World Cup Teams Are in AI Dominance Competition

Teams at this year’s Championship will also have access to a bespoke AI assistant sponsored by Lenovo. It’s FIFA’s attempt to change the game. Whether or not it will be enough is another matter.

“What we do in sports is very similar to self-driving cars, you’re looking for a way,” says Lucey. “When you think about one team, there are 10 permits, when it comes to calling up players. When you put the opposition together, it just explodes.”

Even small countries have found new ways to use technology. Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island with a population of about 159,000, became the smallest country not to qualify for the World Cup in the tournament after using their knowledge and expertise to “track the diaspora”: creating a parentage map, identifying the right players, and using geospatial information to plan visits and organize trials.

“He is the only player from Curaçao 26 who was born on the island of Curaçao,” says Alex Stewart, head of sports management agency Data Analytics FC. The rest were born in the Netherlands.

Another use of data and AI in national organizations is in the selection of managers. Tools can analyze a list of real team options and identify managers whose skills suit them best. Teams can also use AI to help build a team ahead of the competition, based on their group opponents.

England are using AI to assess penalties, knowing that the shot can knock them down. What used to take five days – to analyze every penalty awarded to an opponent – can now be done in five hours, the head of the Football Association analyzes and evaluates. he told the BBC.

Marcelo Bielsa, the manager of Uruguay, said during his time in charge of Premier League Leeds United that his staff spent around 300 hours evaluating the upcoming squad. “We can only do this,” Lucey says. He shows a video of red and blue dots moving around the pitch chasing a yellow ball. Investigators can ask questions—how many times the migration has led to shootings or targets, what other times they have occurred—each will reveal new information.

“You can compare this today with access to the Internet,” says Jan Wendt, founder and CEO of PLAIER, an AI platform for working with clubs and national teams. Both British Airways and Amazon built websites in the early days of the Internet. One became an information and marketing platform for the airline, the other changed the business world, says Wendt. AI is equally pervasive, changing routine jobs and entire industries. Or, in the case of football, sports franchises.

But AI tools and the staff needed to build and operate them are expensive. Not all countries have these requirements. Wendt believes that working with established foreign companies, such as his, should be seen as a good option for smaller countries.

Another problem is that too much information can make a professional’s job difficult. Their job is to break down a lot of information into useful information for a coach or player.

“You don’t want to say, ‘Okay, now we can use all this cool stuff, here’s a 47-page document for all your objections,'” says Stewart. “The work of the expert is easy in some ways because there is so much, but it is difficult because there is so much, so there is the art of boiling.”

Technology can improve matches and prepare teams that could not compete in the past with countries that use a large department of research and analysis. But does this mean that the problem will now be that they cannot compete with the big computer science groups and analysts?

Will the data gap between rich and poor countries widen so much that it distorts competition in a competition that smaller countries already face?

FIFA is concerned enough that it has created an AI agent, Football AI Pro, and is making it available to every country at the World Cup for the first time in the tournament.

The assistant is similar to the ChatGPT interface, where coaches can enter questions and open information about their opponents. Matches are also created in 3D, allowing analysis from previously impossible angles. Everything it is quantifiable, from where the players pass and run how they attack and defend the shots they shoot and the goals they score.

“We see it as our goal, as well as our mission, to provide technology to all teams, so that everyone can access it and can use it in an easy way without having additional experts on the team, because not everyone can afford it,” says Johannes Holzmüller, FIFA’s director of innovation.

Whether this closes the gap between a country with a bare-bones data department and, say, a team in England, which uses in-house programmers, data scientists, and researchers, with the help of external AI tools, is debatable. “That’s the least we can do,” Holzmüller adds. “We’re seeing this disparity where some groups are using technology and data more than others.”

The future of data, AI, and football is, in fact, predictive. “The next step is to make long-term predictions,” Lucey says, hoping to get to the point where false positives analysis will help encourage players to take a break to maximize their chances of winning.

Should FIFA step in and ban countries from using FIFA-sanctioned AI tools?

“That’s a big question,” says Holzmüller. “If this is going to be managed in a different way, it’s not the answer today, but (AI) will play a big role in the future.”