How AI-based recruiting helps Spain’s best soccer teams score

If you’re not a soccer fan, phrases like “attack the post” and “direct free kick outside the 18” may seem unfamiliar (for Americans, that’s soccer). But to a football scout, it’s the daily vocabulary of the profession that represents important language that helps evaluate a player’s value to a team. And now it is also the language spoken and understood by Scout Advisor, an innovative tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) and is built on the IBM® watsonx™ platform specifically for the Sevilla Fútbol Club in Spain.

Scouts have many responsibilities, including observing practices, speaking with young players’ families, and recording and recording games. many Follow-up paperwork is in progress. In reality, paperwork is a much more important part of your job than you might think.

Sevilla FC sporting director Victor Orta explained at the 2023 World Football Summit conference: “We will never sign a player based on data alone. But you would never enter into a contract without relying on data. In the end, good players will always have good data, but it is always the human eye that has to evaluate everything and make decisions.”

Read on to learn more about IBM and Sevilla FC’s high-scoring partnership.

sit on a bench doing paperwork

In 2021, Sevilla FC, a top team based in Andalusia, Spain, was hampered by a mountain of paperwork. With an elite scouting team of 20 to 25 scouts, a single player can accumulate up to 40 scouting reports, which can take 200 to 300 hours to review. In total, Sevilla FC was tasked with putting together a total of over 200,000 reports on potential players, a hugely time-consuming task.

Combining the value of data with expert observations has been at the heart of the club. Scouting reports look at quantitative data, such as game-time details such as attempts scored, correct pass percentage, and assists, as well as qualitative data such as player attitude and alignment with team philosophy. At the time, Sevilla FC could efficiently access and use quantitative player data in seconds, but the process of extracting qualitative information from the database was much slower.

In the case of Sevilla FC, recruiting players using big data had the potential to change its core business. Instead of scouts selecting players based solely on intuition and bias, scouts can leverage statistics and confidently make better business decisions about their multi-million dollar investments (i.e. players). Not to mention when, where, and how you will use that player. But leveraging that data wasn’t easy.

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Sevilla FC values ​​data as much as scoring goals. In 2021, the club created a dedicated data department specifically to help management make better business decisions. It has now grown to become the largest data department in European football, developing its own AI tools and internal ticketing solutions to help track player movements through news reports.

But when it comes to the sheer volume of data collected by scouts, the department knew it had a challenge that required a trusted partner. Initially, the department consulted with data scientists at the University of Seville to develop a model to organize all the data. However, the club soon realized that more advanced technology was needed. The IBM representative’s cold call was serendipitous.

“We were contacted by (IBM Client Engineering Manager) Arturo Guerrero to learn more about us and our data projects,” said Elias Zamora, Chief Data Officer at Sevilla FC. “We quickly understood there was a way we could work together,” he said. Sevilla FC has one of the largest scouting databases in professional football and is ready for use in our generative AI technology framework. IBM has launched watsonx, a cloud-based commercially generated AI and scientific data platform. So partnering to use AI to extract the most value from our scouting reports was the right initiative.”

adjusting the play

Sevilla FC connected with the IBM client engineering team to talk through the issues and devise a plan.

Technology soon followed because Sevilla FC was able to clearly explain its challenges and goals, and IBM asked the right questions. The partnership determined that IBM watsonx.ai™ would be the best solution to quickly and easily interrogate large databases of players using underlying models and generative AI to process prompts in natural language. Using a semantic language for search provides richer results. For example, searching for “talented winger” translates to “A talented winger can dribble past defenders to create space and break through the opposition defence.”

Titled Scout Advisor, the solution provides a curated list of players matching your search criteria in a well-designed, user-friendly interface. This technology helps you unlock the full potential of your Sevilla FC database, from scouts’ intangible impressions to specific data assets.

goal scoring

Scout Advisor’s pilot program went into production in January 2024 and is currently being trained on 200,000 existing reports. The club’s plan is to use the tool during the summer 2024 recruitment season and see results in September. So far, reviews have been positive.

“Scout Advisor has the ability to transform the way we approach recruiting,” says Zamora. “We can identify players based on the opinions of football experts contained in scouting reports and expressed in natural language. In other words, we use this technology to fully extract value and knowledge from our scouting department.”

And with the time saved, scouts can now focus on human tasks like connecting with recruits, watching games, and making data-driven decisions.

Given the high functionality of Scout Advisor’s NLP technology, it’s natural to think about how the same technology could be applied to other sports recruiting and other functions. But one thing is certain. Better decisions about who, when and why to play football have transformed the way Sevilla FC recruits.

“This is the most innovative technology I have ever seen in football,” says Zamora.

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