are sure to follow.

4. Managing challenges and setbacks

Bay have had their fair share of challenges in year one, but the club has not been fazed. They went as far as dropping a player over a disciplinary issue on one occasion. It likely cost them the game, but the senior leadership believed that team values were more important. “It’s in those difficult moments that you set the culture,” said Rushton. “It showed our players and our staff what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

BreakAway Data, creator of an athlete-centric data passport app, is expanding its capabilities to include secure access to electronic medical records.

The new product, BreakAway Pro, aggregates health information from all practitioners — all clubs, national teams, private consultants — through an athlete’s career where it can be displayed and compared against game stats, tracking data and training workload. It is available for all interested leagues and unions, with a custom-build for a first, unnamed partner almost complete.

Since launch, BreakAway has secured deals with the NFLPA, NWSLPA, WNBPA and Athletes Unlimited, among others. Its founders, Dave Anderson and Steve Gera, regularly heard from agents, athletes, investors and other stakeholders that adding EMR capabilities would be a helpful addition to the product.

“We didn’t know we needed to move this mountain in order to give all athletes access to their data, but this was the key piece and the key thing that was missing in sports that we’ve now got,” Anderson said, adding that the topline benefit of this fingertip retrieval is ensuring that what “costs them time, money and effort are now guaranteed and done quickly and swiftly.”

While the data infrastructure was largely in place, meeting the standards for EMR access required significant outlay from BreakAway — a 2023 SBJ 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech company honoree — to add higher levels of insurance, meet HIPAA compliance and build maximum digital security, including a revamp of its AWS storage. Anderson estimated that this project consumed about 75% of the company’s time, money and effort for most of the past year.

Athletes register using multi-factor authentication that is verified by government ID, and all records are stored in a secure server, with none of the information stored locally on a mobile device. Users can manage settings over who has access to what information, toggling permissions on and off as they change teams or seek additional opinions.

“Players have been advocating for better access to their data for a long time, and BreakAway was the first company to build a product specifically tailored for players,” Meghann Burke, NWSLPA Executive Director, wrote to SBJ. “They have set a new standard for what, how, and when information should be delivered. It’s no surprise that they continue to innovate in the digital space, providing players with functional and accessible data solutions.”

Anderson, who had a six-year career as an NFL wide receiver, recounted his own experience attending NFLPA-backed health and wellness testing at the Cleveland Clinic. When he returned to the same facility three years later for an additional checkup, the computer systems had changed, and the doctor couldn’t easily see his past records. Anderson had to bring his own paper copies, making him think, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”

While that’s an acute pain point in elite sports, it’s also an issue for everyday people who change medical practices.

“We’re the first company that is daring enough to take it on. We built this for players, and let’s see how it works because this really doesn’t even exist in the normal world,” Anderson said. “It’s a huge build, and something hopefully that resonates well beyond just sports.”

Intelligence within the app helps provide context and comparisons to normative datasets. Visual tagging of joints and muscles is one of several ways to filter the information a user is searching for. BreakAway Pro also is agnostic to other EMR providers and supports all types of medical imaging as well.

“We heard from enough leagues and we heard from enough people that we were like, ‘All right, let’s just go all in. Let’s bet the farm on our company on this,’” Anderson said. “We claim to be the athlete data company and to have the app where they put all their information, and if this is the most important piece of information that they want, what are we doing here? It is the core piece that ties everything together.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By Luke Whitworth

The Paris Olympics have made history as the first Games where 50 per cent of the medals will go to women.

On top of that, 11-time Olympic medallist Allyson Felix led an initiative to introduce the first-ever nursery for competing mothers and their children at an Olympic village.

These are steps in the right direction at a time when the Games have shown us there is still much work to do to better support female athletes and their health.

One can look at the world records involving the United States’ women swimmers at La Defense Arena in Paris, to name an example close to Leaders Performance Institute hearts, and wonder what potential could be unleashed if the sporting world adopted more female-focused approaches to training, recovery and mental preparation.

On that front, there is some superb work being done by our friends at Sport Wales, who shared insights with Leaders Performance Institute members in early July, and that’s where we begin this edition of the Debrief.

How to increase education around female athlete health

Our Women’s High Performance Sport community group has proven to be a mainstay for the female members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

The community has made it clear that they believe there is a shortfall in education for staff around female athlete health.

With this in mind, we welcomed Dr Natalie Brown, a Research Fellow working as part of a collaboration between Sport Wales and Swansea University with the Welsh Institute of Performance Science [WIPS].

