STATSports: Inside A Premier League Title-Winning Performance Department

With the 2026/27 Premier League season underway, former Arsenal Head of Sport Science and Performance, Tom Allen, reflects on the club’s first league title since 2004 and explains how STATSports technology, objective performance data and expert judgement help elite clubs make better decisions.

Winning starts before kick-off

When Arsenal ended their 22-year wait for the Premier League title, the acclaim naturally focused on Mikel Arteta, his players and the football they produced. Behind the scenes, however, performance staff had spent months preparing the squad for one of the most demanding campaigns in modern football.

For former Arsenal Head of Sport Science and Performance Tom Allen, success always began with understanding exactly what the manager wanted from everyone.

“At the outset, you need to understand the manager’s plan, the game model he has chosen. Then you work backwards from that.”

Allen believes that the role of a performance department is to reinforce the manager’s vision, aligning department specialists from sport science, medicine, strength and conditioning, data science and nutrition behind one shared objective.

“It’s much more than about getting players to be available to play – it’s about understanding what players can physically deliver at their optimum, ensuring they know what’s required, understand the game plan and their role within it. Availability gets a player onto the team sheet.

“Preparation determines whether they can influence the game. That’s what ultimately enables teams to win football matches.”

Performance staff do not simply collect players’ wearable precise GPS data, they translate technical information into clear recommendations for coaching staff.

“My role was to move complexity into clarity. We could collect thousands of data points, but information only becomes valuable when it informs a decision. My responsibility was to connect the information, expertise and football context, then turn that complexity into clear action.

“I would say one thing that always sat behind our thinking was the question ‘does it help us win the next game?’ If the answer was yes, we did it. If the answer was no, we didn’t.”

Preparing players to perform

Arsenal’s title-winning season included 63 matches from a possible 65 across domestic and European competition, highlighting how dramatically the demands of elite football have evolved.

Allen explains: “Successful teams have to play more games, more frequently, and do more on the pitch. Preparing players for games every three days extends far beyond measuring physical output. Travel, recovery, emotional fatigue, tactical demands, nutrition, sleep and individual player profiles all influence how practitioners manage each athlete.

“You’re never going to have perfect information. The aim is to bring every department expert into the room and provide the best possible advice for the manager.”

Those decisions become increasingly individual as fixture congestion grows, as modern performance departments continually balance objective information with practitioner experience to prepare every player for the manager’s demands.

“A player returning from injury requires a very different programme to someone who has started every match over several weeks, while another may need additional physical exposure because they have accumulated fewer minutes.”

Turning data into decisions

Allen has witnessed athlete monitoring transform elite football during his career.

“When I first got into football I had ten GPS units for twenty-five players! Today every player has a vest assigned to them, and that could be from the Under 13 age group upwards. GPS has become another part of the shirt.”

At elite level, STATSports APEX technology provides objective information about every player’s physical output, helping practitioners understand workload, movement demands and intensity more accurately than ever before. That data becomes the starting point for wider conversations across the performance department:

“The GPS data tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why it happened. The data is the starting point for the analysis. So it might trigger a medical discussion, a nutrition conversation, a recovery dialogue or a strength and conditioning deliberation. The player wants to see their own data as well.”

Context is what transforms information into meaningful insight.

Allen points to sprint speed as a simple example: “Two players might both reach 30 km/h, yet one could be a winger operating at around 85 per cent of their maximum speed while the other may be a defender working at their physical limit. Although the headline figure is identical, the physiological demand is completely different.”

Rather than comparing players against one another, STATSports GPS technology allows practitioners to assess every individual against their own benchmarks, helping coaches understand what that means for training, recovery and match preparation.

Preparing for a demanding season

The challenge, Allen says, begins again as clubs prepare for another Premier League campaign: “International tournaments mean players often report back at very different stages of physical and emotional readiness. Some players may only have two weeks of pre-season after playing many minutes at a tournament. Others might have six weeks of pre-season having hardly played at all.”

Those different starting points mean there can be no one-size-fits-all programme.

Using STATSports technology alongside physiological testing, practitioner observations and conversations with players, performance departments build an individual picture of every athlete before deciding how workloads should progress towards the opening weeks of the season.

Allen has also seen players become increasingly engaged with objective performance information.

“Elite sportspeople are incredibly competitive, they’re focused on how they make themselves better. They’re like sponges. They’ll be knocking on your door asking, ‘How do I improve this?’”.

Shared purpose, shared success

Technology has transformed elite football, enabling performance teams to make more informed decisions together.

For Allen, STATSports provides the objective evidence that allows coaches, medical staff and performance practitioners to work from the same foundation, creating better conversations and more informed plans throughout the club.

“STATSports provides objective information about the work players complete. Combined with football context and practitioner judgement, it leads to better decisions. Technology supports the process. It’s the expertise of the people around it who make it work.”

Looking back on Arsenal’s title-winning campaign, he believes alignment was the club’s greatest strength.

“Everybody shared the common goal. We’d learned from previous seasons, kept moving in the same direction, had a special connection and trusted each other. To finally get over the line and see what it meant to millions of supporters was incredible.”

To find out more, and to purchase STATSports Wearable Technology products, click here

5 STATSports facts                                                    

– Founded in 2008 in Newry, Northern Ireland

– Its GPS technology is used by thousands of teams, from grassroots to elite level

– Trusted by more than 500 elite clubs worldwide, including Premier League clubs, national teams and leading MLS franchises

– Supports player monitoring, rehabilitation and preparation to play

– APEX is the GPS tracker commonly seen during elite football warm-ups and training sessions

Images: STATSports