Spanish football Club Sevilla has partnered with IBM to use the latter’s Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, watsonx, to help pick players for its team. The collaboration has led to the development of the tool dubbed Scout Advisor, which is aimed at enhancing the recruitment process and increasing competitive advantage.
Scouting and recruiting players at professional football clubs is a multi-million dollar industry. These are investments made over long-duration contracts and high uncertainty over player performance, making predicting the return on investment (ROI) difficult.
Conventionally, the practice has relied on observations made by Scouters and analysis of data captured over a limited number of factors that can be easily quantified. However, this has limitations since it can only consider a few factors and is time-consuming.
AI generated image of a bot analyzing performance of soccer players.
The advent of AI programs in recent years has opened up new possibilities for such analysis that not only uses a much larger data set but can also provide valuable insight from the available data.
What is Scout Advisor?
Sevilla FC already maintains a large database of player evaluations based on performance data. In the past, this has helped the team identify rising football stars such as Dani Alves, Ivan Rakitic, and Sergio Romero, who came through Sevilla’s scouting program before being picked up by other football clubs.
The club is also known for developing its data analytics to characterize players based on their capabilities and performances. Teaming with IBM, the club will combine its capabilities with generative AI to bridge the gap between data-based metrics and human observations. Using Scout Advisor is expected to enhance player identification and make more informed decisions.
“With the appropriate guardrails and governance in place, AI continues to be a game-changer for businesses across many industries looking to modernize operations,” said Ana Paula Assis, General Manager at IBM. “In this instance, by producing trusted and explainable insights that advance the goals of a competitive football club while transforming the work of a football scout.”
IBM’s AI could help bridge the gap between hard numbers and subjective observations of soccer scouts
Built on IBM’s watsonx, Scout Advisor leverages natural language processing and foundational models to search and analyze massive amounts of information in databases to evaluate potential candidates for recruitment. This includes quantifiable data such as height, minutes played, or goals scored and information entered in textual format in over 200,000 scouting reports, a press release said.
With Scout Advisor, Sevilla FC can now use large language models (LLMs) to improve the accuracy of player identification. Interestingly, it will also allow scouters to describe player characteristics as a language prompt to trigger the AI to return a curated list of candidates based on the requirements.
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Using IBM’s AI, Sevilla FC will now be able to unlock the potential of human-based observations made in many scout reports in its database, giving it an advantage over its competitors.
“Our team of scouters and analysts is committed to finding the best players to support our team’s success and have worked tirelessly to build an impressive database of player reports, and now, with the support of IBM, we can utilize this asset to its full potential,” said José María del Nido Carrasco, President, Sevilla FC.
“We believe that this collaboration will have a positive impact not only for Sevilla FC but for the sports industry as a whole.”
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Ameya Paleja Ameya is a science writer based in Hyderabad, India. A Molecular Biologist at heart, he traded the micropipette to write about science during the pandemic and does not want to go back. He likes to write about genetics, microbes, technology, and public policy.
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