Brown led a rich conversation about her work and suggested some practical ways in which you can make positive inroads when it comes to female athlete health education:

• Invite people external from your female health and the performance team to come in and join the conversations, raising different questions.
• Balance individual needs versus sport specific challenges with whole system support.
• Specialist areas need to consider the female specifics as ‘normal.
• If you’re working as a lone ranger in this space, consider how things are being embedded, knowledge is being passed on, and progress to creating a team is happening.
• Language is a really important area. Don’t exclude anyone, but also correct. Underpinning language with evidence has been effective. Language can also be the key to confidence to talk about the topics and roll it out with athletes.
• Consider behaviour changes and the role of psychology in female health.
• Always provide the evidence of why behind knowledge, advice, support. Especially considering the volume of information, including misinformation, being shared around these topics at the moment.

Additional reporting by Rachel Woodland, Lottie Wright and Sarah Evans.

A six-step approach to driving cultural change

Those of you who read last month’s Debrief will know we touched on the theme of cultural leadership courtesy of Dr Edd Vahid, who placed the topic at the heart of his three-part Performance Support Series for Leaders members.

In July, he followed sessions one and two with a specific focus on cultural change and the effective steps that can be taken to create and deliver a new culture. In session three, Vahid shared a six-step approach:

1. Existing status – where are we? Honour the strengths of the existing culture; combine this with data, intelligence and insights, whether that be critical incident reviews, walking the floor, interviews or focus groups. Finally, check in on people’s experience of the four enablers.
2. Move into the idea of vision and purpose and being able to inspire and aspire. This means giving a clear articulation of where you’re going; matching this with the culture and the strategy. Communicate the value of change. Why are we changing, and how do you create a level of urgency and commitment to seeking change?
3. Identify those who align to the target culture. The guardians play a fundamental role. John Cotter talks about the idea of a ‘guiding coalition’ and it has real validity here.
4. Design. What are the short-term wins? Consider the work around removing barriers and instituting change.
5. Behaviour. What are the critical behaviour shifts you want to see? What are you going to recognise and celebrate and be explicit about in terms of the culture? Consistency and regularity are important.
6. Continuously monitor your progress to help reinforce the change.

What role can AI play in coach and people development?

An interesting question was posed in one of our coaching community group conversations: how can or is AI supporting work in the field of coaching and people development?

When it comes to coaching and learning in general, AI can be a divisive topic. It is common to hear that there is an art to coaching that needs to be protected and that a machine or technology can never connect with a human being.

Nevertheless, those on the community call in July agreed that there is value and opportunity for technology to support elements of people development. We tried to establish what those might be, whilst also testing what AI could come up with during the session.

Three things in particular stood out:

1. Efficiencies – many of you who operate in this space will be aware of the amount of time and resource it takes to collate data and identify the best ways to support efficiencies in your teams. AI can smoothen this process and, in some instances, identify trends you might not have thought about.
2. Access to content – this point does tie to the above quite closely. AI-powered virtual assistants can support by providing instant access to information, answering queries and aggregating trends.
3. Personalisation – AI enhances e-learning platforms by personalising the learning experience, adapting content to the learner’s pace and style, and providing interactive and engaging materials.

Why improvisation is an underrated leadership skill

Those of you who have been involved in the Leaders Performance Institute membership for a while and have attended some of our events, you’ll likely remember we have dabbled into the world of comedy to see what we can learn from the likes of the Upright Citizens Brigade who feature in Dan Coyle’s Culture Code and also comedian Stuart Goldsmith who spoke at our London Summit back in 2019.

We returned to the topic of improv comedy in July’s Leaders Skills Series session, which began with a line from renowned improv actor Bob Kulhan: ‘improvisation thrives at the pivotal intersection where planning and strategy meet execution’.

The session used Kulhan’s premise, set out in his 2017 book Getting to ‘Yes, And’ to explore how improvisation can enhance your leadership. Below, we explore some of the elements that emerged during the discourse.

How does the ability to improvise elevate performance in both individuals and teams?

There are three elements:

1. Improvisation develops collaboration skills by raising an individual’s self-awareness of how they interact with others when there is a need for collaboration.
2. It can build people’s confidence and personal impact when they are speaking up and sharing ideas.
3. Listening: improvisation can build people’s openness to different perspectives and strengthen their active listening skills.

Neil Mullarkey is another of the world’s premier improv actors and, in 2023, he released his book In the Moment. In it, he details some practical skills to help leaders demonstrate the behaviours that help create the conditions for teams to be more creative.

