In Focus: Genius Sports - Finding That Winning Edge: How AI Is Revolutionising The Premier League Game Plan
Recently football has received a rather mixed reception for its adoption and use of new technology. Whereas other sports have managed to successfully integrate tools into the live action– albeit not without their own challenges – football has struggled to strike a balance between technology being accepted as an enhancement rather than a distraction that disrupts the live game experience.
The beautiful game stands apart as the most popular sport worldwide largely due to its cross-cultural appeal, simplicity and accessibility. But when a big match is being viewed by millions of fans around the world, and every single pass, shot, save, foul and offside is being scrutinised, the benefit of technology-driven innovation is put under the microscope.
Where football has struck a healthy balance has been the introduction of technology that delivers team and player performance insights. At all levels of the sport, teams are reaping the rewards of having a growing armoury of data-driven tools at their disposal to prepare for upcoming matches, analyse opponents and dissect performances.
And increasingly, this technology is being driven by AI.
An AI revolution
The Premier League is commonly recognised as the most successful football league in the world with a vast global fanbase. The league’s stratospheric popularity is built on its unpredictability, the idea that any team can beat anyone else on any given weekend.
Amidst this ferociously competitive landscape, Premier League clubs have invested heavily in their performance tools to exploit the most marginal of gains by rigorously establishing what works and what doesn’t. At the heart of this is AI-powered technology that combines rich tracking data with integrated video to deliver unique and actionable insights for coaches and their teams of analysts.
Developed by Genius Sports (owner of Second Spectrum), this technology is built on AI and computer vision that has been trained to recognise and understand gameplay, meaning it automatically synchronises live data with the relevant video in real-time.
Instead of having to watch hours and hours of film to manually create compilations to share and review, football analysts use Genius Sports’ Insight tool to search and immediately identify incredibly detailed performance insights. This tactical use of AI in football demonstrates the extent to which technology is transforming the way sports are played, analysed and monetised as machines’ understanding of live action has outstripped a human being’s manual capabilities.
As an example, some Premier League teams use Genius Sports’ AI-powered technology to instantly find and collate relevant clips ranging from a winger’s effectiveness in 1v1 situations to a striker’s number of runs in-behind or a centre-back’s footwork from defending crosses.
For the latter example, this could be instantly broken down from open play or set pieces and be used to only identify clips when the specific defender is targeted by the opponent delivering a cross. Having instant access to this range of clips could be used to demonstrate that the defender has a weakness when a striker stands in front of their eye-line, helping coaches to tailor their training and match preparation accordingly.
Transforming Premier League performance
Through the power of AI, Premier League teams have an unsurpassed level of data and insight to analyse everything from an upcoming opponents’ strengths and weaknesses to set piece patterns, formations in and out of possession and much more.
As the official tracking partner of the English Premier League, Genius Sports’ cutting-edge, AI-powered cameras have been installed in all 20 stadiums, capturing billions of data points and giving every team access to a suite of game changing player performance tools. Following an expansion of Genius Sports’ partnership with Football DataCo in 2023, Genius Sports’ technology has been rolled out across all 24 Championship teams as well, incorporating its Fitness tool (which provides coaches with a consolidated view of physical and tactical data) to measure each player’s output and distance covered within a tactical context.
Whether it be Championship clubs desperately chasing promotion, or Premier League teams looking to break into the Champions League, every marginal gain realised through AI can combine to deliver the competitive advantage that can be the difference between success and failure. AI is opening new doors in match preparation, post-game analysis, injury prevention and much more with Genius Sports at the heart of the revolution.
