Part 3 — A Career in Football Analytics, The Reality

Benoit Pimpaud
6 min readApr 2, 2022

Beyond the pitch.

Photo by author

After one year in a football club, I decided to leave. Though I had worked hard to reach that childhood dream, it was a natural decision.

Not because the experience was bad — it was awesome — but because I feel it was enough. Football during a pandemic was not really football anymore and living in a new town without any friends or family nearly was a bit rough.

I moved. Without regrets. The experience was awesome.

Childhood dream fulfilled. Checked.

Moving like this allows me to be quite objective about the football analytics industry.

I guess.

I didn’t get awful relationships. I enjoyed the work. I had some starry-eyed moments.

Still, I also got annoyed. Been disillusioned. Like in any workbench.

This last piece is a step back. Trying to reconcile what’s the current state of football analytics and what it could be — what it should be — to reach the level of other common industries.

Not mature enough

We probably expect too much from the football industry.

Yes, it drives a lot of money, it captives a large audience. Still, this is a tiny world.

Written by Benoit Pimpaud

Data & Beyond Engineer. 👀 From An Engineer Sight: a periodic about data, engineering, and design: fromanengineersight.substack.com

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?