One of Lewis Hamilton’s former right-hand men on the Mercedes pitwall has swapped telemetry traces for transfer targets. Michael Sansoni, who spent 11 years with Mercedes and served as Hamilton’s trackside performance engineer from January 2023, has joined Manchester United as the club’s director of data.
United confirmed the hire, noting Sansoni will report to CEO Omar Berrada and be charged with turning the club into a data-led operation, embedding predictive and AI-driven decision-making across football and the wider business. Further recruitment is planned across data, software and platform engineering as he builds out the department.
The move neatly fits the INEOS ecosystem. Sir Jim Ratcliffe — a one‑third owner of the Mercedes F1 team and now a minority shareholder driving football operations at Old Trafford — has been reshaping United after a grim spell. Last season ended with the club’s worst-ever Premier League finish, 16th, underlining the scale of the job.
For F1 watchers, Sansoni’s switch is another reminder of how Formula 1’s culture of precision and speed can travel well beyond the grid. He leaves with eight world championship-winning seasons on his CV and a recent stint at the sharp end of Hamilton’s garage, where marginal gains are currency and milliseconds are a lifestyle.
On LinkedIn, Sansoni hinted his fingerprints are already on United’s rebuild, nodding to summer arrivals Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo as early outputs of new methodologies. “Over the past few months, we’ve already made meaningful progress,” he wrote, adding that he’s been tasked with building a “world-class data and AI function” at the club.
His parting note to Mercedes was steeped in gratitude and racing detail. Sansoni thanked figures such as Loïc Serra, James Vowles, Andrew Shovlin, Peter Bonnington and Riccardo Musconi for shaping his approach, and paid tribute to Toto Wolff’s leadership. He signed off from the team at a TPC outing, race‑engineering George Kurtz, Gerhard Watzinger and Valtteri Bottas — a neat bookend to a career that began in the same role with Esteban Ocon.
From the pitwall to Old Trafford’s back rooms, the through-line is clear: build systems, trust the models, and move fast. If Sansoni can translate F1’s ruthless clarity into football’s murkier market and matchday chaos, United may finally have a competitive edge that isn’t measured in possession but in probabilities — the kind that win championships, in any sport.
