“Our aim was to take Hammarby from mid-table to competing consistently towards the top end of the Allsvenskan. We believed, through their expertise and experience of working with many of Europe’s biggest teams, Kitman Labs could enable us to find a competitive edge”
Mikael Klots Rubin, Head of Medical at Hammarby Fotboll
Following three consecutive seasons of bottom-half finishes in the Swedish Allsvenskan, Hammarby Fotboll set a goal to break into the top 3 in the Allsvenskan and secure European qualification for the first time in a decade. With this in mind, Hammarby embarked on a partnership with Kitman Labs ahead of the 2018 season.
The club had a relatively small staff to manage their players and had not collected much data on their athletes historically.
Through their collaboration with Kitman Labs, Hammarby was able to learn from the best practices of many of Europe’s biggest sporting organisations when it came to data collection and data management.
The partnership allowed Hammarby to:
- Create a unified set of performance objectives and inspire organisation-wide understanding and commitment to achieving them.
- Utilise real-time, actionable insights to inform decisions about player load and player development
- Reduce player injury by connecting performance and development data to training programmes
“Almost immediately, we felt the impact as we had objective insights to back the decisions we were making every day”
The partnership began strongly and during the 2018 season Hammarby displayed much improved performances and benefitted from a reduction in injuries to key players throughout the season.
Ultimately, Hammarby finished the season in 4th position in the Allsvenskan.
And they did not stop there…
This marked improvement continued throughout the 2019 season with Hammarby winning their final eight league games and narrowly missing out on their first league title win since 2001.
By the end of the season Hammarby had:
- Amassed 65 points from 30 games
- Scored a record number of goals (75)
- Stayed undefeated in all 15 home fixtures
And reached their goal of a top 3 finish to secure European qualification for the first time since 2007.
