Arsenal have won their first Premier League title in 22 years and, within hours, will contest the Champions League final against PSG — the culmination of a deep, far-reaching process of restructuring, both technical and organisational.
Since Mikel Arteta was appointed head coach in 2020, Arsenal have steadily built out a wider ecosystem of specialist roles behind the scenes, assembling a support structure that has underpinned their return to the elite of English and European football.
One of the most influential areas of this transformation — in terms of innovation and its direct impact on what happens on the pitch — has been data analytics. And within this department, several key positions have been, and continue to be, held by women.
The first name to mention is Sarah Rudd, a historic figure at the club who left Arsenal in 2021 but is widely regarded as the architect of its modern analytics department. She first arrived in North London in 2013, after developing a player performance model based on Markov chains and joining the startup StatsDNA, which was subsequently acquired by Arsenal the same year.
Following that acquisition, she went on to lead the club’s data and video analysis department at a time when football across Europe was only just beginning to formalise such structures. In that sense, she can fairly be considered a pioneer.
In an interview with El País, Rudd said that “the work we did at Arsenal completely changed the way player performance is evaluated.” In the same conversation, she explained that she eventually left the club to “pursue new challenges beyond what is possible within a single team,” going on to found her own sports consultancy. She left behind, however, a significant legacy — in both methodology and expertise — at Arsenal.
Alongside Rudd, for three years, worked Susana Ferreras, who is now Data Analytics Lead and video analyst within Mikel Arteta’s staff. Arsenal hired her in 2018 as a sports scientist — “a role created specifically for her,” as Rudd later explained — following a career that combined elite sport, engineering, and performance analysis.
A former Olympic silver medallist with Spain’s national basketball team, Ferreras also worked as a telecommunications engineer for major companies such as Vodafone and Telefónica, while simultaneously building experience as a basketball analyst — a role she continued to hold in parallel during her early years at Arsenal.
Today she is a key figure across the club’s football operations, having been promoted in 2024 to Data Analytics Lead. And she has done so, working largely out of the spotlight, as Arsenal have gone on to win the Premier League — with a Champions League final still to come.
Not a bad return at all.