Press
Short bio · 50 words
Joel Ayomide Adejola is the operator of STATSWING, a research-led sports decision-intelligence institution focused on football. He came to STATSWING from investigative journalism at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) in Nigeria, an engineering internship at Texas Instruments, and several years of student government and academic philosophy at the University of Kansas.
Medium bio · 100 words
Joel Ayomide Adejola is the operator of STATSWING, a research-led sports decision-intelligence institution focused on football. STATSWING was built in five and a half weeks from a desk in Lawrence, Kansas. Joel's background runs across investigative journalism at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) in Nigeria — where he covered the 2022 World Cup and broke the ₦2bn fire-fighting-equipment story at Abuja Stadium — engineering work at Texas Instruments, and several years in University of Kansas student government, where he is also a Brownstein-Young Award recipient in philosophy. He writes about football, epistemology, and what AI is forcing into the open about how we learn.
Long bio · 250 words
Joel Ayomide Adejola is the operator of STATSWING, a research-led sports decision-intelligence institution focused on football. STATSWING helps clubs and operators think more clearly about difficult decisions in recruitment, analysis, markets, and football operations — through published research, player assessment grades, and a public analytics dashboard. STATSWING was built in roughly five and a half weeks from a desk in Lawrence, Kansas; Joel is its only full-time worker. BallerzBantz, the public football data product he started in 2020, now sits within the STATSWING ecosystem as one downstream expression of the underlying research.
Joel's path to STATSWING ran through several formative roles. Out of secondary school in Lagos and the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, he worked as an investigative journalist at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting in Nigeria, where he covered the 2022 FIFA World Cup, broke the abandoned-fire-fighting-equipment story at Abuja Stadium, and reported on voter registration suppression ahead of the 2023 elections. He later interned in engineering at Texas Instruments, working on motor drives and gallium-nitride solutions. Across three years at the University of Kansas, where he studies Philosophy and Physics, he has authored a passed Student Senate resolution correcting the University's misreading of federal employment law for student staff, served as a Fellow at The Catalyst (the KU School of Business accelerator), worked as a KU Writing Center consultant for five semesters (where he developed the observation that the gap between task compliance and genuine understanding predated AI — AI just made it legible), and received the 2025 Brownstein-Young Award for outstanding junior in the Department of Philosophy.
His work runs through one question: what makes a claim worth believing, and who decides. He writes for BallerzBantz (a football intelligence newsletter) and is preparing the launch of PingBack, the publication where he is making the broader case — that AI orchestration has made single-operator institution-building possible for the first time, and that he is running an experiment to find out. STATSWING is the first instance of the experiment. He can be reached at joel@statswing.com.
Story angles
The single-operator institution. Building a sports intelligence institution covering 14,800+ players in three weeks from a laptop — what AI orchestration makes possible at the institutional layer, and what it doesn't.
Institutional failure as a build trigger. ALA → Catharsis essay. KU Housing → Senate Resolution. Football analytics gaps → STATSWING. A reflex, not a strategy — and what it means to make a habit of it.
AI didn't create the education crisis, it made one legible. Five semesters and roughly 300 writing consultations at KU's Writing Center. A frame for AI's actual effect on learning that doesn't reduce to either 'cheating' or 'transformation.'
Honors
Selected roles
Languages
Prior appearances
Contact
Joel Adejola · joel@statswing.com · @JoelAdejola