Sormaz appointed Barnsley Sporting Director

ANALYTICS pioneer Mladen Sormaz has been appointed as the new Sporting Director of League One Barnsley.

Sormaz is currently the Director of Analytics at Miami-based private investment firm 777 Partners, who own a number of clubs around the world. In September they agreed to purchase Farhad Moshiri’s 94% stake in Everton and are awaiting approval for that to go through from the Premier League.

In December, Barnsley announced their intention to appoint a Sporting Director. Former captain Bobby Hassell has taken on the role on an interim basis during January.

Sormaz was our guest on Episode #9 of the TGG Podcast and has presented at a number of our events, including TGG Live last October and the Big Data 2022 Webinar. You can watch a section of the Big Data presentation below.

Sormaz's rise is a great illustration of the changing face of professional football in this country. He originally did a Sport and Exercise Science with Psychology degree at Leeds Beckett University, before converting to Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University. His PhD, at York University, was in Modelling Neural Brain Responses and Pattern Recognition.

After graduating he worked full-time for the statistical analysis website Football Whispers, as well as doing one and-a-half days a week as a First-Team Data Analyst at Huddersfield Town.

“Statsbomb gave me the chance to do my first football analysis blog and then Joe Mulberry ran a hackathon about three years ago, which was the first time I’d really watched football data," Sormaz told TGG in 2019.

“I’m very grateful to both of them - and to Football Whispers and Huddersfield Town for the opportunities that they’ve given me.”

After Huddersfield, he became Leicester City’s first Head of Head of Analytics in 2019, a position he held for more than three years. Edd Webster now holds that position.