Tom Allen: A Peek Behind The Curtain of Arsenal’s Transformation

**Tom Allen** (0:03)
You've got to look at what Mikel's done in his one job at Arsenal. So he's taken the club that was in disarray. I've never seen a fan base have a falling out with the owners and now love the owners throughout a period of time.
And that's all because we had a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve. The connection was the first one, and then it was going into eventually winning the Premier League.

**Aleda** (0:26)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Empowering Leaders Podcast. At Aleda we are passionate about inspiring connections and creating a world of collaboration. Our signature program Aleda Connect curates groups of five to six leaders from diverse backgrounds in sport, industry, social venture and the arts who come together to learn, to connect and to collaborate. The Empowering Leaders Podcast is proudly brought to you by Victoria University, where cutting-edge sports and exercise science facilities like heat chambers, performance labs and altitude environments mean VU is rank 7th in the world for sport science. VU, uniquely you. If you enjoy listening to the Empowering Leaders Podcast, be sure to subscribe and please if you have a moment, we would love you to leave a review so we can reach more listeners and empower more leaders.
Our guest today is one of the leading high-performance practitioners in world sport. Tom Allen spent six years at Aston Villa before joining Arsenal FC, where he spent the next nine years and rose to become head of sports science and performance, working alongside Mikel Arteta during one of the most successful periods in the club's modern history.
Tom helped shape an environment where elite athletes could consistently perform at the highest level. Tom holds a master's degree in sports science and has completed a professional doctorate in elite performance. Throughout his career, he has led high-performance teams across sports science, strength and conditioning, player monitoring, injury prevention and return to play. Combining world-class research with practical application in one of the most demanding environments in professional sport. Tom Allen, it's a great pleasure to have you on the Empowering Leaders podcast.

**Tom Allen** (2:03)
Thank you very much, mate, and thank you for the kind words as well.

**Aleda** (2:07)
It's an incredible life that you've had. And if you go back and think of 15 years inside two of the biggest clubs in English football, if you look back, what do you think shaped you most as a leader from that chapter of your life?

**Tom Allen** (2:20)
Well, a lot of people, like we always say. So obviously, when you do the Aleda Connect groups, everybody talks about people. Everyone who you meet, you get influenced by people who do good things, you also get influenced by people who do bad things. And throughout my journey, like if we look at Aston Villa, the time I was at Aston Villa was a very turbulent time for the club. Now, where I was there for six years, I had 13 different managers, of which one was there for three years.
So you can see how the turbulence is there. You understand that you have to adapt quite quickly to different methodologies, how you bring like a team of people, probably less so on board and how you do things not so well. And then you take a lesson from that and go, okay, if you do this, you see how certain people can react and it's not beneficial for the environment. And one of the issues you saw is that it was like a lack of belief in people. I'm sure you've seen it before. If you show people that you believe in them and that they're capable of doing it, people can fly and do like incredible things. I came out of university, went straight to Villa where I was an intern, did a year as an intern and like you do everything that you can. You're running around chasing boards, you're doing water bottles, like you basically a jack of all trades, you're learning so much different things. You're working with elite players who, like when I first came in, technology was barely new.
So you have the, I didn't need to do that in my day, I'm 35 years old, don't worry about me. And then you got the young lads who were starting to get embracing the technology and you're going, okay, now you're starting to see a different change in the era. And I mean, I'm sure you've seen it with the AFL as well, where a lot of data is now being emphasized on one athlete. And like you get thousands of data points per second in like a game of football. Then when I've done my internship, I've then become first team sports scientist and really focused on the GPS. And how that then evolved was learning how to simplify more complex information. So like I always say to people, you need to try and connect the complexity into clarity.