We also explored Mullarkey’s LASER model during the session:

• Listen– be curious, notice what is being said and what is not being said.
• Accept– accepting is not the same as agreeing, be aware of your own agenda.
• Send– listen-to-link, build momentum with the other persons idea or perspective.
• Explore– remain curious and explore your ‘filters’ and assumptions.
• Reincorporate… an earlier idea and build on it.

By Luke Whitworth

Too often there is a disparity between what is said and what is done in an organisation.

Angus Gardiner, the General Manager of the New Zealand rugby team the Crusaders, once said: ‘good and bad teams have the same values written on the wall’.

The ‘saying’ is the easy part, the ‘doing’ is quite another and this idea, was the jumping off point for Dr Edd Vahid’s recent project with Management Futures titled A Cultural Hypothesis, which was published in March 2024.

Vahid hypothesised that sustained cultures of success consistently display four features:

1. Purpose
2. Psychological safety
3. Belonging
4. Cultural leadership

As Vahid wrote, ‘an inspiring purpose is essential, a psychologically safe environment is critical, and a sense of belonging exists as a fundamental human need. Coupled with exceptional leadership, these elements distinguish cultures that thrive’.

The fourth has provided the basis of Vahid’s three-part Performance Support Series focusing on culture and change.

The first session invited Leaders Performance Institute members to assess themselves across the four areas; the second focused on cultural leadership as the ‘super enabler’ of culture; the third session further explored the skills needed by cultural leaders.

The three levels of cultural leadership

In A Cultural Hypothesis, Vahid explains that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

1. Sponsors: those operating at ownership or board level; they give permission to architects and guardians (who have a more active role) to deliver the culture. They are typically one or two people.
2. Architects: those responsible for the design of the culture, ensuring it is set up in a way that can allow people to thrive. They are typically a small number.
3. Guardians: the individuals on the ground, delivering on a daily basis, ensuring alignment to the articulated culture which they can translate to individuals operating in that space. There can be multiple guardians.

The architects and the guardians are more active in their roles and, during the session, Vahid explored the skills required for each.

Cultural architects – what skills are required?

Vahid asked members to reflect on the cultural architects in their environments and their skills. The group suggested the following:

• They have a clear vision of what ‘good’ looks like.
• They have a solid understanding of the current state of the culture.
• They can be what the culture requires them to be.
• They have strong communication skills and the ability and opportunity to lead by example.
• They have the ability to win hearts and minds.
• They are respected in the organisation and have the common skills to bring people along on the journey.
• A resilience to withstand the challenges presented by the journey.
• They set and maintain standards with consistency and genuine care.
• They ‘walk the talk’ themselves and believe in necessary change.

Vahid then shared a series of observations about cultural architects based on his research:

They are often appointed by the sponsors. By contrast, the guardians will mobilise on the ground.

They lead the cultural design. They have the ability to articulate and create the environment; they make others aware of the vision and direction of travel. This needs to be done in a skilled and inspiring fashion, with language that is able to influence the culture.

Their role can also be more literal i.e. they have a role in creating a more optimal physical environment.

They acknowledge the tensions within their team and possess the ability to flex and be agile without losing sight of the purpose.

They understand the importance of stories, which can help to distinguish your culture. As Daniel Coyle asked several organisations in his 2018 book, The Culture Code, ‘tell me a story of something that happens here that doesn’t happen anywhere else?’ They know the answer.

The architect must be effectively monitoring the culture and its current state. That can be checking-in with where the culture is now or, equally, understanding the journey that it is going to go on. It’s important to invite feedback and ‘speak truth to power’. It is crucial for them to be connected to the guardians in staying abreast of goings on; they must also ensure a sense of positivity around the culture.

Architects will take a more ‘global view’ than the guardians.

In light of the ‘radically traditional’ research of Alex Hill and the Centre of High Performance, architects provide what Hill calls the ‘disruptive edge’ while the guardians maintain the ‘stable core’.

Cultural guardians – what are their other traits?

Once again, Vahid turned to members to ask what skills they felt cultural guardians possess. They suggested:

• They have an ability to have courageous conversations with skill.
• They have awareness of their skillset and how to model behaviours and values.
• They are self-aware of their biases.
• They have the ability to advocate for the importance of cultural preservation and to influence others regarding its value.

Vahid outlined what his research had to say on the matter of cultural guardians:

The guardians can provide much-needed support as well as bandwidth, space and capacity for the architects to focus on the things that really matter. It requires insight and intelligence to provide a clear view of the landscape.

They carry a strong purpose; there is a level of awareness, alignment and connectedness. The challenge for the architect is to ensure the guardian remains connected because if the connection is lost, you can lose someone who is a positive advocate and instead they become a disruptive influence.

