One club, one dashboard: Why Almere City FC is betting on data

"We never say to each other, 'this can't be done.' We say, 'how are we going to solve it?'" For Benno, Head of Talent Development at Almere City FC, that's not a motivational poster line — it's how his team actually works, and it's exactly the mindset behind one of the club's most ambitious internal projects to date.

Two years into his role overseeing the Academy and Jong Almere, Benno has one job above all: making sure talent flows into the first team. As Almere City FC — the youngest licensed professional club in the Netherlands — pushes deeper into data and technology, he's become a driving force behind ClubOS, the club's new operating system built to bring every team, process, and person into one place.

A young club writes its own rules

Being the youngest professional club in the country isn't something Benno treats as a disadvantage — it's central to how he frames everything else he says. "Because you're young, literally and figuratively young as a club, we get to write our own book every day." Where traditional clubs lean on decades of history to do things a certain way — which he's quick to say "can also be beautiful" — Almere City FC operates more like a young company: one that has to earn every improvement. That's what makes data and innovation feel less like a nice-to-have and more like a necessity: it's how a young, ambitious club competes against institutions with far more history behind them. "There's still so much to win — for the club, for the surroundings, for who we are, for what we do."

From scattered systems to one dashboard

Clubs have used physical and performance data for years — that part isn't new, Benno's quick to point out. What's different about ClubOS is the ambition to centralize everything: every process, everyone connected to a player or team, brought together in one place instead of living across individual Excel files, personal laptops, and everyone's own way of processing information. The goal isn't just tidier data — it's a shared way of working. "Then it's more efficient, more accurate, and far more effective than the way things are usually done."

Breaking down the walls between Academy and first team

The theme he keeps circling back to is connection. Historically, the Academy, Jong Almere, and the first team have functioned as separate entities, moving at their own pace, disconnected from one another. A shared dashboard changes that — not by replacing anyone's expertise, but by giving everyone visibility into the same environment, working "in one area, in one dashboard." For Benno, that's the real prize: a clearer, faster picture of what's actually happening across the club, and — in his words — hopefully better decisions as a result. And for his role specifically, it means one thing: more talent delivered to the first team.

Showing it to the people who'll actually use it

The day of this interview wasn't just another workday — it was the first time Benno and his collaborators, Sven and Callum, presented months of work to the wider group of colleagues who'll eventually rely on the system, each bringing their own expertise to the table. He wasn't surprised by the reactions, he says, because he'd lived with the project for months already — but he was glad they were positive. "Ultimately we all have to work with this together, embrace it together." That buy-in, he stresses, is the part that turns a good tool into a club-wide habit.

Solving problems together

Ask Benno about the collaboration behind the build itself, and he lights up. What he values most about working with Sven and Kelly isn't just technical progress — it's a shared instinct for solving rather than deflecting. Nobody on the team has ever said a challenge "sounds difficult" and left it there; the answer is always to find a way to get it into the dashboard. "That gives a lot of energy. It works well. It builds momentum fast." Mistakes happen along the way — he's matter-of-fact about that — but the team treats them as the start of the next improvement, not a setback.

The bigger picture

What elevates this beyond an IT rollout is where it sits in the club's identity. Almere City FC's technical policy plan through 2030 names innovation and technology explicitly as part of who they are. ClubOS isn't a side initiative bolted onto football operations — Benno calls it a backbone, the infrastructure the club's ambitions are meant to run on. "The more technological developments, the better — because as a young club, we have to be pioneers, and we're happy to help lead the way."

"I'd be really proud when it's finished — and I think the other guys should be too," Benno says. But he's quick to add: it's far from done. There's still a lot of work ahead — and for a club still writing its own rulebook every day, that's exactly how it should be.

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Thank you to our partners at Almere City FC for sharing these insights with us.

You can watch the interview on YouTube.