Solving Sports Analytics at Scale: An Independent View of Axon Perform
There's a problem Adam Morton keeps encountering across the sports organisations he works with — and it doesn't matter whether he's sitting with an AFL club in Melbourne or a rugby union team in Wellington. The data sources are largely the same. The questions coaches and performance staff want answered are largely similar. But many clubs simply cannot justify the expense of experienced data teams capable of turning that raw data into usable insight.
That gap is exactly what brought Adam to a conversation with Jon Foote, CEO and founder of Axon Perform.
““Jon has quietly built something that solves this at scale - a Snowflake-backed analytics platform used by world champion rugby teams and football clubs in the UK, giving performance analysts and coaching staff the kind of reporting capability that previously required a full data team to deliver.””
Adam knows the problem intimately. In his work with AFL clubs, he's spent years integrating GPS data from player tracking systems, combining it with match statistics, fixture calendars and medical availability, and then watched the same challenge repeat itself at the next club, almost entirely from scratch. Jon Foote shared a nearly identical story from his experience supporting New Zealand Rugby, Japanese national rugby, NRL teams and football clubs across the UK.
The pattern, as Adam notes, is precisely the kind of problem that lends itself to a productised, multi-tenant platform, one that solves the integration challenge once, brilliantly, rather than every club paying to reinvent it independently.
What stood out to Adam
Pre-built Power BI templates - teams access years of carefully engineered analytics work on day one, fully branded and customisable to their own requirements.
Automatic athlete identity resolution - Axon HQ maps athlete records across Catapult, VALD, Teamworks and more, including one-to-many duplicate records, solving one of the most painful integration problems in sport.
Wearable data centralisation - Axon Pulse is designed to capture data from Garmin, Whoop and Apple Watch at scale, feeding it directly into the same Snowflake environment that powers everything else.
AI-powered natural language querying - coming soon, enabling performance staff to interrogate their data through conversation rather than requiring Power BI expertise.
Adam was particularly struck by the economics. A club that can't justify hiring a dedicated data engineer can access years' worth of carefully engineered data infrastructure, pre-built reporting and ongoing product development for considerably less than the cost of a single hire. The platform's modularity means teams start with what they need and expand as their appetite grows.
““It’s the same logic that underpins the best SaaS products in any industry: identify where every customer is solving the same problem, and solve it once, brilliantly.””
Looking further ahead, Adam sees the AI opportunity as particularly significant for the teams Axon already serves - organisations without a dedicated data scientist on staff, but whose performance staff are deeply expert in their domain. The Snowflake-native data foundation Axon has built is precisely the kind of structured environment that current AI tooling can genuinely unlock.
Adam Morton is an internationally recognised data and analytics leader, formally acknowledged with a Global Talent Visa by the Australian Government in 2020. He founded the Mastering Snowflake training programme and works with organisations across the UK, Europe and Australia on enterprise data strategy and implementation.
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Adam Morton's full write-up — Solving Sports Analytics at Scale — is available on LinkedIn, along with the complete video conversation with Jon Foote. If you work in sports performance analytics, it's well worth your time.