Football coaches desperate to boost their team’s performance could soon find an answer in an artificial intelligence system aimed at conjuring the next superstar.
A kind of sporting Aladdin’s lamp is within reach, technologists claim, which could allow managers to simply wish for a new player with the aggression of Erling Haaland or the poise of Jude Bellingham and for an AI to suggest the perfect prospect.
A system that uses video and automated tracking to monitor the performances of nearly 180,000 mostly teenage footballers around the world underpins the services of Eyeball, a digital scouting company that already has relationships with more than a dozen Premier League clubs and other elite teams in Europe and North America.
Using what it claims is the largest video database of global youth football – with players logged from 28 countries – the company says it can now determine which young players most fit the description of current or recent top stars as defined by one of eight archetypes. These include the ideal “box-to-box midfielder”, “modern No 9”, “playmaking No 10” and “inverted wing-back”.
The characteristics of the ideal midfielder are a blend of Steven Gerrard, Kevin De Bruyne, Dominik Szoboszlai, Federico Valverde, Dani Olmo and Bellingham – all top-ranked internationals. Eyeball’s modern No 9 is modelled on the attributes of Haaland, Robert Lewandowski, Harry Kane, Victor Osimhen, Karim Benzema and Nicolas Jackson.
“We see in the not-too-distant future that this search inquiry will be activated via voice prompt,” 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 is yet to be confirmed. But, meanwhile, the company has supplied camera technology to capture fine-grain data on players in youth games across established football hotbeds such as Spain and France, Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast as well as smaller nations such as Burkina Faso.
Clubs using the system include 13 in the Premier League, several in Spain, Germany and Italy, Ajax in Amsterdam, US major league soccer teams and even US colleges 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 is tracking players in South Africa, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Senegal and is also planning to gather data from North Macedonia, Serbia and possibly Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Its founder, Darko Stanoevski, says AI scouting was “democratising a process that is very subjective and unfortunately driven by politics and the interests of certain people” – in particular football agents.
Eyeball is scouting 12- to 23-year-olds at amateur clubs across Europe using a single camera which captures the entirety of the pitch. The technology tracks each player’s run 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 started to join the professional ranks. They include the 18-year-old Ivory Coast midfielder Abdoulaye Kanté, who was picked up by Troyes, a French second-tier side, 17-year-old Norwegian winger Daniel Skaarud who moved to Ajax’s academy, and 19-year-old defender Assane Ouedraogo who moved to MLS club Charlotte FC.
But it will not be for another few years that the value of the approach can be properly assessed. Only then will it be clear whether the players selected with the help of AI turned out to be a success.
“We’ll be able to tell people what data, what typical behaviour we can interpret from the video is indicative of future talent, rather than just telling you what happened on the pitch,” says Hicks.
The systems also pose the question of whether AI analysis might start changing the style of footballer we see playing the top flight game.
“The decision-making is still done by the coaches and the chief scouts based on the club’s philosophy – more physicality or whatever,” says Stanoevski. “We won’t see any change soon. However, long term, I believe it will [change].”
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