A partnership between Linguistics experts at the University of Warwick and the Football Association of Wales (FAW) is changing how game analysts and team coaches communicate. This is ensuring that game intelligence is acted upon during live matches to sharpen their competitive edge.

During the first phase of the project, Kieran attended the European Qualifiers match between Cymru and Latvia to observe match relationships and collect audio data of the match interactions between team analysts in the gantry, and managers on the pitch side. Within workshops Kieran worked with the analysts and coaches to review the data and build a shared understanding of what was happening and what might need to happen for the team to reach its goals. This collaborative approach located and unpacked episodes of successful communication and examined who spoke to whom, when, and how often, as well as the social networks, to identify the staff and team units most reliant on eachother during matches.

In a second phase of data collection, Kieran broadened the data collected on analysts and recorded all the coaches as they engaged in coaching, to gather a higher quality data set and expand his analysis. By the end of the second workshop, the FAW team felt empowered in their communication planning and decision-making and adjusted the coaches pitch-side positions to improve the flow of information. The workshops have given the analysts and coaches an appreciation of the complexity of match communication, and they can now make evidence-based decisions to improve their match day interactions with one another.