Football coaches desperate to improve their team’s performance could soon find an answer in an artificial intelligence system aimed at conjuring the next superstar.
Technologists say a kind of sporting Aladdin’s lamp is within reach that could allow managers to simply wish for a new player with the aggression of Erling Haaland or the poise of Jude Bellingham and have an AI suggest the perfect prospect.
A system that uses video and automated tracking to monitor the performances of nearly 180,000 soccer players, mostly teenagers, around the world supports the services of Eyeball, a digital scouting company that already has relationships with more than a dozen clubs in the Premier League and other elite teams in Europe and North America.
Using what it claims is the largest video database in global youth football (with registered players from 28 countries), the company says it can now determine which young players best fit the description of current or recent top stars defined by one of the eight archetypes. These include the ideal “box-to-box midfielder”, the “modern 9”, the “playmaking 10” and the “inverted winger”.
The characteristics of the ideal midfielder are a mix of Steven Gerrard, Kevin De Bruyne, Dominik Szoboszlai, Federico Valverde, Dani Olmo and Bellingham, all of whom are top internationals. Eyeball’s modern number 9 is based on the attributes of Haaland, Robert Lewandowski, Harry Kane, Victor Osimhen, Karim Benzema and Nicolas Jackson.
“We anticipate that in the not-too-distant future this search query will be activated by a voice message,” says David Hicks, the company’s co-founder. “For example, a scout will simply have to say ‘show me a Steven Gerard-type player’ or ‘I want a box-to-box midfielder who can impact a game.'”
The long-term effectiveness of the approach has not yet been confirmed. But in the meantime, the company has supplied camera technology to capture detailed data on players in youth matches in established soccer hotbeds such as Spain and France, Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast, as well as smaller countries such as Burkina Faso.
Clubs using the system include 13 from the Premier League, several in Spain, Germany and Italy, Ajax Amsterdam, soccer teams from major American leagues and even American universities looking to recruit students from Europe and Africa, Eyeball said.
Former England defender Sol Campbell has been involved in another AI-powered scouting startup, Talnets, which tracks players in South Africa, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Senegal and also plans to collect data from North Macedonia, Serbia and possibly Bulgaria. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Founder Darko Stanoevski says AI scouting was “democratizing a process that is very subjective and unfortunately driven by politics and the interests of certain people,” particularly football agents.
Eyeball is scouting 12- to 23-year-olds in amateur clubs across Europe using a single camera that captures the entire field. The technology tracks each player’s running distances and speed, number of sprints, acceleration and deceleration over five yards, and data such as how many sharp 90-degree turns players make.
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Some players scouted like this have begun to join the professional ranks. They include 18-year-old Ivory Coast midfielder Abdoulaye Kanté, who was signed by Troyes, a French second-division team, 17-year-old Norwegian winger Daniel Skaarud, who moved to Ajax’s academy, and 19 year old defenseman. Assane Ouedraogo, who moved to MLS club Charlotte FC.
But it will not be for a few years that the value of the approach can be properly evaluated. Only then will it become clear whether the players selected with the help of AI were successful.
“We’ll be able to tell people what data and what typical behavior we can interpret in the video is indicative of future talent, rather than just telling them what happened in the field,” Hicks says.
The systems also raise the question of whether AI analysis could begin to change the style of footballer we see playing in the top flight.
“Decision-making is still made by coaches and scouts based on the club’s philosophy: more physical or whatever,” Stanoevski says. “We won’t see any changes soon. However, in the long term, I think (it will change).”