The Football Association of England (The FA) & G-workplace

The Football Association of England (The FA), the world’s oldest football association, has embraced inclusivity, diversity, and technology-driven innovation for success across various games. The challenge lies in managing and extracting value from vast internal and external data sources. The FA employs APIs to integrate these sources, utilizing Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery for data lake management with the help and support of G-workplace. Driven by new ways of thinking fueled by supporting inclusivity, diversity and innovation with technology, The FA has recently seen a resurgence of success on and off the pitch across the youth, men’s and women’s games. When data volumes get larger, the problems associated with the data can also get larger. The more data you have, the harder it can be to extract value from the data.

External and internal sources have been made available through APIs so that data can be transferred to cloud storage where the Google Cloud Storage infrastructure comes into its own. BigQuery was used for the data lake. In the data lake, information from various sources is collected and made available for the various analysis systems. The external sources are made accessible by App Engine (GAE) and Cloud Functions. These processes first place the data in Cloud Datastore where it is converted by Dataflow for the Data lake. This process is orchestrated by Google Composer. Data from the Data lake is transformed by Dataflow into Datastore tables. In this way the effectiveness of the APIs is maximised. Internal sources have been created with the Looker tool and Cloud Sql. To give the users the possibility to run reports by themselves Data Studio is used. Google Workspace (G-Suite) has been used to unlock the Data lake by creating Google sheets which can be accessed by larger numbers of analysts.

The Player Performance System allows The FA to gain deeper insights into player development, tactical analysis, and talent identification. This data-driven approach supports coaches and technical staff in making more informed decisions, ultimately contributing to the success of English football teams at all levels. The scalable Google Cloud infrastructure ensures the system can handle growing data volumes and evolving analytical needs.