FA Leverages Google Cloud AI to Spot Future England Football Stars

The excitement is building as we approach Euro 2024, the prestigious international football championship that UEFA hosts every four years. For the Football Association (FA), England's football governing body, this tournament represents the peak of years of meticulous planning and research. While England's Manager Gareth Southgate and his squad are set on clinching the trophy this summer, the FA is also strategizing on how to discover the next generation of England's football stars. To aid in this mission, they've enlisted the help of Google Cloud technology.

England's future football talents are monitored by a dedicated network of scouts. These scouts produce detailed reports filled with textual data that document a young player's progress over time. The real challenge is to sift through thousands of these reports and create meaningful summaries that highlight a player's development journey. Without this, there's a chance that potential stars might be missed, buried in the vast archives.

Since 2019, the FA has been collaborating with Google Cloud, utilizing BigQuery, their data warehouse solution, to consolidate their data and streamline their processes. This partnership has laid the foundation for extracting valuable insights from a wealth of untapped information, including scouting reports.

Now, the FA and Google Cloud are taking their collaboration a step further by integrating generative AI into talent identification. With Vertex AI, Google's machine learning platform, the FA's historical scouting reports are being transformed into succinct summaries, distilling years of accumulated knowledge.

This AI-driven approach offers several benefits:

• Quick Player Evaluation: Coaches and scouts can instantly grasp a player's development path.
• Enhanced Context: By concisely capturing subjective scout assessments over time, this method provides a different angle compared to more objective, data-driven sources.
• Consistency and Reliability: Each scouting report captures a moment in time through the eyes of an individual scout. By merging and condensing these reports, variations in individual perceptions are balanced out, offering a more comprehensive view of a player's performance.

The initial phase of this scouting project shows great promise. Moving forward, these technological advancements could revolutionize talent scouting and player development, ensuring a bright future for English football and beyond.