What does a Performance Analyst do?

We sat down with Richard Handyside, Course Lead for BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education and Lecturer in Performance Analysis, to discuss all things Performance Analysis.

What is Performance Analysis?

If you’re looking for a definition of Performance Analysis, the UK Sports Institute define it as: “a specialist discipline involving systematic observations to enhance performance and improve decision making, primarily delivered through the provision of objective statistical and visual feedback”. So, basically, your role as a Performance Analyst is to support what they're referring to as a decision maker.

Taking football as an example, there are a whole range of different decision makers, from the players on the pitch, through to the manager or the head coach making decisions about the team and the recruitment staff about which signings to make. 

To make that decision possible, they need information, and a performance analyst's role is to provide that decision maker with that information. The more reliable and up to date that information is, the better. So, you're not there to make decisions, you're there to provide either video or numerical statistical data to help others make decisions.

What's your experience in Performance Analysis?

My own experience has been really interesting. I have an undergraduate degree in Sport and Exercise Science, and a master's degree in Performance Analysis. I started working in professional football in 2010, initially at Leeds United Football Club and then quickly moved on to Arsenal. I spent a long time at Arsenal Football Club. I started down in the Academy with the under Sixteens and progressed all the way through to the first team over a period of about five years.

I then left football, wanting experience working with different athletes and sports. I started working for the UK Sports Institute. I was asked to help the England Netball team from a performance analysis point of view. It was a sport that didn't have a particularly big analysis tradition, which was a great opportunity for me to make an impact. This culminated in the 2018 Commonwealth Games where we won a gold medal, which was amazing! Winning it felt like a bit of a kind of closing of that chapter so that's when I thought, what else do I enjoy?

Then opportunity arose to teach the area and step into academia. That was six years ago, so I now teach Performance Analysis across both our Sports Coaching and Physical Education, and our Sport and Exercise Science degrees.

Is Performance Analysis just for football?

Performance Analysis is absolutely a growing field in sports other than football. When I started it, it was relatively new. It only existed in a formal sense in those sports that were able to fund it, such as football and perhaps rugby. If you watch rugby on the TV, you'll see the coaches sit up in the boxes quite high up and away as opposed to the tradition of the football coaches being right there down at pitch level, and those coaches will sit next to their analysts with their laptops open.

As Performance Analysis has grown as a discipline in these sports and people have been able to see the value, it's convinced coaches and performance directors that it’s a useful tool, and you now see Performance Analysis jobs being advertised across almost every sport, either for team sports like football, rugby and cricket, or for bodies like the UK Sports Institute supporting Olympic and Commonwealth sports.

You also see more specialist roles now, such as biomechanics analysts, because they are there to look at elements that are technique-based and numbers heavy. Take gymnastics as an example, because it's focused on rotations, body shapes, joint angles and planes of movement, you're probably going to see somebody with more of a biomechanics background than a video-based performance analysis background working with athletes in sports like this. 

How do our sport courses support students to move into Performance Analysis roles?

We address Performance Analysis through modules across both our Sport and Exercise Science, and Sports Coaching and PE degree courses during the first two years of the courses, and there’s also another optional module available in the final year.

A number of our students have gone on to Performance Analysis roles, mostly in football, with smaller clubs like Solihull Moors but also bigger clubs like Aston Villa, Derby County and Nottingham Forest.

Additionally, we send two students per year to work as interns at Solihull Moors, which resulted in one particular student going to Wembley twice for the for the playoff final in the FA Trophy final. We’ve also had students complete Performance Analysis placements with Birmingham Moseley Rugby Club, Kidderminster Harriers Football Club and Warwickshire County Cricket Club, meaning students are getting substantial practical experience and are now applying this in professional sport since graduation.

Just one example of this is graduate, Callum Roberts, who has gone on to work for Birmingham City Football Club as a Performance Analyst.