The guardians can speak truth to power with ‘radical candor’, to cite Kim Scott’s theory; they ‘care personally while challenging directly’.

They are role models. They also need to have a degree of influence as they are the foot soldiers that can carry out the vision effectively.

The guardians are on the ground, taking that more localised view. They can make decisions on the ground for the benefit of and in alignment with the culture. They don’t need to escalate every decision or action.

Finally, guardians are identified or are emerging. Vahid’s use of the term ‘identify’ is deliberate because one of the challenges for cultures is to identify the individuals that are going to have a positive influence. He says teams have to ask the question as to whether they are doing enough to support their guardians and the development of their skillset.

Cultural architects, cultural guardians… and cultural shareholders

While there are cultural sponsors, architects and guardians, these are all cultural shareholders.

Vahid’s research suggests that cultural shareholders can be distinguished by their level of:

• Influence
• Engagement
• Motivation

Those who carry significant positive influence and are highly motivated in alignment with your cultural aspirations could be considered guardians, but they are absolutely your strongest architects.

The challenge of a culture is to get an appropriate balance. Is there sufficient weight towards the guardians – if everyone’s a shareholder, are there sufficient numbers of strong and positive advocates for the culture – or are there people who might be considered countercultural?

How does a shareholder become a cultural guardian?

Vahid invited Leaders Performance Institute members to answer the question. They said that cultural shareholders transition into guardianship because:

• They communicate the ‘why’ well.
• They use rituals to highlight and celebrate their behaviours that support and reinforce the wider cultural aspirations.
• They onboard people into the way things are done with care.
• They give frequent updates and appreciate roles.
• They provide access to the thinking underpinning the culture and mentoring programmes.
• They involve shareholders in governance processes where they can have a say in decisions that affect the company’s culture, possibly through working groups, representation, or advisory roles.

In order to create more cultural guardians, Vahid argues that it is important to:

• Ensure people are onboarded effectively; they must know the why of the culture and be granted access to that thinking.
• Make sure people remain connected during change and transitions. New people and those evolving in their roles – include them in the process.
• Be deliberate and attentive with belonging cues. Just because someone fits today it doesn’t mean they will in six months’ time.
• Invest in people development. Are you doing enough to ensure that people have the skill to operate as and feel valued as a guardian? What development programmes do you have in place?

What are some of the fundamental change principles?

Vahid invited members to reflect on cultural change and the fundamental principles they call upon in those phases of development. Attendees suggested the following:

• Start with ‘unfreezing’ the current culture. Help people to recognise what’s not currently working and why there is a need for change.
• A clear articulation of what it looks like and what is desired.
• A clear direction of the path on which you are heading, whilst acknowledging the past as a springboard for future development (maintaining positive traditions).
• Respect the need for time – change cannot be rushed.

The change starts with observation; the sponsor then gives the architect permission to design, create and deliver what the new culture might look like. With this in mind, Vahid suggests a six-step process:

1. Existing status – where are we? Honour the strengths of the existing culture; combine this with data, intelligence and insights, whether that be critical incident reviews, walking the floor, interviews or focus groups. Finally, check in on people’s experience of the four enablers.
2. Move into the idea of vision and purpose and being able to inspire and aspire. This means giving a clear articulation of where you’re going; matching this with the culture and the strategy. Communicate the value of change. Why are we changing, and how do you create a level of urgency and commitment to seeking change?
3. Identify those who align to the target culture. The guardians play a fundamental role. John Cotter talks about the idea of a ‘guiding coalition’ and it has real validity here.
4. Design. What are the short-term wins? Consider the work around removing barriers and instituting change.
5. Behaviour. What are the critical behaviour shifts you want to see? What are you going to recognise and celebrate and be explicit about in terms of the culture? Consistency and regularity are important.
6. Continuously monitor your progress to help reinforce the change.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

By Luke Whitworth

We want to start this Debrief with a big thank you to those who made it to our Sport Performance Summit in LA last month.

It is always wonderful to see the great and the good of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to discuss the pressing performance challenges of the day.

Speaking of which, the happenings at Red Bull were far from the only opportunities on offer at the Institute in June, with roundtables and community calls packed with members sharing both challenges and best practices on a range of topics.

Many are covered in this month’s Debrief. As ever, do check out our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions, which are designed to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.

Right, let’s get into some reflections on June.

