The Technology Changing How Football Finds Its Next Stars
Matheus Cunha scored twice against Roma on Tuesday night and was then sent off before the final whistle, which was a very United way of ending a nine-game winless run. Somebody at the club once watched him play and decided he was worth buying; as a supporter of a team (unfortunately) that has spent months looking for answers, I have become oddly interested in how clubs make that call.
Scouting used to mean a man in a bobble hat behind a goal in the rain with a notebook. These days, it can mean GPS vests, software that watches match footage frame by frame and apps that let a teenager upload a video of himself from the back garden.
Clubs arecollecting so much informationon young players that a notebook has little hope of keeping up. Algorithms Are Reading The Scouting Reports Nobody Has Time For Clubs have been filing scouting reports for decades, but many end up in databases that nobody has time to open.
Sevilla FC has more than 200,000 scouting reports in its database, according to IBM. In May 2024, the Football Association announced its work with Google Cloud on using generative AI to analyse historical scouting reports.
Using Google's Vertex AI platform, the project turns years of observations into shorter summaries, giving coaches andscouts a broader pictureof a young player's development. The project was still in its pilot phase when Google reported on it, but it showed how AI could help staff review years of scouting information more quickly.
GPS Vests Don't Care How Good Your Highlights Look Professional clubs use GPS tracking and other performance monitoring systems to collect information about players during training and matches. STATSports reported that five of the Premier League's top six clubs used its Apex tracking devices during the 2018/19 season.
These systems can record sprint distance, top speed and workload. Leroy Sané reached 35.18 km/h that season, according to Sky Sports, just under 22 mph - a figure no highlights reel can fake.
Wearable tracking technology is now available outside professional football, too. The Dutch football association KNVB, for example, supported Footbar's wearable tracker for amateur players, allowing them to measure things such as distance covered, sprinting speed and the number of balls played.
A teenager in a small league can use this kind of technology to build a record of their physical performance over a season, although a tracker can only tell you a player reached 22 mph, it still has no idea whether he was chasing a through ball or the referee. Computer Vision Watches The Players Everyone Else Overlooks Computer vision is software that picks out players and the ball in a video, then tracks their positions throughout a match.