Shorts: England Netball, Mitre, Wolves, Harlequins

England Netball and The Well HQ have announced a pioneering and powerful new partnership that will see the duo introduce an industry-leading community education programme across the sport to help everyone in netball better understand, nurture and support women and girls at every life stage to create sustainable change in the game.

The partnership is an exciting first step in realising the ‘Game for Life’ destination of England Netball’s recently launched ‘Adventure Strategy’ – a new 10-year plan to accelerate the growth and development of the sport at all levels of the game, with the ‘Game for Life’ destination focused on enriching the approach to growing the game and ensuring that netball is a sport for all at every life stage.

The collaboration aims to improve the understanding of female health, life stages and bodies and how they are directly connected to enjoyment and performance in the game – empowering everyone to work with and not against the female body and mind to remain in and thrive in the sport.

This Christmas, British football brand Mitre is backing Shelter’s call to clubs up and down the country to ditch their home shirts for the Boxing Day fixtures to highlight the scale of homelessness and raise much needed funds for the charity’s frontline work.

Osama Bhutta, Director of Campaigns at Shelter, adds: “Mitre is the one of the most iconic and loved names in football, so we are delighted to have their support for our #NoHomeKit campaign. They join the growing number of teams, fans and partners from every level of the game, who have already signed up to help us fight homelessness this Christmas.”

However, the Premier League has already confirmed that home teams playing on Boxing Day are not permitted to wear away kits to raise awareness for homelessness.

Wolverhampton Wanderers FC has signed a multi-year deal with StatsBomb to use its data and analytics services.

This agreement demonstrates the club’s ambition to build upon its recent European and domestic successes by utilising deep data and innovative platforms in its recruitment and performance analysis departments. 

As part of the agreement, the English Premier League club has also become the latest elite team to sign up for StatsBomb 360, a product crafted at the forefront of innovation in football analytics. StatsBomb 360 adds a snapshot of player locations around every on-the-ball event during a match. The StatsBomb 360 data will enable Wolves to easily analyse its defensive shape, available passing lanes and decision-making, ball receipts in space, line-breaking passes and much more.

Harlequins has announced that the club has extended its partnership with wealth manager Charles Stanley.

The relationship, which began in 2019, will continue to focus on player welfare initiatives. Earlier this year, the club and Charles Stanley released the ‘State of Play’, an independent player education report, with a focus on a player’s transition out of rugby at the end of their playing career.

With this new partnership, Harlequins and Charles Stanley will continue to help players plan for their transition out of the game and make necessary financial provisions for their future.