The countdown is on to Euro 2024, the international soccer championship organized by UEFA every four years.
For the Football Association (FA) – England's governing football body – the tournament is the culmination of years of strategic planning and research. While England manager Gareth Southgate and his team will focus on bringing home the trophy this summer, the FA is also thinking about how to find the future stars of the England team. And they've turned to Google Cloud technology to help.
Analyzing player scouting reports with AI
England's future football stars are tracked by an extensive network of dedicated scouts. Rich in textual data, his reports describe the development of young athletes over time. The challenge is in reducing the thousands of reports into insightful summaries that depict the player's development journey. Without this ability, there is a risk that potential talent will be overlooked, lost forever in the archives.
FA began working with Google Cloud in 2019, using BigQuery, our data warehouse solution, to centralize its data and streamline processes. This has helped them lay the groundwork needed to unlock insights into player development from a wealth of untapped information, including scouting reports.
Now FA and Google Cloud are collaborating to add a new dimension to talent identification through generative AI. Using Vertex AI, our machine learning platform, the FA's historical scouting reports are now being converted into short summaries to distill the wisdom accumulated over the years.
This AI-powered solution enables:
- Player evaluation at a glance: Coaches and scouts gain an immediate understanding of a player's development trajectory.
- Deep Context: Capturing subjective scout assessments over time can help provide a different perspective to some of the more objective, numbers-driven data sources.
- Compatibility and Reliability: Each scouting report represents a snapshot of a moment in time through the lens of an individual scout. By combining and reducing these reports, individual variations in perception are smoothed out and a broader picture of the athlete's performance is drawn.
This pilot phase of this scouting project is promising. Looking ahead, these developments could redefine talent scouting and player development – securing a promising future for English football and beyond.