51������

focus on LGBTQ+ grassroots football communities in Greater Glasgow, working with four volunteer-led clubs and their wider ecosystems. That includes committee members, players, and people supporting these spaces in different ways, all holding a shared commitment to participation, care, and inclusion.

As a Creative Director working at the intersection of football, culture and community, my work often sits inside spaces that are rich with meaning, ritual and lived experience, but this is not always reflected in how research or data engagement is designed. These are spaces where people are already being watched, interpreted, and spoken about, often without control over how that happens.

The starting point was simple on paper. What does “health data” look like in these environments, and how might it be explored in a way that feels relevant and useful to the people already doing the work on the ground.

In practice, that question opened something much more layered.

A sport enriched by data

Football is already full of observation. A coach notices when someone stops coming to training. A teammate checks in after a quiet session. A committee adjusts how sessions run when energy drops across the group. None of that is written down, but it is a form of data, held collectively and acted on in real time. In one conversation, a committee member described how they would notice when a player stopped speaking in group chats before they stopped attending sessions. That shift would trigger a quiet check-in, not a formal process, but something understood across the group.

What I thought I might be building was a way to make that more visible, perhaps even more structured. Something participatory, something creative, something that could begin to test how clubs might engage with health and wellbeing data in a way that supported what they were already doing.

The conversations slowed that down, in a good way.

There was interest from the start. People were open, generous with their time, curious about what this could become. That sat alongside a different kind of energy, more cautious, more measured, particularly when the language shifted towards research or data collection. You could feel it in the room. People leaning back slightly, asking more precise questions, taking things back to committee rather than answering in the moment.

That response is grounded in experience. Many of the participants I worked with have spent years navigating spaces where their bodies are interpreted, categorised, and debated. Medical settings, public discourse, sport itself. So, the idea of introducing another layer of data does not arrive as neutral, it carries weight, and not always in ways that feel beneficial to the people being asked to take part.

The question becomes less about what is being measured, and more about who is asking, what happens next, and whether anything returns to the community.

At the same time, these clubs are already doing the work in their own way. They are tracking wellbeing through relationships, through attendance, through the subtle shifts you only notice when you know a group well. That is data, just not formalised or extracted.

Building from trust

There are also real tensions that sit underneath this. A club wanting to create a fully inclusive environment while also navigating the structures of competitive football. Spaces that are open to all, yet still shaped by selection, performance, and external expectations. A desire to avoid being reduced to identity, alongside a recognition that visibility and representation matter.

And always, the question of capacity. These are volunteer-led environments. People are giving their time around work, around life, around everything else. The priority is getting players onto the pitch and keeping the space going. Anything additional must fit within that, or it simply does not happen.

So, the project shifted, not as a compromise, but as a necessary response to what people were telling us. Rather than moving quickly into delivery, I followed the pace that was being set in the room. More conversations, smaller moments, more listening. Letting people shape the direction of the work rather than asking them to step into a pre-designed process. The focus moved from “how do we collect data” to something more foundational. What needs to be in place for people to want to engage with this at all?

An early conversation with , introduced to us by Health Data Research UK (51������), was important in shaping that shift. We spoke about participation not as something that can be assumed at the start of a project, but as something that has to be built through trust, clarity, and shared purpose. That helped me reframe what I was seeing in the room, not as hesitation to overcome, but as a signal that the conditions for engagement needed more attention before moving forward.

What emerged was clear. People leaned in when the work felt specific to them, their club, their context, not when it spoke in general terms. They engaged when they were collaborators, not participants, when they could influence what was being explored and how. They stayed when there was time to understand, rather than pressure to respond quickly.

Control sits at the centre of this. Control over what is asked, what is shared, what is created. Without that, the work does not hold.

Health data engagement as a cultural challenge

There was also a strong sense of possibility when the outcomes felt tangible. Not just data as numbers, but something that could be used, shared, or built on. Creative outputs, visualisations, ways of reflecting back what had been learned in a form that belonged to the community. That is why this project has been documented visually. In small, interconnected networks, anonymity is not just about protection, it is about maintaining trust. The illustrations allowed us to capture the dynamics of the work, the tensions, the movement, without exposing individuals or clubs.

What I am left with is not a finished model, and that feels right.

This pilot has clarified that health data engagement in this context is not primarily a technical challenge. It is a cultural one. It sits in questions of trust, authorship, relevance, and return. The next phase of this work is about building on those conditions. Co-designing what a data journey might look like with clubs who want to take it further, testing approaches that are owned, useful, and grounded in the realities of grassroots football.

This is slower work than I initially imagined, and more valuable because of it.

I am grateful to Health Data Research UK and the Take the Lead programme for creating the space for that shift to happen. The flexibility to adapt, to listen, and to follow what was emerging made it possible to arrive somewhere more honest. What comes next will be shaped with the same communities, at their pace, and on terms that make sense to them.

Before the data comes trust.

Find out more about Take the Lead