It sought help from a small London-based startup, AiScout, which uses Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking computer vision technology to assess the physical movements of players.įrom May to December, RFYC invited youth players to complete drills through the AiScout app.
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When the pandemic struck, however, RFYC had no ability to go see any young players in action. Nine of the 10 players in its first graduating class two years ago received contracts to play professionally in the Indian Super League.
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It’s a multi-pronged process of scouting trials all culminating in what’s a life-changing opportunity. “So many decisions on recruitment are still made like, ‘I'm gonna go call my buddy, who's an agent.’”ĭata paired with video leads to visibilityĮvery year, the Reliance Foundation Young Champs, a five-star residential soccer academy in Navi Mumbai, scours India for the best 12 year-old players, offering them five-year scholarships to live and train at the academy. “People would be shocked if they saw the behind the scenes of Europe in terms of the way these clubs are run, not just from an operational standpoint, but from a sophistication,” says Jordan Gardner, co-owner and managing partner of Denmark’s FC Helsingør as well as an investor in England’s Swansea City and Ireland’s Dundalk FC. The existence of scouting innovation doesn’t necessarily mean widespread adoption. Global soccer already suffers from the chasm between the haves and have-nots financially, but the gulf between clubs using advanced methods of scouting will contribute to the talent gap. “But data has the ability to genuinely actually contrast you to people in a way that gives you, I think, a much higher percentage opportunity of actually being seen because it's a marker of talent, rather than creativity in how you put together a CV or a visualization of who you are.”
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“Contrasting those is a very manual process, and making yourself stand out is based on selecting some good clips and being lucky if the right person looks at it,” says Ben Smith, Chelsea Football Club’s head of research and innovation who also heads BreakAway’s international business. Presenting more true markers of talent helps minimize the need for multimedia skills in crafting highlight reels in hopes it reaches the right evaluator. Players are getting more control of and context from their data from apps like BreakAway Data, which seeks to help prospects gain commensurate scouting interest for their talent. Even the evaluation of the evaluators is being considered by thoughtful organizations such as 360 Scouting. Other new areas of information gathering include analysis of biomechanics using only smartphone cameras from AiScout and JuniStat, the democratized collection of physical data from SkillCorner and Track160, and the application of advanced algorithms to assess a player’s fit in varying tactical styles from SmarterScout and StatsBomb. Sensors such as Playermaker-which proffer physical data and, in a first, also metrics evaluating technical skills-are gaining a foothold in the scouting process, even if there’s a requisite learning curve to make sense of this new information. The world of soccer data is evolving rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital video, the growing accessibility of physical data inputs and now the introduction new devices and datapoints. Harvey Elliott's impressive data from Playermaker's shoe-worn sensors was initially thought to be a glitch. “And he became the youngest player ever to play a Premier League game.” “We’re looking at this, and the data is legit,” recalls CEO Guy Aharon of 16-year-old Harvey Elliott’s preternatural ball handling. There’s no way he has so many touches and that he's dribbling like this.” Someone from Playermaker’s team paid the club a visit where the Fulham coaches conceded that the day was “generally okay but look at this player: it's abnormal. Just two weeks after implementing the shoe-worn sensors, Fulham called Playermaker and said, “Your data is not reliable. This was a big get: Fulham had recently earned promotion to the Premier League for the 2018-19 season.īut there was a problem.
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Playermaker’s very first client in the United Kingdom was Fulham FC. You can read Part 1 on the growth of digital video here and Part 2 on how access to physical data has improved here.
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This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece, the conclusion to our soccer series, looks at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts.