Premier League Introduces AI Scout to Find the Next Football Superstar

Scouts are a somewhat mysterious group for many people, and they are crucial to the construction and development of a team. In order to improve the efficiency of scouts, the Premier League Burnley Football Club recently enabled AI scouts.

Recently, Chinese football player Li Sirong signed a professional contract with the Dutch football club ADO Den Haag. This news quickly became a hot topic on Weibo, but the reason why he became a hot topic was because: he is too handsome.

Although he became popular because of his handsomeness, Li Sirong actually has both good looks and strength. He started playing football at the age of 7, and entered the youth training system of the Hague club at the age of 12. He was favored by the club's CEO Hamdi, who believed that he "could play in the Premier League in the future."

Among the many young players, there are more potential stocks like Li Sirong. How can they be discovered? This has to start with a special profession in the football circle.

Scouts with a keen eye discover tomorrow's stars

In major league football clubs, in addition to coaches, players and managers, there is another crucial position, that is, scouts.

The job of a scout is to discover talented young players in competitions large and small around the world and recommend them to coaches.For many talented players, scouts are like the horse trainer who discovers a good horse.

Beckham:At the age of 11, he was spotted by Malcolm Fedge, a famous Manchester United scout, because of his outstanding performance in a youth team match. Soon after, he received an invitation letter from Manchester United.

Messi:At the age of 13, he was discovered and signed by Barcelona scout Rexach;

Ronaldo:During a small match, he was discovered by Dutch scout Piet de Visser.
Since then, Peter Visser has discovered outstanding players such as Neymar and Kevin De Bruyne, and is therefore regarded by many as the greatest scout in the industry.

The "reconnaissance" work of a scout is actually not as easy as just watching the game. The road to discovering a new football star can be very tortuous.

They need to travel around the world and carefully observe every player on the field. Once they find a potential player, they need to learn more about the player's background.View a large number of videos and reports, record their height, weight, speed, strength, passing, dribbling, shooting and other data,Comprehensively evaluate the quality and ability of players.

Then they will write scouting reports for the coach, meet with the player's family, and invite him for a tryout until he is finally signed. So, this is a job that requires both physical and mental effort.

It has to be said that players like Beckham, Messi, Ronaldo and others are lucky, as they met their "mentors" at their best times. However, the power of scouts is limited, and there may be many "Beckhams" buried in some corners of the world.

In response to this, the Premier League Burnley Football Club (Burnley FC) has partnered with technology company AiSCOUT to launch AI scouts, redefining the way football stars are discovered, giving more players the opportunity to be discovered, while also sharing the work pressure of scouts.

Attention young players: AI scouts are here

In mid-January, Burnley Football Club announced thatAiSCOUT will provide Burnley with artificial intelligence technology services to assist scouts in global screening and identify talented young players aged 14 and above.

AiSCOUT, headquartered in London, is an AI-based talent discovery platform. The AI scouting system it developed combines the latest AI technologies such as computer vision and deep learning to achieve three major results.

 1. Action recognition: Accurately detect body posture and limbs 

The researchers used thousands of game records from different teams to train the AI model.Enable the system to identify each player in the video and determine their posture and movements: Are they running, walking, or jumping? Who are they passing the ball to? Is their dominant foot left or right?

2. Performance analysis: tracking players and recording data 

In addition to observing the movements of players during a match, Shreedhar Rangappa, PhD, a research assistant who led the project, trained a deep neural network to track individual players.The performance data of each player, such as activity level, passes, assists, shots, etc., are collected and integrated to obtain the player's performance score.

3. Lens stitching: Get a comprehensive view 

When analyzing lower league or non-professional matches, the field of view is limited because organizers usually only use a small number of cameras to record the games.

In this regard,The researchers developed automatic view stitching software that can synthesize the images into a full-view image even with only two cameras.

The introduction of AI scouts can be said to be beneficial to all three parties.

For the majority of players, no matter where they are, they only need to upload their training videos or game videos to the AiSCOUT application.The AiSCOUT system will automatically analyze and generate a 360° player performance display chart, and list the player's detailed data in terms of technology, cognition and psychological quality for scouts' reference.

For football clubs, the introduction of the AI scouting system means that they do not have to hire a large number of scouts and can reach all parts of the world.

For scouts, the workload will be greatly reduced, and the efficiency and accuracy of selecting new players will also be improved.

AI scouts are becoming more mature, should the Chinese national football team consider it?

In major European football clubs, a very mature scouting system has long been formed. Some super clubs employ hundreds of scouts, or as few as a dozen, who regularly send scouting reports to the club.

However, the expenditure in this regard is also very huge. In recent years, Burnley has slowed down the pace of player recruitment in order to save costs. The average age of its players (28.4 years old) ranks third from the bottom in the Premier League, three years older than Manchester United (25.2 years old), which ranks first.

For Burnley, recruiting talents and injecting fresh blood into the team is urgent, so they "thought quickly" and "hired" AI scouts to help, which greatly broadened the scope of their talent selection.

Can the Chinese national football team also learn from this? Well, let's not talk about it for now. This is not a problem that can be solved by a scout.

News source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/drgeraintevans/2021/01/31/discovering-the-next-generation-of-soccer-talent-through-ai-and-the-amateur-game/?sh=53982022c786 https://www.aiscout.io/