Simon Pakenham-Walsh, formerly of River Island and Sweaty Betty, becomes the Premier League's first chief technology and data officer as it moves to the cloud and builds AI fan products.
The Premier League has appointed its first chief technology and data officer. Simon Pakenham-Walsh, previously chief information officer at the retailers River Island and Sweaty Betty, joins with immediate effect to lead the league’s data strategy and a move of its core systems to Microsoft’s cloud, as Decision Marketing reported.
His remit covers migrating the league’s IT and data infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, handling the huge spikes in traffic on match days, processing live tracking data in real time, and bringing decades of match data, live statistics and media archives together in a single cloud data warehouse. He will also oversee AI-powered fan features, including the Premier League Companion app built on Microsoft Copilot.
He will work alongside Andy Beale, director of technology, who joined from BT Sport in 2025, and Chris Archer, director of digital products and technology. Pakenham-Walsh said he was “thrilled to bring together my passion for sport with my experience in technology and data”.
The Premier League’s real product is no longer the match, it is the audience around it, and data is how that audience is sold. Broadcasters, sponsors and the clubs themselves all want to know more about who is watching and how, and a league that can offer them richer data and better digital products can charge more for rights and partnerships.
Hiring from fashion retail rather than sport is telling. River Island and Sweaty Betty are businesses built on knowing individual customers, and that is the direction the league is heading, from broadcasting matches to running a direct relationship with fans around the world. It is the same shift that has clubs rebuilding their identities for screens, as Newcastle United did last week.
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