Insight into the new data team helping give Sunderland and Lee Johnson the cutting edge in League One promotion battle

The club created a new role, with James Young appointed to the position of head of data and analysis in March and he has been providing some insight into the work his team does in a bid to help Lee Johnson’s side on the pitch.

Young had previously worked for Deloitte – whose clientbase includes the FA, UEFA and Premier League – for six years prior to his move to the Stadium of Light.

A key part of his role is to help the recruitment, performance and coaching teams to make ‘evidence-based decisions’.

Sunderland have enjoyed a strong start to the new season and have also progressed to the third round of the Carabao Cup.

Speaking to the Training Ground Guru site, Young has been offering an insight into some of the changes they have made.

Young said: “You can do the best analysis in the world, something totally groundbreaking, but if the club can’t pick it up and do something with it, it’s meaningless.”

A lot of initial work has been going into how the data is stored, a new Kairos planning and communication platform introduced, which the likes of Norwich, Stoke and Scotland use, while Akhil Shah has been appointed as the new data scientist.

Young added: “We were previously working off PDFs for schedules and as soon as that changed,you had to send a new PDF to a massive group of users.

“It was an inefficient process, especially when you're trying to get that short feedback loop. Even something as basic as the time of lunch changing - you want the whole club to know about it straight away.

"Extrapolate that out to training, travel arrangements - the ability to do things instantaneously and to keep people up to date in real time is very powerful. That’s why Kairos was a no-brainer for me.”

Sunderland’s new structure includes head coach Lee Johnson, sporting director Kristjaan Speakman, Stuart Harvey as head of recruitment and academy manager Lewis Dickman.

Young added: "All these things are coming together really nicely now.”

Read the full interview here:

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