World Cup teams in a race for AI dominance

Huge size Of the data that is recorded in World Cup this summer Unprecedented. FIFA, the tournament organizer, will track about 150 million data points for each match. Inside the ball alone, sensors monitoring the IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) will record 500 movements per second to track the ball’s movement.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, Patrick Losey can go further. “The thing about football is that the number of permutations (in the game) is greater than the number of atoms in the universe,” he says.

Lucey is Chief Scientist at Stats Performance, the data and AI company whose work underpins almost the entire global football ecosystem. Their statistics are used in every aspect of the modern game. It supports player scouting, charges multi-million-dollar fees on player transfers, helps the coaching staff choose tactics and formations, and devises corner and free-kick procedures. Players use it to negotiate contracts, and broadcasters use it for entertainment.

Amnesty International It now enables data to be collected across matches around the world like never before, and staff within teams are pushing the boundaries to process that data at unprecedented speed. in World CupLarge amounts of information will be processed and analyzed by humans and artificial intelligence, to find the latest technologies.

The difference in this The Year Cup will also have access to a dedicated AI agent Powered by Lenovo. It is FIFA’s attempt to level the playing field. Whether that is enough or not is another matter.

“The data is nuanced, multifactorial and contradictory,” says Lucey. “And what we do in sports is very similar to self-driving vehicles: you look at trajectories.” “If you think about one team, there are 10 factorial substitutions, just in terms of the ranking of the players. If you include the opposition, it explodes.”

Even smaller countries have found innovative ways to benefit from technology. Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island with a population of about 159,000, became the smallest country ever to qualify for this tournament’s World Cup after using its own data and technology to “track the diaspora”: mapping lineage, identifying eligible players, and using geospatial data to plan expeditions and organize tryouts.

“Only one player from the Curaçao 26 was actually born on the island of Curaçao,” says Alex Stewart, CEO of data-driven sports consultancy Analytics FC. The rest were born in the Netherlands.”

Another growing use of data and artificial intelligence in national associations is manager selection. The tools can analyze a team’s realistic range of options and identify managers whose tactical strengths suit them best. Teams can also use AI to help shape team composition ahead of the tournament, based on opponents in the group stage.

England are using artificial intelligence to analyze penalties because they know penalties can knock them out. What used to take five days – analyzing every opponent’s penalty kick – can now potentially be done in five hours, head of performance insights and analytics at the Football Association. He told the BBC.

Uruguay coach Marcelo Bielsa once said when he was in charge of English Premier League team Leeds United that his staff spent around 300 hours analyzing the upcoming team. “We can do it automatically,” Lucey says. It shows a video of red and blue dots moving around the field chasing a yellow ball. Analysts can ask questions – how many times the movement led to shots or goals, and all the other times it happened – each one revealing a new layer of information.

“You can compare this situation today to web accessibility,” says Jan Wendt, co-founder and CEO of PLAIER, an artificial intelligence platform that works with clubs and national teams. Both British Airways and Amazon built websites in the early days of the Internet. One became a platform for information and airline ticket booking, while the other changed commerce globally, says Wendt. Artificial intelligence is similarly ubiquitous, changing routine tasks and entire industries. Or, in the case of football, sports franchises.