Data analytics help make the mighty lionesses roar

The Football Association has been working with Google Cloud technology to enhance the selection, development, training, and performance of the high-profile England women's team.

The partnership has focused particularly on making football more accessible and inclusive by using data to support the FA's 'Inspiring Positive Change' strategy. This is intended to transform women's and girls' football by enabling equal access to opportunities, boosting participation, and supporting sustainable success at the elite level.

Making the most of a narrow window

There is often an all-too-short window between England players completing matches for their own football clubs and the start of summer tournaments such as the World Cup or the European Championships.. The upshot is a squad frequently having only short amounts of time to prepare.

So, to maximize the time available and ensure players are physically and mentally ready, The Football Association (FA) leans heavily on the power of data and technology to help. To this end, it partnered with Google Cloud in 2019 to enhance the selection, development, training, and performance of all the England teams.

Ahead of Euro 2025 and other recent tournaments, Google Cloud played a key role in providing coaches and performance staff with access to the data and processing power they needed to select the best available Lioness squad.

Moneyball, but with help from the cloud

A core application in this context was the FA's in-house developed Player Performance System (PPS), which runs on Google Cloud. The PPS measures the training, fitness, and form of players across each of England's national teams. The aim is to understand who are at the top of their game, enabling coaches and their staff to spot patterns in behavior and performance that a human scout might miss.

The system does so by taking thousands of hours of video and match statistics from training sessions. It then generates insights on individual player and team performance and even offers guidance to coaches and their staff on how they can best enhance it.

The PPS is also a central component of the Helix management tool, which tracks the activities of over 3,500 male and female professional footballers. This is the equivalent of more than 22 million data points collected from competitive games and training sessions. Helix also includes player profiles, scouting reports, and medical information.

Choosing the best female players

Once the data has been analyzed, integrated visualization tools provide coaches and their staff with multiple, customized views of what was previously just disparate data. These views offer them new and unique insights into player and team performance within minutes.

The result is that coaches are well positioned to optimize their choice of tactics. This provided the Lionesses with an edge that took them all the way to win the UEFA Women's Euro in 2022, the World Cup final in 2023, and to another UEFA Euro victory in Switzerland last year.

Sponsored by Google Cloud.