Scavenger hunts, an inter-company football match & new winners of the highly coveted 'FA La La La' Cup.
After being fully remote since March 2020, we finally decided an in-person team day was essential. Riding the post-conference high, the StatsBomb North (Europe & US) team trekked to Bath for team building and getting to know each other in 3D form. After presentations, demos and knowledge sharing galore over the past two years, we were super mindful that everyone is zoomed out and didn’t need to sit and listen to talk upon talk about strategy and commercial updates. We needed ‘fun activities’ (this made many of our team cringe initially too - bear with me), but we also wanted to get everyone fired up for the future.
Of course, we were also covid careful; we booked out double the space we needed so that social distancing was possible, and we made vaccination a prerequisite. We’re still sad that our StatsBomb South colleagues couldn’t join us - unfortunately Egypt came off the red list just too late for us to get visas sorted. It wasn’t quite how we envisaged it in that respect, but then nothing COVID-related goes to plan.
CEO Ted Knutson kicked off proceedings by setting a clear vision for StatsBomb - we are going to become ‘the world’s greatest sports data company.’ Well, that’s pretty compelling! It’s not fluff; we are already on our way and have a solid strategy to get us there. Ted caught all our new starters up on our journey so far, where we started at a kitchen table right up to where we are today as a company of over 500 people, and set the scene for the next few years. There were some key themes that everyone could take away - ‘own yo shit’ now being the informal company mantra, and a strange guest appearance of Ryan Reynolds (don’t ask!).
Post StatsBomb Team Day fallout...
There's a reason for this, but I'm not sure I want to explain it outside the company.
(Also @CarlonCarpenter is fired.) pic.twitter.com/6OzIjSbqe9
— Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) October 19, 2021
He also spent a fair bit of time talking about employee shares, showing real examples of employees in the company and how their shares have grown so far. Most employees are shareholders - it’s really important to all the founders that employees own a part of the company and feel that they have the ability to drive their own future.
We then sent everyone off on a scavenger hunt around Bath. We are lucky to be based in a world heritage site - it gave everyone a chance for a spot of sightseeing around beautiful Bath. The local contingent were looking quite smug until I told them they had their own set of cryptic clues!
How many of these would you have got right? (Yes, these are the harder ones.) Answers are at the bottom of this page.
- Bump, scrape and feed
- Past Raheem
- You need to be Poirot to find Bath’s walk of fame
- Paths, puzzles and petals - 6 in fact
- 18th-century cocoa addict
The point of making everyone run around was to have fun and chat with people they wouldn’t normally chat to, but we’re a competitive bunch, so we had to give everyone a purpose. For the winning team, StatsBomb has made a charity donation per team member to a charity of their choice.
So congrats to the winning team, co-founder Thom and all of our Will’s! Donations are on their way to the following important charities:
https://www.scope.org.uk/
https://snowdropproject.co.uk
https://www.whiteribbon.org.uk
https://www.dogstrust.org.uk/
Day 2 hosted CTO Thom Lawrence’s vision for the future of tech teams at StatsBomb, where he laid out the framework for engineers’ career progression across multiple disciplines. Vicki Cullen launched our new HR software, empowering all employees and managers to manage performance, time off, and training needs, and I reinforced some important operational cadence within the organisation that we are working towards.
The remaining time was spent in workshops, thinking through process improvements we want to make, brainstorming future ideas, and more valuable face-to-face team time. We even squeezed in an inter-company football tournament! All ages, all genders, all abilities. This is how we roll.
As always, we ended with a quiz, as is now a tradition on StatsBomb team days, as we have the best quiz master ever, Kat Agg, whose forte is describing football club logos in words. It’s hilarious - and tricky. For example, can you guess which club this is?
‘A siren with hair billowing in the breeze is holding a horn under her left arm, resting on a gigantic football, stood in front of an eight-spoked wheel, a yellow teardrop and green and black arch.’
We even have our own internal cup that is passed each season from winner to winner - the FA La La La Cup! Congrats to the deserving winners of this year’s competition:
Interacting with so many people in person after so long was exhausting and exhilarating, but myself and the senior management team are so proud of our employees and the strong teams that we have built together. StatsBomb South are hosting their version of team day this week. We’re sorry we can’t join you, we hope you enjoy watching our videos and we look forward to watching yours.
Thanks for your support as always,
Charlotte, COO
Answers:
1. Graze (the restaurant), 2. Thermae Spa (anagram), 3. Peter Ustinov’s handprint, 4. The petals on the sign at the entrance to the maze near Pultney Weir and 5. Charlotte Brunswick Chocolates.
Logo competition: Fortuna Sittard