Hibs and Kitman Labs have agreed a partnership deal that will allow the Club to deploy their ‘Coaching & Development Solution’ across the Development Squad and Academy.
Kitman Labs has an established track record of working with top teams and leagues across a variety of sports, including soccer, basketball, rugby, and American football.
The company’s technology is in use by some of the world’s most elite soccer organisations, including Bayer Leverkusen, Chelsea, Liverpool, Fulham and Ipswich.
The Solution’ will advance Hibs’ ability to optimise player pathways and identify talent earlier in the development cycle, enable more informed succession planning, accelerate their talent development pipeline, and better prepare players for the rigours of the First Team.
Hibs coaches will be able to continue to create individualised development programmes, while establishing an objective, data-driven benchmarking system for player progression.
Alongside this, Hibs will continue to utilise Kitman Labs’ Performance Medicine and Performance Optimisation Solutions.
That means the Club will now have medical, performance, coaching, and talent development data in a single, integrated platform.
All of this is designed to unlock player health, wellness and performance outcomes and inform talent development strategy across the entire football club.
By unifying all data and analytics in a singular operating system, practitioners and stakeholders across the Club will have access to shared data and shared intelligence in real-time – enabling cross departmental collaboration and communication while providing the insights necessary to support both strategic and tactical decision-making.
Hibs has been utilising the Kitman Labs Intelligence Platform for its First Team for several years, helping them leverage advanced analytics to maximise player performance and welfare.
The expansion of the partnership with Kitman Labs will help the Club systemise their talent development pipeline to support the needs of the First Team and help the Club fulfil its ambitions in the commercial market.
Academy Director, Gareth Evans said: “Utilising the Kitman Labs Intelligence Platform allows us to unify our data collection process, which is vital when monitoring the development of our young players.
“The ‘Coaching and Talent Development Solution’ will provide our coaches will the infrastructure and data-led insights to build successful development models, which will ultimately aid the young players we have at HTC.”
“We’re grateful for our continued and longstanding relationship with the Hibernian Football Club,” added Stephen Smith, CEO and Founder of Kitman Labs.
“The Club has been at the vanguard of adopting and leveraging data science to optimise the health and performance of its players for years.
“The expanded use of iP represents the continued evolution and innovation of the Club and its leadership and we look forward to partnering to help identify and develop the next generation of Hibernian players.”
The company represents the industry’s largest network of elite and youth organisations (2,000+) and the industry’s largest dataset of talent, performance, and medical data for all stages of the athlete lifecycle.
John graduated from Telford College in 2010 with an HNC in Practical Journalism and since then he worked for the North Edinburgh News, The Southern Reporter, the Irish News Review and The Edinburgh Reporter. In addition he has been published in the Edinburgh Evening News and the Hibernian FC Programme.
