For clubs For applicants Questions Express interest
Cohort one - four places - applications not yet open

Sport cannot buy this engineer. So we are building them.

Earl Forward is a paid, 28-month academy. We select on aptitude, train AI-first engineers for four months, then place them inside football clubs and rights holders six months at a time.

For clubs and rights holders For applicants
The gap

The people who can already do this are priced for the AI labs.

About £130,000

The London median for a forward deployed engineer: the role where one engineer embeds inside a single customer's systems and ships production software rather than recommendations. levels.fyi

£30,000 to £65,000

What a football club pays a data engineer, entry to mid level. Betting firms pay 30 to 50% more than clubs for the same skills. Analytics Sports Jobs salary report, June 2026

No club closes that gap by bidding. The only way sport gets these people is if somebody trains them from scratch.

How it works

Four months to train. Two years to prove it. Then a career.

01 · Select

No CV

You get a brief and you build something. Judged on what you shipped and whether you can explain it to a room. Aptitude and attitude, not credentials.

02 · Months 1 to 4

Train

Salaried from your first week, in our London office. Agentic coding as the default, not AI-assisted. Systems thinking, data engineering, product sense, business analysis. Week 16 is the gate.

03 · Months 5 to 28

Place

Four six-month placements inside clubs and rights holders, with an Earl technical lead on call through the first. Rotation builds range instead of parking you in one building for two years.

04 · Month 28

Hire

A placement client gets first option to hire, for a standard recruitment fee with a six-month guarantee. Others will stay and grow with Earl.

Why now

Three things happened at once.

01

The first rung has gone

UK graduate vacancies fell to 8,398 in May 2026, down 42% year on year. Youth unemployment reached 16.2% in mid-2026, an eleven-year high. More than a million 16 to 24 year olds are not in education, employment or training, the first time above a million since 2013. Adzuna, ONS

02

Companies stopped buying juniors

They are buying a small number of high-leverage builders instead, and flattening everything in between. Nobody is producing those people at entry level, which is exactly the shortage this programme exists to fill.

03

The role now has a name

Postings for forward deployed engineers rose more than 800% between January and September 2025. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Salesforce and Stripe all hire it. We could not find a single degree, bootcamp or certification that trains it. Financial Times, using LinkedIn data

For clubs and rights holders

An engineer inside your team, not a consultant in your inbox.

Not only clubs. Leagues, federations, venues, agencies and sponsors all have the same gap, and the same trouble hiring for it.

Register interest in a placement
  • Six-month blocks Take one. Book consecutively if you want continuity. A freeze means you simply do not renew at a boundary, without killing the relationship.
  • Off your headcount They stay an Earl employee for all 28 months. Opex, not permanent budget. No req to open, no notice period, no redundancy exposure.
  • Priced for people building experience Your work is part of how they learn, and the rate reflects that. It steps up as they prove out across the programme.
  • You are not carrying a trainee alone An Earl technical lead is on call through their first placement, and the Earl toolchain and standards come with them.
  • Read the work before you take the person Everyone on the programme publishes under their own name from week one. Six months of somebody's actual thinking beats a CV and a reference.
  • First option to hire at month 28 A standard recruitment fee, backed by a six-month guarantee, on somebody you have already watched deliver.
For applicants

Paid from day one. No fee, ever.

Every bootcamp in the country charges the learner or the state. We pay you instead, which is why we can be far choosier about who gets in.

Express interest in the next cohort
  • Salaried from your first week Through the training and every placement, rising as you go. You never pay us, and there is no exit fee if you leave. We will not do that.
  • 28 months, on one contract Four months training in London, then four six-month placements inside clubs and rights holders. An Earl employee throughout.
  • No degree requirement, no CV screen A build challenge decides it. If you can build and explain, the rest is negotiable.
  • You publish under your own name On our domain, from week one. That corpus is your portfolio, and it is how a club decides to take you.

Career starters

Qualified, capable, and locked out of an entry-level market that has stopped hiring. The skills that are actually scarce right now are not the ones a degree was built to certify.

Released academy players

Around 10,000 boys are in the academy system at any time and most will not have a football career. One career ending at 18 does not have to be the only one. Same build challenge as everyone else, and you will not need a discount.

Mid-career changers

Agents made the syntax cheap. Judgment, domain sense, stakeholder skill and systems thinking did not get cheap, and twenty years of them is an asset here rather than a liability.

Selection

There is no interview you can talk your way through.

You get a brief and you build something. Expect to spend around 70 hours on it. We are looking at what you shipped, the decisions behind it, and whether you can stand up and explain the thing to people who did not build it.

A lot of people will not pass first time, and that is fine. Every single applicant gets written feedback and an invitation to resubmit for the next cohort, not just the near misses. Plenty of people will need two or three attempts. We would rather you came back than went away.

We will publish the submissions that got through, so the next wave can see what good actually looks like.

Express interest

Cohort one. Four places. Not open yet.

Tell us which you are and we will come to you when applications open. That is the only thing we will use it for.

Would you rather just email? hello@earl.partners

Goes to hello@earl.partners and nowhere else. No list, no newsletter. See our privacy notice.

Questions

The things people ask.

Do I need a degree?
No. There is no CV screen and no qualification requirement. Selection is a build challenge: you get a brief, you build something, and we judge what you shipped and whether you can explain it.
Does it cost me anything?
No. You are salaried from your first week, through the training and every placement. You never pay us for the training, and there is no exit fee if you leave. We will not do that.
Is it accredited?
No. We award our own certificate. A club buying an embedded engineer cares whether the person can ship, not which body awarded the paper, and we would rather spend the time on the curriculum than on an accreditation process.
Who employs me, Earl or the club?
Earl, for all 28 months. You are an Earl employee on placement, never on the club's payroll.
What happens at the end of the 28 months?
A placement client gets first option to hire you, for a standard recruitment fee paid by them and backed by a six-month guarantee. If none of them does, the wider market wants this profile. Some people will stay and grow with Earl.
What if I do not pass the build challenge?
You get written feedback and an invitation to resubmit for the next cohort. Every single applicant gets that, not just the near misses. Plenty of people will need two or three attempts, and we would rather you came back than went away.
How long does the build challenge take?
Expect to spend around 70 hours on a submission. It is deliberately a real piece of work rather than a test, because that is the only way to see how somebody actually builds.
Is Earl Forward a recruitment agency?
No. An agency sends you a CV. We select the person, train them for four months, employ them for 28, and place them inside your organisation on our payroll. A fee only ever comes up at the end, and only if you decide to hire them.
What does a placement cost a club?
Less than an agency contractor and far less than a permanent hire at market rate, because your work is part of how they build experience. Rates step up as they prove out across the programme. Get in touch and we will talk specifics.
When does the first cohort start?
Applications are not open yet. Register your interest and we will come to you when they are.
Where does the training happen?
Our London office, for the first four months. Placements are wherever the club or rights holder is.
I was released by an academy. Is this actually for me?
Yes, and you sit exactly the same build challenge as everyone else. No discount, and you will not need one. A decade of deliberate practice, coachability and performing while somebody assesses you is most of what this work asks for. An engineer who already speaks football solves a problem no consultancy can.