Welcome to my personal website!
My name is Jan Van Haaren and I have been contributing to the soccer analytics community for over a decade.
I am passionate about evidence-based decision-making in professional soccer. I have ample experience with designing and implementing data-driven metrics, models, and products for evaluating the performances and playing styles of professional soccer players applied to areas such as player recruitment, match analysis, and player development. I also have extensive experience with establishing data science teams and fostering data-driven cultures in professional soccer environments. I have a special interest in bridging the gap between soccer analytics metrics and soccer practitioners, communicating and visualizating insights derived from soccer data, creating the infrastructure for processing and analyzing large volumes of soccer data, and explaining the predictions made by machine learning models in a soccer context.
I am the Head of Data & Technology at Club Brugge. I am also a Research Fellow of the DTAI research group at KU Leuven, collaboring closely with professor Jesse Davis and his team. I held various positions at SciSports between January 2017 and April 2021, serving as the Chief Analytics Officer during my final year at the company. I received a PhD in Engineering Science with a specialization in Computer Science and Machine Learning in 2016 and a Master of Engineering with a specialization in Computer Science in 2011 from KU Leuven.
I am active on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn. Feel free to drop me a message!