The Spanish business Kognia, which developed its own artificial intelligence platform, is one of the innovators in this approach.
Any footballer can mimic the goal celebrations like Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappe, Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, or Lionel Messi, even imitating their likeness in video games.
The power of images is something to which younger generations are exposed for countless hours.
Can we simulate them with the same power of that image?
It is a reality that is growing and is not a condition.
The use of artificial intelligence in football academies has made it possible to enhance and supplement the inherent talent already present.
How?
Learn from the on-field actions of the best players, integrate it, and develop similar responses to similar circumstances.
A player who picks up Haaland’s style of dribbling beyond the defense or dominating space in the penalty area might be “produced.” Haaland is Man City’s leading scorer. Use the opportunity and let instinct take care of the rest.
Even by contrast, it is possible to see how the Norwegian performed on the field at the age of 17 and how the most talented striker from an academy would have conducted himself at that time.
The typical parameters гҽveal their similarity.
Only a few youth training academies are starting to investigate automated tactical analysis of the match created by the startup Kognia as a weapon in this objective.
However certain coaches, like Xavi Hernandez at Barca (La Liga), Unai Emery at Aston Villa (Premier League), or Paulo Sousa at Salernitana, have benefited from this (Serie A).
More than 300 tactical situations involving a player, a line, or the entire team are found in match video by its software-based technology, which then gathers them into visual movies illustrating the tactical notion.
“Nobody in the industry created that automatically ,” In 2008, Maurici A. Lopez-Felip, CEO of Kognia, гevealed to the newspaper El Mundo that he was starting to recognize the possibilities of video analytics in football. At Barcelona, where he was pursuing a degree in sports science and physical activity, he worked with Joan Vila, the former coach of the La Masia academy who is credited with helping Xavi Hernandez develop his standing. For a long time, FC
Barcelona’s head of methodology.
To emphasize the tactical ideas Vila wished to convey to the players in order to help them play better, Lopez-Felip carefully edited the footage.
Even if Kognia’s special tool is beginning to function to some level, training furnaces rarely employ it.
There are clubs like Villarreal (La Liga) that track their entire 11-team system, thereby creating concepts about each player they own. “A great opportunity opened up for the club to be able to work very professionally with the youth academy, with all the information we created through the graphic clip,” said Lopez-Felip.
The system’s creator continued: “Some clubs in Spain, England or Germany have been recording their academy teams for years, even if it’s a low-quality mobile camera. Now they’re starting to get on track, with all the data generated, working with the players and looking for ways to improve. grant it by specific tool”.
This comparison can be with players in action, by age or category in which they participate, with great historical references to ever-sprung from the club’s own academy, or even with past stars.
“If we had enough videos of Andres Iniesta or Fernando Torres when they were young players, we could analyze them and extract all the data from their matches,” argued Lopez-Felip. “That will allow us to compare their movements to compare them to players currently playing in similar positions in the youth teams of Barca or Atletico Madrid.”
It is a pity that there are not many videos of the great stars of the distant past. “The theory is that we could analyze any player, including Diego Maradona if there were videos of his matches in high quality, but in practice that’s not possible.”
In recent years, data analysis (also known as “Big Data” – big data), is relatively popular in football in particular and sports in general. However, most of the new analyzes stop at statistics and comparisons from which to give a reference.
“Until now, sports-related data analytics, barely 20 years old, compares one player to another based on superficial data such as shots, moves, ball recoveries, fouls or distance in a match, but those are not representative,” Lopez-Felip analyzed.
He goes into detail: “We need data on tactical concepts, on how he participates in the game, for example how he creates chances for himself or his teammates, or how he moves in the ring. ban to take advantage of the cross. This is not possible manually, we have provided automatic filtering to be able to meet the needs of the governing bodies and sports engineering.”
FIRST MLS
The US, a nation whose sports are quite accustomed with data analysis, is where the concept of monitoring all grassroots football to regulate every detail first emerged.
Teams from U13 through U17 compete in the Next division of the American Professional Football League (MLS), which was founded with the generation born in 2000.
From there, they concentrated on gathering information from the roughly 10,000 games that are played each season.
It is no аccident that the MLS teams in the United States and Canada, two countries with strong football traditions, currently have a lot of talent from the years 2000 and earlier.
They educate children, send goods to Europe for development, and anticipate hosting the 2026 World Cup along with Mexico.
“I didn’t find a way to do it on a large scale because the staffing and infrastructure costs were not feasible. We could do it because we only needed video to generate all the information they had. needed, assisting them in their analysis and providing them with basic data that their own group of data scientists can process. For example, we do with the Bundesliga,” said Kognia’s CEO .
This is also an explanation for his technology can be deployed earlier in the youth academy of American football than in Europe.
“It’s a league that thinks more about the future and cares a lot about structure ,” Maurici said of the MLS difference. “Probably because of their franchise economic model, where there is no feаr of relegation and a sporting director can work on the long-term project. In Europe, everything is about immediate performance. instantly”.