What we learned at the Sport Performance Summit in LA

We had a great couple of days with those of you who made the trip; and there was plenty of thought-provoking content for us to get our teeth stuck into (full account here). Below are a few snippets that particularly caught our attention:

Four tips for avoiding the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a 1997 book by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen that explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations. It resonated with Jen Allum, from X, the Moonshot Factory and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, who understand they could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Onstage, Allum shared their four top tips for avoiding this scenario:

1. Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
2. Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
3. Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
4. Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

Allum added that X, the Moonshot Factory “rewards project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty” in the work they do.

How to optimise your energy as a leader

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.” Here are her thoughts on how leaders should show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.

• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.

• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?

• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

The biomarkers of a healthy culture

Back to the myriad insights gleaned from our June Virtual Roundtables, starting off with the latest segment of our series of learning centred around culture and change. The sessions highlight findings from a recent research project by the Premier League’s Edd Vahid titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. The project examines the key components of cultures that have been able to sustain themselves.

Vahid posits astute leadership as a ‘super enabler’. Indeed, as Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’

What are some strategies we can consider?

1. Start with acknowledging the connection between leadership and culture: the literature largely points in this direction, with leaders having a fundamental role in supporting the change management process.
2. Identify aligned leaders: from there is important to ‘identify leaders who align with the target culture’ as Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018.
3. Honour your existing culture: you can too quickly go from point A to point B without taking a moment to understand what the existing culture looks like.

Vahid’s also research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

1. Sponsors: senior individuals critical for manifesting the desired culture.
2. Architects: these are responsible for designing cultural initiatives.
3. Guardians: everyone contributes to safeguarding the culture to varying extents.

Four features of a great debrief

Effective debriefing skills was the top of conversation for our latest Leadership Skills Series session. If you are interested to join roundtable sessions centred around developing your own leadership, there are some great topics coming up around strategy and cohesion you can find on the Member’s Area.

To keep this section punchy, a section of our discussion focused on some top line considerations for what constitutes a great debrief. Are you doing these well in your environments?

1. Psychological safety and the notion of creating a calm, positive and supportive space. As part of this consideration, set people up to focus on learning, not to be defensive and model your belief in their potential to create great performance. Finally, do everything you can to reduce power differentials.
2. Get good at questioning. Use open, non-judgmental questions and a lot of follow up questions. Focus on learning more than results and allow time for reflection.
3. Strike a good balance between focus on the positives and areas for improvement. A reminder: we learn quickest by reinforcing what works.
4. Pay attention to group dynamics to get the best possible contribution from all individuals.

The pathway to better collaboration and multidisciplinary working

Finally, we wanted to highlight some interesting insights and perspectives from our topic-led roundtable on functioning more effectively as multidisciplinary teams, which is often a very popular topic of interest across the Institute when speaking to many of you.

Do check out the complete summary. Below are a handful of ideas from members on the call that they feel are currently missing or need to be given more attention in the quest to do this well:

1. How are you supporting new leaders in your teams? Often we see those in technical expertise of ‘tactician’ roles move up to leadership position but lack the requisite skills to lead effectively. The role inevitably changes, so what are you or we doing to help them ‘lead’ their teams and embed true collaboration?
2. Be intentional with feedback. It was shared that an opportunity is a robust and thoughtful feedback mechanism that have variations in their approach. The idea of thinking about detailed feedback is to support learning on a consistent and ongoing basis within your teams. It always seems to us that high quality feedback seems challenging for our teams, so this may well be an opportunity to explore.
3. Are your standard operating procedures clear? If not, they need to be to support this quest for high levels of collaboration.
4. Psychological safety and empowerment. How do we  empower people more effectively to take targeted risks within their roles, whilst still feeling safe and secure? What we are really getting at here is psychological safety in teams and a shared understanding of what that means and looks like.

By Rachel Woodland, Sarah Evans and Lottie Wright

• Use the critical moments to reinforce your culture.

• Expansion franchises must recruit staff who want to be challenged and challenge themselves to be the best they can be.

• Challenge yourself as a leader to have a diverse staff, so that when you are recruiting female athletes, lifestyle and protecting the longevity of their career can be just as important considerations as pay.

There has never been a better time for women’s sport in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In March, Bay FC began their inaugural NWSL campaign to great fanfare.

The club was co-founded by former US women’s national team stars Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Danielle Slayton and Leslie Osborne, who propelled the project from an ambitious idea to a grand reality.

They hired Lucy Rushton as General Manager. Rushton, who was the second woman to serve as GM in MLS when she joined DC United in 2021, spoke at this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica.

Rushton is no stranger to the Leaders stage having also spoken during her time at Atlanta United, whom she joined following excellent spells with Watford, Reading and the Football Association in her native England.

