AlBaharna joins growing Manchester City Insights team
Written by Training Ground Guru — January 17, 2023
MANCHESTER CITY have added to their growing Insights team by hiring Maram AlBaharna from The Athletic as Football Insights Analyst.
AlBaharna will be part of the Insights Department, which works for the whole of City Football Group (CFG), including Manchester City’s first team. She will report into Head of Football Insights Ravi Mistry, who joined CFG in June 2020 from The Information Lab.
In an interview last year, data scientist Edd Webster explained the idea behind CFG’s Insights department, which he described as the “visualisation team”.
“What Ravi, a data visualisation expert, can do compared to say Will Spearman (Liverpool’s Lead Data Scientist) is totally different," Webster said. "Will isn’t making dashboards, he’s building models, while Ravi is building tools that people who aren’t data users can understand.
"That was a really smart move by City and I think other clubs will follow. At the moment you’ve got Heads of Recruitment making Tableau dashboards, which is good, but you have people with that skillset who can make really good use of it.”
AlBaharna will help to produce high-quality, reliable and insightful visual analytics; scope, develop and maintain engaging tools which reduce time to insight; and educate and upskill the club’s football staff about analytics.
After completing a BSc in Economics and Management at the University of London, AlBaharna worked as an analyst and data consultant for FC Analytics. Last year she joined media company The Athletic as a data journalist.