Hawthorn Football Club drafts Google Cloud to improve Club analytics with AI
In elite football, speed matters.
On the field, just a fraction of a second can separate a clean mark from a turnover. In the analytics team, the side that can spot a trend quickly can have a big impact.
Enter Hawthorn Football Club’s collaboration with Google Cloud — demonstrating how elite sport can leverage enterprise-grade technology to solve complex challenges.
Too many sources, not enough time.
A single AFL match can generate over one million data points. As the Hawks prepared game to game, that mountain of information sat across systems that couldn’t speak to each other: GPS tracking, Champion Data match stats, medical logs, and handwritten scouting notes, each locked in its own silo.
Bringing together all that data manually was gruelling work.
One platform, one source of truth.
We worked alongside our Premier data analytics & AI partner intelia set out to deploy enterprise AI where the Hawks identified the problem: off the field.
The result was a unified data platform, built in partnership with intelia, that turned months of manual data-wrangling into something coaches and analysts could use quickly.
It starts with Google Cloud BigQuery — by organising hard performance numbers and qualitative coaching notes into a single, verified source of truth, the Hawks built a direct pipeline to create insights at a speed that previously was not possible. And questions that used to take weeks to answer can now be explored the same day.
Looking ahead: from the server to the track.
Using Google Antigravity, the club plans to rapidly build front-end applications that will create a full picture for its team, while conversational data agents built with Gemini Enterprise will enable them to talk directly to their data.
Rather than having line coaches dig through spreadsheets or decipher complex dashboards, Gemini Enterprise will remove the technical barrier entirely. Staff will be able to interrogate massive, complex datasets — asking specific questions and getting verified answers on the spot.
“We are excited for what is ahead providing us the ability to converse directly with our data and analyse sources in a way that would never have been possible before.” says Dean Westaway, Hawthorn’s General Manager of Technology, Data and Analytics.
A change in culture and performance.
The Hawks’ AI ambitions run wider than the analytics team, too. Google Cloud certifications will help lift AI literacy across the club’s staff, with fan engagement and matchday experience next on the list.
“With Google Cloud and AI, the gap between having an idea and building it is basically gone. If an elite footy club with a diverse set of non-technical stakeholders can transform how they operate in a few days, any business can,” says Joel Collins, founder and director at Intelia.
This collaboration demonstrates how unexpected organisations and technology partners can solve problems that off-the-shelf software simply wasn’t built for. As the demand for real-time insight rises across every sector, those who can quickly close the gap between an idea and a working solution will be the ones who see the whole field.
