Phrases like “hitting the post” and “direct free kick outside the 18” may seem foreign if you’re not a soccer fan (for Americans, see soccer). However, for a football scout, it is the daily lexicon of his job, representing the key language that helps assess a player’s value to the team. Now it is also the language spoken and understood by Scout Advisor – an groundbreaking tool using natural language processing (NLP) and built on the IBM® watsonx™ platform especially for the Spanish club Fútbol Sevilla.
Every day, a scout has several duties: observing training, talking to the families of teenage players, taking notes from matches and saving further documents. In fact, paperwork is a much more vital part of the job than you might think.
As Victor Orta, sporting director of Sevilla FC, explained at his conference during the 2023 World Football Summit: “We will never sign a contract with a player based on data alone, but we will also never do it without referring to data. Ultimately, a good player will always have good data, but there is always the human eye that has to evaluate everything and make a decision.
Read on to learn more about the incredibly successful collaboration between IBM and Sevilla FC.
Overwhelmed with papers
In 2021, an avalanche of documents plagued Sevilla FC, a top-flight team based in Andalusia, Spain. With an elite scouting team of 20 to 25 scouts, a single player can accumulate up to 40 scout reports, requiring 200 to 300 hours of review. Overall, Sevilla FC were tasked with preparing over 200,000 reports on potential players, an extremely time-consuming task.
The combination of expert observations with the value of data remained crucial for the club. Scouting reports include quantitative data on the minutiae of a game, such as goal attempts, pass percentage, and assists, as well as qualitative data, such as player attitude and alignment with team philosophy. At the time, Sevilla FC could effectively access and utilize quantitative player data within seconds, but the process of extracting qualitative information from the database was much slower in comparison.
In the case of Sevilla FC, the utilize of massive data to recruit players had the potential to change the company’s core business. Instead of scouts selecting players based solely on intuition and bias, they could also utilize statistics and confidently make better business decisions in the case of multi-million investments (i.e. players). Not to mention when, where and how to utilize said players. However, using this data was not an straightforward task.
Getting lend a hand from IBM
Sevilla FC takes data almost as seriously as it takes goals. In 2021, the club established a dedicated data department specifically to lend a hand management make better business decisions. It has now become the largest data department in European football, developing its own AI tool that helps track player movements in the news, as well as internal ticketing solutions.
But when it came to dealing with the enormous amount of data collected by the Scouts, the department knew it faced a challenge that required a reliable partner. Initially, the department consulted with data scientists from the University of Seville to develop models to organize all the data. However, the club soon realized that it would need more advanced technology. The icy call from the IBM representative was random.
“He contacted me [IBM Client Engineering Manager] Arturo Guerrero to learn more about us and our data projects,” says Elias Zamora, Chief Data Officer at Sevilla FC. “We quickly realized that there were ways to collaborate. Sevilla FC has one of the largest scouting databases in professional football, ready for use within generative AI technologies. IBM just released watsonx, a commercial cloud-based generative artificial intelligence and data science platform. Therefore, a partnership to extract the most value from our scouting reports using artificial intelligence was the right initiative.”
Coordinating the fun
Sevilla FC engaged with the client’s IBM engineering team to discuss the challenges they faced and a plan was developed.
Because Sevilla FC was able to clearly explain their challenges and goals, and IBM asked the right questions, technology soon emerged. The partnership identified IBM watsonx.ai™ as the best solution for quickly and easily sifting through the company’s massive player database using foundational models and generative artificial intelligence to process natural language prompts. Using semantic language in the search provided richer results: for example, a search for “talented winger” translated to “a talented winger is able to challenge defenders by dribbling to create space and penetrate the opponent’s defense.”
The solution, called Scout Advisor, presents a curated list of players who meet your search criteria in a well-designed, user-friendly interface. The technology used helps unleash the full potential of Sevilla FC’s database, from the scout’s conceptual impressions to specific data resources.
Scoring a goal
The Scout Advisor pilot program went into production in January 2024 and is currently training on 200,000 existing reports. The club plans to utilize the tool in the summer 2024 recruitment season and see the results in September. So far, the opinions are positive.
“Scout Advisor has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach player recruitment,” says Zamora. “It allows you to identify players based on the opinion of football experts included in scouting reports and expressed in natural language. This means that we utilize this technology to fully extract the value and expertise of our scouting department.
With the time saved, scouts can now focus on human tasks: contacting recruits, watching games and making data-driven decisions.
When considering the high functionality of Scout Advisor’s NLP technology, it is natural to think about how the same technology can be applied to recruiting in other sports and other functions. But one thing is certain: making better decisions about who, when and why to play a player has changed the way Sevilla FC recruits.
Zamora says: “It’s the most revolutionary technology I’ve seen in football.”
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