Virtual coaches and scouting apps: How the AI revolution is transforming football's future
QPR’s relegation at the end of the 2012-13 season acted as an unlikely precursor of sorts to the introduction of artificial intelligence in football.
At the start of the season, midfielder Esteban Granero arrived amid fanfare from Real Madrid but was unable to halt the club’s drop from the top flight.
He returned to Spain the following season, first on loan with Real Sociedad before joining permanently. While there, he befriended a team analyst, who found himself unsure what to make of the reams of data he had at his disposal.
Granero’s solution was perhaps atypical to that of his peers. “I took the data and started asking clever people about it,” he recalls. “I went to universities and asked professors about artificial intelligence, as I felt could improve data analysis, as in other industries.”
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