Georgia Tech grad, Atlantan serves U.S. World Cup team in a most Tech way

It was the 2014 men’s World Cup in Brazil that hooked Akshay Easwaran.

He was a rising senior at Milton High, a year away from enrolling at Georgia Tech.

The women’s World Cup in Canada a year later further entranced him.

“And so, watching both of those U.S. teams compete and watching that on my couch at home, I was like, ‘Man, this is awesome,’” Easwaran told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “’This environment is awesome.’”

A dozen years later, Easwaran will have a behind-the-scenes position in that environment. As a senior data engineer for the U.S. Soccer Federation, he is in charge of receiving millions of data points from games around the world and managing that information on a data platform. Analysts use that platform to equip coaches and staff with insights to speed their pursuit of championships.

That includes, of course, the World Cup trophy the U.S. men’s national team will begin competing for in less than two weeks.

“I’m sort of the first port of call for when we get that data in, saying, ‘OK, we want to create these different database tables off of this data,’” Easwaran said.

It can be generating post-match reports that combine play-by-play data with metrics retrieved by technology that tracks all 22 players and the ball. The reports include myriad indicators that measure player and team performance.

It can be building a web application that presents user-friendly player data, much of it from GPS technology, from league and national team games from around the world. The platform supports coaches in making decisions on player call-ups and identifying opponent tendencies.

“A lot of that information that you’re describing — player tendencies and evaluating their performance at their individual club — that’s the bread and butter of that application,” Easwaran said.

It can be combing through data from hundreds of games to find trends that can be exploited by the 27 U.S. national teams Easwaran’s six-person data analytics team serves.

One project, in response to a request from the women’s national team staff, pooled data from leagues across the world that identified the spots on the field that created the most optimal chances for scoring.

It led to the coaching staff making that part of its tactics, developing a plan to train players to best use the ball in those areas and then putting it to use in competition.

“I think that’s really exciting,” Easwaran said. “We’re able to say, ‘Hey, we did all this work to do some education and to try to find trends, and that informs something that we see on the field.’”

The director of Easwaran’s data analytics team called him a “major force multiplier” for the federation.

“He’s helped us onboard several new data providers and integrate these data sources to uncover insights we haven’t had access to in the past,” Sam Gregory said in a statement for the AJC. “It has put us in a position to be more prepared for this summer’s FIFA Men’s World Cup and the opening of our new National Training Center than ever before.”

It is not where Easwaran, the son of Indian immigrants who are also in the technology field, would have anticipated his career would take him when he was studying computer science at Tech. Before transitioning into sports analytics, he was a software engineer at the tech company Salesforce.

“But automating how to send emails is not the thing that I’m most passionate about, is the best way to put it,” he said.

Like so many, his passion lay in sports.

He is a loyal Tech fan and was a member of the Ramblin’ Reck Club, the student spirit group that cares for the car of the same name. Easwaran also continues to co-host a Tech sports podcast, “Scions of the Southland,” which, as an occasional guest, is how I got to know him.

“He’s everything you’d want a Tech alum to be,” Jack Purdy, a friend of Easwaran’s and co-host of the podcast, said. “Equal parts intelligent and humble at a very high level.”

Using the skills he was learning at work, he found himself spending his down time on sports-related projects, like building a college football simulation game, collaborating with a friend (Saiem Gilani) on a website (Game on Paper) that provides advanced statistics for college football games in near real time and creating an analytics website for a number of American soccer leagues.

That opened the doors at Atlanta United, another team he supported as a fan. He was a data engineer in the club’s scouting department in 2023 and 2024 before he was hired by U.S. Soccer in September 2024 as part of its buildup to the May opening of its national training center in Fayette County.

“It’s been a really awesome experience,” said the 28-year-old Easwaran, who now lives in Inman Park.

The data analytics team has already benefited from having nearly all of the federation in the same palatial building, where team staffs are steps away as opposed to reachable only by video call or a visit to a team camp.

“Even (recently), we were able to bring a couple of women’s national team analysts in a room, talk about some of the metrics that we’re showing in our applications,” he said. “What works, what doesn’t, what have we customized for just the women’s game?”

The World Cup is days away. A dozen years after his introduction to the soccer, a force-multiplying data engineer from Atlanta will be counted on to help prepare the U.S. national team to compete against the world.