The beautiful game has become even more beautiful with the introduction of innovative data tools such as AiSCOUT. A monumental amount of effort and resources are put into scouting for the next top talents in football by each team across the globe, but the traditional methods of scouting have often been restrictive and involved costly, slow manual tasks. By bringing video analytics, player stats and performance data together through a range of proprietary machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligences, AiSCOUT can find, engage, trial, analyse, rate, score and scout aspiring amateur players on a global scale.
“Real innovation that brings the subject to the platform and then the data to the clients to optimise end-to-end. Brilliant!” – Judges’ comment
The development of AiSCOUT – an application to assess and analyse player statistics – has changed the way talent is identified by utilising video analytics, player statistical and performance data through proprietary machine learning algorithms and AI’s. This enables AiSCOUT user to find, engage, trial, analyse, rate, score and scout amateur players across the globe for a fraction of the cost, time and effort of traditional methods. Beta and MVP testing resulted in 77 amateur players being trialled and signed for professional clubs and national squads – 47 of these players trialling in 2022 alone.
To date, AiSCOUT has been successfully used by professional clubs such as Chelsea FC, Burnley FC in addition to amateur players across 125 countries. A long list of additional football organisations including governments, national squads, universities, leagues and clubs from all over the world have eagerly awaited the full role out. At the tail end of 2022, after two years of research and insights, AiSCOUT was signed by Chelsea FC as its official academy recruitment partner, with the platform set to become an integral part of the club’s recruitment and scouting process for academy players over the next five years.
Talent scouts using AiSCOUT receive a 100% efficiency increase and receive access to talent that would have been missed using traditional methods. The app provides statistics and analytics for any player, anywhere in the world, from any socio-demographic background to be easily uploaded and accessed. The solution truly democratises the opportunities for players across the globe and access to different talent pools for clubs of all sizes and resources. The app promotes equality, diversity and inclusion by removing financial and geographical restraints limits from potential talent of lower socioeconomic backgrounds and less developed countries – all that is needed is access to a mobile phone.
The success of AiSCOUT saw the team being invited to join the FIFA Innovation Programme and provide a full demonstration of the tools. There is also the opportunity to take AiSCOUT outside of the world of football as there has been interest from other human-performance based industries, such as the military and health, to build out AiSCOUT to support their industries.