She sat next to another trail blazer, Ohemaa Nyanin, the newly appointed GM of WNBA expansion franchise the Golden State Valkyries, who will join the league in 2025.

Nyanin, a Ghanian-American, had been with the New York Liberty for five years, most recently as Assistant GM, jumped at the chance to bring further basketball prestige to this corner of southern California. She previously served as Assistant Director of the US women’s national team and helped Team USA to Olympic gold in 2016 and World Cup gold in 2018.

The duo delivered insights into how they are shaping the cultures of their nascent organisations; how they’re working or planning on working with their athletes; how they’ve chosen to lead; how they’re supporting their staff; as well as how they’re changing the sporting landscape.

Owners must establish the culture and values

The Bay culture was clear well before Rushton had even accepted her position: everything is about the people, from the staff to the players. The owners want everyone to be B-A-Y. That is:

Brave – the ownership want the franchise to be bold in the industry, pushing boundaries, breaking barriers by being innovative.

Accountable – the staff turn up everyday and are responsible for their actions and drive, and push themselves forward.

You – Bay FC also celebrate themselves as individuals and bring their true authentic selves to work every day.

The three concepts have helped shape the mindset each day and give the staff and players something tangible to hold onto. The organisation’s vision is to be a global sport franchise at the head of innovation and change.

How can these be measured? For Rushton, “it’s the feeling when you go to bed or wake up and how you feel about going to work the next day or that morning”. She believes the staff feel good and know they can influence what is happening; they know it’s a positive environment and everyone is striving for the same things.

Women’s sport should not simply replicate men’s sport

Rushton’s experience of men’s football taught her a valuable lesson. “Coming into a women’s franchise, it’s so important that we understand and appreciate the difference to men’s sport and don’t try and replicate it,” she said. The club has been intentional on that since day one and strives to be people-first, player-centric, and celebrates and promotes good female health.

With Bay midway through their first season, Rushton reflected on how the staff live the values every day. They all want to work hard, but care, kindness, and mutual support are just as critical for an expansion team. You need people who want to be there, who have the grit to go through the ups and downs, but support each other when you might not have the same resources as the teams that are 5 or 10 years old.

“How we approach training everyday and present ourselves to the players gives them energy,” she continued. “Which in turn the players buy into and end up energised and galvanised.” The key is how you present yourself and how you turn up and how you live by the standards that have been set, and the biggest factor is togetherness and collaboration of all departments.

Measure success through environment and collective wellbeing

Nyanin left a household name in the New York Liberty, but her goal is not to merely recreate that team in the Bay Area. Nor does she simply want to recreate the Golden State Warriors (Valkyries co-owner Joe Lacob is also the majority owner of the Warriors). Nyanin wants the Golden State Valkyries to stand alone.

She needs to find people that are interested in a vision of winning championships, in alignment with the ownership group. Success will ultimately be measured in trophies. They are the first WNBA expansion team since 2008, so Nyanin is considering what it looks like to build a successful organisation. She said: “We need to find individuals who are interested in being challenged every day, leaning into the team. Do you want to come to work everyday, and serve the athletes everyday in a way that provides for an innovative space, that provides for us to do what we know we can do, and how quickly can we get there?”

With this question in mind, Nyanin reflected on the qualities she seeks out as the Valkyries hire and write job descriptions. “Being an expansion team means you have to be entrepreneurial. By embracing the unknown can you be empathetic too,” she added.

Rushton asked Nyanin about measuring success from a cultural perspective rather than through championships. In response Nyanin said it is about the climate of the people that come in the door. “When we ask how you are doing they might say ‘I’m fine’ or ‘I’m good’, but if you say ‘how are you doing in the terms of a climate?’; so ‘sunny, or ‘cloudy’, or ‘rainy’ – it adds depth. A way of measuring success is how we can collectively come up with our non-results-based success criteria, how do we make it such so that everyone is sunny?”

For Nyanin, ‘sunny’ doesn’t mean super excited, or super extroverted – you can be introverted but still be sunny. Success is ultimately defined by how the Golden State Valkyries create their own definitions of safety in the workplace; it stems from executives to coordinators, to players, and even changing the way agents and external stakeholders engage with the organisation.

A culture born of diversity

We all know the saying about the best-laid plans, so Rushton and Nyanin spoke of the importance of allowing culture to shape itself. For Rushton, the critical moments are when things haven’t gone to plan. “How you react to things not going to plan is how you create culture. Actions taken in those moments show the players and staff what’s acceptable and what’s not,” she said.

