Southampton FC’s IT director changes formation

Southampton Football Club are on an upward trajectory with new ownership and a talented squad pushing to compete on the European stage. FA Cup finalists back in 1976, Southampton have been Premier League stalwarts for 20 of the league’s 27 seasons and are famed for a thriving youth academy that produced global superstars such as Gareth Bale.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that this comes without growing pains for the club’s IT director, James Grove.

A change of formation for the IT department

This being Grove’s first senior IT job in football, he’s had to get stuck in right away, as a football commentator might say. Joining just months before the COVID-19 pandemic, Grove has had to get up to speed on an industry that turns into a hospitality business on matchdays, while trying to save costs and impress new owners in equal measure.

From St Mary’s Stadium in Southampton, Hampshire, Grove shows CIO UK the IT strategy he presented to the club’s new owners, a consortium backed by Serbian media entrepreneur Dragan Solak and led by former Brentford FC co-director of football Rasmus Ankersen.

The strategy spells out a vision to go digital-first and build a high-performance culture and outlines the legwork required to modernise the IT department. “What I found, when I talked to stakeholders here, was that IT was a closed shop,” says Grove, who is part of the senior leadership group and reports to the managing director. “We did enterprise IT fantastically [well], but there wasn’t really much engagement there with the rest of the business. We didn’t do any business relationship management.”

“IT are great, but we don’t know what they do”, was the attitude that reverberated across the club, which prompted Grove to bring about the changes.