Key points:
- Professional football clubs now account for 714 job postings per million UK jobs, almost triple the 247 recorded in 2018.
- The hiring mix is broadening beyond matchday operations, with Data and Analytics reaching a record share of club postings as performance analysis becomes central to how clubs operate.
- Football hiring is most concentrated in the North West, at 2,400 postings per million local job ads, more than triple the national average. London registers one of the lowest rates, despite hosting more top-flight clubs than any other region.
The scale of UK professional football’s economic footprint is striking. Research commissioned by the English Premier League suggests the League alone contributes roughly £10 billion per year to the economy in gross value added, supporting more than 100,000 full-time equivalent jobs across the league and its clubs and generating £4.4 billion in tax receipts. Broadcast exports are worth £1.7 billion, almost matching the output of the rest of the UK television sector combined.
For all its economic scale, professional football represents a small – but growing – slice of the UK jobs market. Just 0.07% of all UK job postings relate to the football sector, according to an Indeed Hiring Lab analysis of job postings.
That’s a fraction of larger, mainstream sectors: Retail accounts for around 4% of all UK job postings and Software Development roughly 2.3% – 30 to 55 times football’s share. The share of football jobs is closer to that of a specialist field like Aviation (about 0.04% of postings) – another category that punches well above its weight, generating substantial economic value from a relatively small direct-employment base. The explanation lies in the nature of the industry: football generates enormous economic value through broadcast rights, commercial partnerships, tourism, and supply chains, but the direct workforce at club level remains relatively compact.
Even so, that compact workforce is becoming more diverse and more skilled. The modern professional football club is as much a media, data, and technology business as a sporting one, and the composition of its workforce is changing to reflect that. Behind every matchday, a growing ecosystem of analysts, scientists, commercial strategists, digital producers, and community officers keeps the operation running.
Football’s hiring footprint continues to expand
The footprint of British professional football club hiring has been steadily growing and 2026 is shaping up to be another strong year. Hiring in H1 is already close to last year’s pace, even before the traditional summer peak.
Job postings from professional football clubs have become a steadily larger part of the hiring landscape. Clubs across the top five tiers of English men’s football and the Scottish leagues accounted for around 722 postings per million across all UK job postings on Indeed in the year to June 2026, up from just 247 per million in 2018. In other words, the share of hiring taking place at football clubs has almost tripled over the period, rising in every year since the 2020 low.
Part of that climb reflects clubs simply expanding their off-pitch operations. But it has been amplified by the wider backdrop: as overall UK job postings cooled through 2024 and 2025, football-club hiring held broadly steady, so clubs now make up a bigger slice of a smaller pie.
2026 is on track to extend the trend, based on the seasonal rhythm of prior years. In the first half of the year, clubs posted 643 jobs per million UK postings, a solid pace for the typically slower half of a given year. That matters because football recruitment tends to be back-loaded. Historically, only around 45% of a club’s annual hiring lands in the first half of the year, with postings peaking in July and August as squads and matchday operations gear up for the new season. With the busiest months still to come into the figures, 2026 looks set to post another record should the pace pick up as it has in previous years.
The five strongest months for football club job postings typically come between July and November. That reflects the nature of the football calendar, whereby many clubs will review strategy in the summer off-season and adjust their workforce plans accordingly for the new season starting in August. Recruitment intentions are quietest in April and May, as the campaign winds down.
Football clubs hire across a range of categories
Every Erling Haaland highlight you watch was made possible by hundreds of team employees who will never set foot on the pitch. Some of the biggest clubs employ as many as 1,000 staff: forty times the size of a Premier League roster of 25 players.
The growth is showing up across a wide range of roles. The Sports category is the largest at 11%, encompassing football coaching staff, head coaches and personal trainers.
Clubs also hire lots of staff in categories linked to stadium and matchday operation, notably Catering and Hospitality workers, including stewards, bar staff and chefs. The true footprint of these matchday roles is, in reality, greater, since many clubs outsource these functions or hire specialised vendors to perform these functions, which is not captured in our methodology. This analysis focuses only on hiring done directly by clubs themselves.
Still, the data shows clubs are increasingly recruiting well beyond the pitch, in Marketing, Retail, Security and, notably, Data and Analytics, which has climbed to a record share of club postings as clubs invest in performance analysts and data specialists.