Some decisions have been made that may have impacted performance outcomes but certainly reinforced their culture and values. They might have been a “nightmare” at times, but they’re critical. The backing of the ownership and the Head Coach, Albertin Montoya, helped give Rushton the confidence to go ahead. Showing the group that the leaders are aligned was powerful and gave them the confidence that it was the right thing to do and that the leaders had each others’ backs.

For Nyanin, it is important to give newly-hired executives their own blank slate to contribute to the masterpiece. She said: “If everyone has a different background, you have to listen to their ideas as they’re all coming from different spaces. So it’s still being architected from all different walks and types of cultural differences.”

This means that it’s important to Nyanin to have each executive bring their own unique experience. Through these different experiences and backgrounds the culture develops. This will bring challenges and added work, as you have forces leaders out of their comfort zones. It also means that you have to be willing to think differently.

“It’s like explaining basketball to children, who all ask ‘why?’ People from different backgrounds are going to ask why do we need to execute things this way, and will ask good questions, and bring contributions beyond asking ‘why?’”

In return, Nyanin believes that the athlete will benefit, especially the female athlete who comes with different complexities. “If your own staff can challenge you and ask you why before the athlete does, then you’re giving the athlete a space for them to feel safe to be elite at their sport.”

Athlete care is paramount

What about their appeal to female players? Bay spoke with the potential recruits about player-centricity of club and how they were going to elevate player care. From starting from a blank slate, they were able to accelerate mechanisms that can help with impacting the salary cap through player housing for example. The club emphasised treating them like the athlete they are in comparison to some of their poor experiences in other environments.

In Rushton’s experience, the priorities are very different to male athletes, where pay often dictates the direction of negotiations. With females, it’s about living standards and how the organisation will elongate their career. It’s important to give them confidence in the staff who would give them the best care, medical treatment, and infrastructure. Rushton is proud that, as far as she knows, the players have no complaints about the level of care and how the organisation treats them as female athletes.

On a day to day basis it boils down to two things in her mind. Firstly, helping them be in the best position they can be for the longest time possible and, secondly, to help them live a nice lifestyle outside of football.

This focus on player care resonated with Nyanin, who was pleasantly surprised at the rapid expansion of the NWSL given her own experience of the WNBA. Bringing it back to athlete experience is hugely important because, in WNBA, athlete experience tends to focus on ‘how you do get elite talent to come through?’ Nyanin explained that longevity in the sport is different, although is it changing, because the majority of the athletes play six months in the WNBA and then go and play overseas where the conditions are often worse, but they’re getting paid more money. “Understanding the motivations of the athlete prior to them coming to your organisation and engaging in your space is important,” she said.

Attracting elite practitioners from male sport

How might top level practitioners be attracted from historically better-funded male sports? Both Nyanin and Rushton believe that efforts must be based on the vision, culture and concepts the organisations trying to build.

For the Valkyries, as Nyanin explained, the vision is to “build the best, to be the most elite, to build a space where people feel they’re being heard and their ideas being executed in a way that results in excellence. Why wouldn’t you want to come? How can I create an environment for you to thrive, and how can we do that together?”

Rushton agreed. She said: “it shouldn’t be about the gender. It does matter though – many wouldn’t be right for women’s sport. I want to make you the best practitioner in what you do, and give you the platform to excel in your specialisation.”

New franchises means recruiting for those who are willing to challenge themselves and go outside the box with their thinking. It becomes about finding the people who are comfortable with the associated risk in order to better themselves. Rushton believes they have to “believe that they can go there and make a difference.” Rushton also observed that, “a lot of males would find it refreshing to come to a female athlete team because it’s a totally different environment, with totally different feeling and vibe.”

For Rushton herself, when she moved from men’s to women’s football there were two main factors that drew her in:

1. Knowing what the owner was striving for, and it being incredibly ambitious, and the level of care and his values as a person. She said it’s rare to find someone that ambitious but be about the process and the care that is shown in achieving it.
2. Giving back to the game and being a role model. When Rushton was younger the women’s game didn’t have the opportunities; and for many years she was the sole women working in the footballing environments that she was in. Now she can show there’s a pathway to make it a profession and a career. All the staff are in positions where they can help the youth see bigger prospects for the future within sports and the women’s game.

How fans contribute to a team culture

There remains another crucial component of a team culture: the fans.

The final moments of the session were used to discuss how both Nyanin and Rushton, and their organisations, are forging connections with their fans. As Nyanin said, fans expect communications, but there are times when you can’t share with them. This is a dilemma considering that the fans are also investing in the franchise and so they deserve communication. It becomes about finding the balance around what to do when things aren’t going well. Working on being honest in their communications so that the fans understand that the leaders and everybody involved is working to solve any issues.

