The Euro Cup final against England on July 14 was also Spanish international Jesús Navas’s last appearance for his country. With the win in Berlin, La Rojas gave the perfect send-off to the 38-year-old—the lone survivor from the Spanish squad that last won the Euro Cup in 2012, and the only one left from the Iker Casillas-led side that won the FIFA World Cup in 2010.
While it is curtains on Navas’s international career, he continues to play for La Liga side Sevilla FC. In May, Sevilla announced that the defender had renewed his contract until December 31. After retiring from the field, Navas will serve the club for life.
For all you know, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) could have a role to play in choosing Navas’s replacement at Sevilla, as the club has a proprietary platform called Scout Advisor to sift through reports filed by scouts who fan out across the world to spot and funnel fresh talent into the club’s system.
The club’s Chief Data Officer Elías Zamora was in Kochi on July 11-12 for India’s first GenAI conclave, jointly hosted by IBM and the Kerala government. Zamora is an unlikely figure in the footballing world, as he is a maths nerd among jocks—a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Sevilla.
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“Elias is a pioneer who thought how can I bring GenAI into sports, especially football,” said Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president (Products), IBM Software. “And now everyone is trying to do the same. And, decoding a scout’s slang is not easy. For example, an excellent forward is sometimes called a ‘tank’. I didn’t know that word meant forward, I thought it meant some sort of tank. But, using GenAI, Elias and team have completely transformed, optimised and automated the process.”
Zamora said, “(Scout Advisor) was not about using AI, but about having the right question and finding the right methodology to solve it. In this case, it ended up being AI. At Sevilla FC, we had been generating a lot of data in the last five years. We had a lot of numerical and categorical data. And we built our own tools to analyse this data
“Numerical looks at how many minutes a player played, how many passes came from him and so on. Categorical looks at his main position, which was his last team, how tall is he and so on. Our systems were good enough to analyse this.
“But we are also known for our scouting system. Scouts send us reports in free language. We got (three lakh) such reports in the last five years; a million in the last ten or 15 years. Who can read through this and get systematic information from it? It is impossible.”
He said that Scout Advisor, which is powered by IBM’s watsonx platform, came in here. “For example, the centre forward or the tank,” he said. “You are looking for a strong player who can play with his head, who can retain central defence, who can generate second opportunities…. Scout Advisor helps us refine what we are looking for, and then picks out the report that has a player with the characteristics we are looking for. In this case, artificial intelligence allowed us to better use human intelligence.”
Zamora added that technology had changed scouting in other ways, too. For example, though Sevilla’s 15 scouts still visit 50 or more countries, a good scout with a wide network often receives videos of potential players, in addition to having access to local matches that are telecast in any corner of the world. He clarified that the club was not using AI to predict the result of a match.