The growing importance of data
Data and Analytics has moved from the fringes to the centre of professional football over the past decade. What began with basic performance tracking, recording distance covered and passes completed, has evolved into a sophisticated discipline spanning player recruitment, tactical preparation, injury prevention, and commercial strategy. Clubs now employ data scientists, statisticians, and performance analysts as core members of their operation, not peripheral support staff. The share of Data & Analytics roles in football club hiring has more than doubled from 1.5% in 2018 to 3.2% in the year to June 2026.
The influence of analytics is perhaps most visible in recruitment, where models that assess player performance across hundreds of variables have become standard practice at the top of the game. Tracking data, event data, and increasingly video analysis powered by computer vision are giving clubs a more granular picture of what happens on the pitch. The challenge is not acquiring data but knowing what to do with it, and the clubs that can translate analytical insight into better decisions, on the training ground, in the transfer market, and in the dugout, are increasingly the ones pulling ahead.
North West of England has the highest concentration of football jobs
The geography of football hiring is heavily tilted toward the North West. Measured by intensity – football-club postings per million of all local job ads – the North West stands far ahead of the rest of the country, at around 2,400 per million, more than triple the national average. That reflects one of the densest concentrations of clubs anywhere in the country, from the Manchester and Merseyside giants down through a deep bench of English Football League and non-league sides across Lancashire and Greater Manchester.
Below that, a cluster of regions sits well back but broadly level with one another: the West Midlands (around 870 per million), the East of England (around 860) and the North East (around 730). Yorkshire and the Humber, the South East and the East Midlands follow, each in the 550-630 range.
It’s worth stressing that this is a measure of concentration, not absolute volume. London is a case in point: despite being home to more top-flight clubs than any other region, it registers only around 320 football postings per million – one of the lowest rates in Great Britain. The capital’s sheer scale of overall hiring dilutes football’s share, so clubs barely register as a slice of the local market even though they post plenty of jobs in absolute terms. The lowest intensities of all are in the South West (around 270 per million) and Scotland (around 300), where clubs are fewer relative to the size of the regional workforce.
Heatmap titled “North West has the highest concentration of football jobs” showing football jobs per million overall postings by region in the twelve months to June 2026. The North West has the highest concentration of football jobs relative to the region’s overall labour market.
Conclusion
Professional football’s jobs footprint tells a story that goes well beyond the sport itself. Clubs are no longer simply sporting institutions; they are complex media, data and commercial operations whose workforce needs have grown steadily more diverse and more skilled. The near-tripling of football’s share of UK job postings since 2018 reflects that transformation, and with 2026 on track to extend the trend, there is little sign of it slowing.
For the broader labour market, the football sector remains niche, but with outsized visibility and influence. The skills now in demand at professional clubs, from data science and performance analysis to digital content and commercial strategy, mirror the skills reshaping hiring across much of the wider economy. While football is the most visible, similar trends are emerging in other sports like rugby and cricket as they become more commercialised and professional.
The concentration of football hiring in the North West, and more broadly across the North and Midlands, is a reminder that the sport’s economic contribution is not evenly distributed. For communities where a football club is among the largest local employers, the steady growth in off-pitch hiring is a genuinely meaningful development – one that extends the club’s role in the local economy well beyond matchday.
Hiring Lab Data
Job postings data is available on our Data Portal. We also host the underlying job-postings chart data on GitHub as downloadable CSV files. Typically, it will be updated with the latest data one day after this blog post is published.
Methodology
To identify professional football clubs in Great Britain, we searched Indeed’s registry of hiring employers for organisations whose names identify them as football clubs (for example, containing “Football Club” or “F.C.” combined with a list of known club names), then screened out false matches. We then restricted the list of clubs to those in the top five English leagues (from the Premier League to the National League), plus the top four Scottish leagues (note that many clubs in the Scottish lower leagues are semi-professional). This measure includes jobs posted by the football club and its affiliate entities, including foundations, community trusts, academies, women’s teams and commercial arms across retail, merchandising, hospitality, events, conferencing, stadium tours, travel and media. This approach captures direct hiring by football clubs, but understates their full footprint since some hiring (particularly matchday staff) is outsourced.
The projection for 2026 full-year job postings is based on the H1 performance overlaid with the seasonal pattern for H2 observed in prior years.
The number of job postings on Indeed.com, whether related to paid or unpaid job solicitations, is not indicative of potential revenue or earnings of Indeed, which comprises a significant percentage of the HR Technology segment of its parent company, Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd. Job posting numbers are provided for information purposes only and should not be viewed as an indicator of performance of Indeed or Recruit. Please refer to the Recruit Holdings investor relations website and regulatory filings in Japan for more detailed information on revenue generation by Recruit’s HR Technology segment.
