How Leinster's data guru now paves the Premier League's pathways
TRAILBLAZER: Stephen Smith, CEO & Co-Founder at Kitman Labs. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
It started with ten years’ worth of strength and conditioning reports on printed Excel sheets in a storage cupboard at Leinster. That and a curious mind. Now Stephen Smith is turning his analytical focus to the task of unearthing the world’s first female Formula 1 champion and identifying prospective managers for leading football clubs.
Quite the journey.
Smith found his way to Leinster via a childhood in Kildare, schooling at the Cistercian College in Roscrea, and a degree in sports and exercise rehabilitation at the Institute of Technology in Carlow. Leinster? That started out as a few months of work experience and stretched to over six years of enormous growth for him and for the club.
Michael Cheika was a huge part in all that.
The Australian head coach was an uber-intense individual who transformed an under-performing organisation. He was also a data convert after using it to build a successful career in the fashion industry. Among his early frustrations in Dublin was the time it was taking to get stars like Brian O’Driscoll, Felipe Contepomi and Gordon D’Arcy off the injury list.
Among the questions Cheika asked was how their layoffs compared to players with similar injuries. Were Leinster’s taking longer? And, if so, why? No-one had the answers: the information simply wasn’t there. This was around the time that Smith started to digitise that decade’s supply of old Excel printouts. Cheika was all ears.
“One thing I loved about his approach was that there was no bullshit, no crap. He didn’t care if you were in the role ten days or ten years, if you could provide answers he was willing to listen and he created a lot of empowerment.
“I saw an opportunity for my role and my input and my voice to be heard at a point in time when I was extremely young, and at a point in time when I was probably the most junior member of the backroom team. He gave me an incredible amount of air time.
“It also meant that I could see the impact that I was having every day in that environment. That created a lot of excitement for me and made me feel like the role I had was meaningful, and I continued to lean into that area as it was an enormous gap for us.”
Leinster went from laggards to market leaders. They were the first northern hemisphere rugby team to use GPS to track their training and their playing time, and that was just the start. Smith has described since how they went from one metric – what they could see with the naked eye – to 300 as they collected their data and built their databases.
It was new ground. Virgin territory.
There was no thought then of taking this thing to the wider sports market and beyond. Smith adored his work at Leinster. He believed passionately in the project and the people as the club claimed three Heineken Cups in four years, but it dawned that the Irish province hadn’t been the only sports organisation living in data’s dark ages.
“Then it did grow into, ‘wow, other sports haven’t figured this out either’.”
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Kitman Labs started out in 2012 with just €55,000 in seed funding. Smith found that his Irish midlands accent and our colloquialisms worked against him when pitching his project so he had to tweak both. Even that wasn’t enough for pennies to start dropping in boardrooms around the world.
The British mathematician Clive Humby had declared data to be the “new oil” six years earlier but sport wasn’t the first sector out there digging wells. Coaches and administrators aren’t scientists and this Irish guy was trying to sell them the idea of a piece of highly-scaled theoretical technology that would span multiple sports teams and, potentially, industries.
It was a lot to absorb.
He wasn’t a businessman either, but Smith attracted investors and some became mentors. It was explained to him that he didn’t need to know the ins and outs of every department: that he was more of a head coach looking to find individuals who could, in sporting terms, kick a goal, lock down a scrum or call a lineout. That worked.
Kitman Labs is now headquartered in California where the Smiths live. It has offices in Dublin, Manchester and Sydney, over 250 employees and they work with over 2,000 sporting organisations between clubs, leagues and governing bodies across 26 countries. Two of their most prominent partners now are the Premier League and the NFL.
Enough said.
If the concept is all too … sports sciencey then Smith breaks it down into two types of data: medical and activity. Just collecting all this is one thing – and that was the frontier for a long time - knowing how to use it is the key. If digitising hand-written records was the Stone Age then the sector is probably somewhere post-Industrial Revolution by now.
“We’re at a point where the collection, digitisation and aggregation is all good and there is a huge focus on creating intelligence from that. It is all about analysis and interpretation, how you leverage that for communication, collaboration and decision-making.
“So I feel like we’re at a really important point. Over the next five years we’ll really start to see the impact the data can create for us in moving performance forward. To be in the heart of the process in solving that problem is exactly why I started this business.”
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Maybe the best way to explain all this is by way of example.
One of the most interesting partnerships the company has made is with the English Premier League for their Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). It provides academies with a centralised ‘Football Intelligence Platform’ that collates player and staff data across areas that include coaching, medical, sports science, player care and education.
Smith describes it as “easily the most advanced academy network in global football”. It encompasses 94 English clubs, so it is designed to lift standards all the way down the game’s pyramid. It collects information from the day players start their academy journeys as seven and eight-year olds through to their late teens.
Kitman’s role is providing the digital platform to house and sieve all this info.
“It creates a tidal wave of players across the entirety of the UK system. People in the high-performance space globally do not understand the gravity (sic) of what has been happening over the last ten years across the Premier League and wider UK ecosystem.
“What people are seeing is that the Premier League has easily become, by a stretch, the most competitive league in global football and those two things are not a coincidence. There is absolutely a link between the two.
“So, yes, they bring in overseas players but that is at both underage and senior level and they are actually extremely measured about the number of overseas players coming in. They are developing more homegrown talent than any other nation globally.”
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This is big business. Kitman has subsumed the Sports Office and Presagia Sports since its inception. Three years ago it was revealed that it had raised €45m new funding although there was a recorded loss of €6.1m for its financial year in 2021, up from €4.6m 12 months before. This was alongside a bump in sales up to €4.8m for the same period.
The directors’ report stated this to be along expected lines and pointed to an increase in overheads while the company went about finishing research and developing new products and services. What’s clear is that the horizon is expanding in terms of its applications and what's feasible.
The deal with the Premier League was only announced last October, for instance, and the use of all this data has spun off in a myriad of different and fascinating ways. A partnership with one football club to find players suited to their style of play morphed into a programme where they linked it to prospective salaries and so better informed transfer dealings.
“We have also started to spin off recently around conversations surrounding manager selection. Who exhibits the right characteristics and traits that the organisation wants? We have worked with a number of our clients to help them find head coaches and managers. It’s solving completely different problems and ones we never thought we would be in the market to do. Now they have become really important parts of who we are.”
Horse sports and motor sports have been sucked into this orbit too.
The bid to find the first female F1 champion is being undertaken with a company called More Than Equal that is bent on using data to find young drivers with potential and then enrol them in a 100%-funded driver development programme in a sport where women have always found it harder to avail of opportunities.
More wide-ranging again are discussions with the US Department of Defence in which Smith realised that problems they were having from a performance perspective were identical to the sports sector: if the characteristics needed to be a striker and a goalkeeper are very different then the same applied to airmen and medics.
“So helping them identify the right people and characteristics is exactly the same as what we do from a scouting or recruitment perspective. Then how do you train them? That’s the same as an academy training scenario. How do you keep them performing and healthy? It’s been really uplifting to see how ubiquitous the technology we created is.”
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