KOCHI: One of the oldest football clubs in Spain is taking the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) route to scout for players. Sevilla, which has won the UEFA Cup/Europa League seven times — most recently in 2023 — and has some big players like Jesús Navas, Youssef En-Nesyri and Rafa Mir, will be introducing its GenAI platform, Scout Advisor, to select players for the upcoming season. Dr Elias Zamora, chief technical officer (CTO) of Sevilla Football Club, founded in 1890, conveyed this at the International GenAI conclave on Thursday.
“My team is responsible for providing insightful information to decision-makers. We help them identify talent, players and potential sponsors. What we do is collect data and transform them into information. It is then sent to the decision-makers to decide upon the players they want.” “We are not making the final decision,” he explained.
Dr Zamora pointed to the long-standing tradition that the club has of making use of data in the football ecosystem. “We use data as an asset, specifically for scouting,” he adds. He said that in the past, the club used quantitative and categorical data that included the number of minutes, number of goals, passes and how good the player is in one of these matrixes against their performance in a competition. “Our methodology has been a proven success for the past 20 to 30 years,” he says.
“We have the largest scouting department and also the largest scouting database in the world,” says Dr Zamora.
But why GenAI? “Our scouting department generates a million reports. However, it becomes humanly impossible to go through all of them and arrive at a decision when selecting a player or a talent. We wanted to be able to extract insightful information from both quantitative and categorical data. We did that using GenAI. We developed Scout Advisor using GenAI,” the CTO noted.
The platform makes it all easy. “Just type in the keywords in any language. GenAI or the large language model (LLM) not only takes in the word but also generates the meaning of the said word. The technology understands what you are introducing and enriches it through GenAI technology. It compares the word to every one of the million reports in the database and identifies where the keywords appear that you are looking for. The revolutionary thing here is that GenAI helps us search for a specific word but also its meaning,” he adds.
“This allows us to identify the players who, according to experts, have the characteristics that they have keyed in,” he adds.