The following is an excerpt from an article published in the March 2023 edition of fcbusiness (p. 24). Access the full publication here.
From Nice-to-Have to Necessity
Football is a beautifully simple game, but the ecosystem that surrounds it has become ever more complex and multifaceted. This has accelerated the need for clubs to find efficiencies. From on-field performance to business operations, the last 10 years has seen a surge in the use of technology to aid in the many functions that support the game.
Digital solutions that were once a nice-to-have have become mission-critical systems today for any club that wants to compete. fcbusiness spoke with EFL Championship team Reading Football Club and Crystal Palace in the Premier League to understand how they have successfully adopted technology provided by Teamworks to help find efficiencies and drive performance.
Teamworks User Profiles
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Antoine Thompson
Head Of Academy Operations At Reading Football Club
Product: Hub
Prior to Teamworks Hub becoming available, we were using multiple sources for sharing information among staff and parents. Being a Category Two academy, we have a lot of staff across many departments and we have people working all times during the day and night so you need to have a place where all communications are live and centralised. You can lose key information so what we’re finding with Teamworks is that it’s a one-stop shop for everything. There’s a scheduling tool, message groups, forms – Teamworks has it all. That’s been a major enhancement and it has streamlined a lot of our processes making efficiency the most noticeable improvement since we started using it.
From a scheduling perspective, having a diary of activities for the day is helping players know what they’re going to be doing and at what time of day. For parents, it’s allowing us to ensure they’re aware of the squads their children are in and for what games - we can provide that nice and early to them in a calendar form. We’re all busy so having that information there helps us concentrate on the jobs we need to do.
Cedric Leduc
1st Team Sport Scientist, Crystal Palace Football Club
Product: Smartabase
Digital transformation has become important due to the amount of different data sources which are now available in football and sport in general. If an organisation is collecting vast amounts of data without investment in ways to manage it, it can become pretty useless. With that in mind, it’s important to have a structure in place and create efficient workflows to ensure the effective use of data.
Having the data centralised automatically through Smartabase, we don’t have to think much about the data collection and storage process. This helps to optimise our decision-making by reducing the number of repetitive tasks we would have to do if the system was not here. We can actually focus on the analysis side of the job and really think about what the data means and how we can move forward from that point.
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Contact us or email: info@teamworks.com