Similarly, Rushton and Bay have been deliberate in how they present the organisation to the fans. The Business Operations team at Bay go to the fans and ask them to bring the energy and passion; to be part of their story. They seek to empower the fans and have them be part of the journey. Bay have gone out to the community, had fans come and watch training, and prioritised outward action in the build-up to launch. People now want to be a part of their journey.

Rushton spoke of how Bay deliberately tell the stories of their players. This means that people become invested in the emotional side of who the player is, so if the team lose a game, the fans are more invested in the person than the result. The outcome is one of which she is proud and the Valkyries hope to emulate. “The fans have fallen in love with the team, despite the record.”

Results will surely follow but, here and now, both women are intent on proving that new women’s sports teams are not only viable but can thrive.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Queens Park Rangers’ season went poorly for more than four months, with the League Championship club sitting squarely in the relegation zone deep into January.

QPR soon turned its season around, however, after a change in leadership. The club won 10 times and added five draws over its final 19 matches to secure its spot in the second tier of English football another season. Most estimates suggest that relegation from the Championship to League One is a financial hit of more than $10 million (£7.9 million).

Right around the time of that upset over Leicester, QPR onboarded a new AI-powered predictive modeling tool, Gemini Sports Analytics, to make optimal use of the massive datasets they’ve compiled. Gemini is a “force multiplier,” CEO Jake Schuster has said, by simplifying the process of building machine learning algorithms catered to each club’s specific needs.

“What I really liked about Gemini was they didn’t have an ego in trying to solve every problem,” QPR Director of Performance Ben Williams said. “They created a tool where you can solve your own problems.”

Around the time of QPR’s on-field nadir, CEO Lee Hoos retired from that role, while remaining as chairman, and hired Christian Nourry as the new chief executive. Nourry was 26 and a managing partner at Retexo Intelligence, a data analytics and advisory business that worked with Real Madrid CF, AS Roma and the Mexican national team. (He became the youngest CEO in English soccer, with one European executive describing Nourry as “the Lionel Messi of the football business world,” according to the Independent.)

Nourry wanted to implement market-leading solutions to upgrade the club’s tech stack. QPR asked itself, according to Williams, “Are we able to interrogate that data optimally, to forge outcomes that are positive for the long-term future of the football club? Our answer to that was ‘no.’” That prompted the search that led the club to Gemini.

The very thesis of Gemini is to empower analysts, coaches or “anyone with a dataset,” as Williams put it, to take action with data. He noted that it can be used for everything from tactical match plans to traffic probabilities on bus trips to road matches.

Founded by Schuster, a longtime sport scientist, Gemini leverages the tech infrastructure of cloud and AI partners Snowflake, DataRobot and Databricks with data sources such as StatsBomb, SportRadar, Genius Sports, Sports Info Solutions, SkillCorner and Infinite Athlete.

As an example of what’s possible, Shuster explained that Gemini users can apply clustering algorithms to match stats and tracking data to create passing trees to identify how opponents like to create scoring chances of their own or concede them to others.

“The early lift was certainly centered around pre-match and post-match reports,” Schuster said. “So, opposition analysis — how do we approach this game? And then, post-match, what happened and what are the implications for future events? A big part of the early work with them was helping them automate those reports. And then the next step was approaching the summer transfer window.”

But it also remains an area of exploration, as QPR onboards more staff members over time.

“The power comes from our curiosity,” Williams said. “We’re in a phase of play and learn and discovery.”

Other Gemini clients include the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, the SEC’s Texas A&M and Italian soccer club Parma Calcio, which just claimed a Serie B title to earn promotion back to Serie A. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company also raised two investment rounds north of $3 million in the past year. There are now 27 sports franchise owners either directly invested in Gemini or through recent round-leading investor Will Ventures. QPR’s owners individually own minority stakes in two MLS clubs (LAFC and FC Cincinnati) as well as MLB’s Cincinnati Reds.

That financial backing has led to Gemini’s first customer success hire, former Arizona Diamondbacks Director of Operations Sam Eaton, and a budget allocation to hire a CTO, a role Schuster is actively recruiting. The company is also in the testing phase of some new generative AI features it hopes to roll out soon.

“The whole idea behind going with this tool was we can be really broad in our thought process of what we think helps our performance,” Williams said, “rather than be penned in by somebody else’s thought process of what is important to performance because they’ve created a tool that solves a problem that they once had.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.