The United States Soccer Federation is hoping to recruit players from across the world by using AI to scan video footage of tens of millions of young athletes, joining some college athletic programs that are infusing AI into their recruiting process.
At a Fortune event in Scottsdale, Arizona, this week, US Soccer Federation COO Dan Helfrich — formerly the CEO of the consulting giant Deloitte — declared that AI-assisted scouting represents a “paradigm shift” that will allow US soccer to “scout every single soccer match that a US-eligible player is playing anywhere in the world.”
As Helfrich tells it, AI can effectively allow scouts to be in more places at the same time. Since scouts for the US national team can’t be literally everywhere, a system has emerged in which certain clubs, schools, and regions are prioritized over others, resulting in talented athletes who may be overlooked.
“How do you get your scouts — your humans — to all of those places?” said Helfrich. “You can’t. And so automatically, you’re excluding 99.5 percent of people.” But AI combined with the widespread availability of video footage, argues Helfrich, allows scouts to analyze the play of millions of athletes.
“Video becoming much more widely available for youth sports, and AI — suddenly, we’re reimagining,” said Helfrich, per Fortune.
It’s an interesting prospect, especially for a sport as global as soccer. And if an AI tool helps a gifted athlete get noticed by US Soccer when they otherwise wouldn’t, that’s an undeniably good thing. On the flipside, building a robust talent pipeline that funnels potential stars into national team programs is a challenge that goes well beyond scanning videos from across the web. It’s questionable whether the program US Soccer is using will make for a “paradigm shift,” or whether it’s just another tool in the kit.
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The AI program that US Soccer is using reportedly trained to be able to identify certain attributes about a player’s game — skill level, technique, movements — that the organization believes would suit a specific position.
After Helfrich’s comments to Fortune, US Soccer Federation CEO JT Batson confirmed on the talkSPORT podcast that the national team program is indeed using a “pilot” that leverages AI “for purposes of player identification.”
“It’s something that we’re in the early stages of,” said Batson. “But we’re excited to learn from and figure out, you know, how do we scale that so that way more kids can be truly part of US soccer, and we’re supporting them in their soccer journey — whether they want to play soccer for fun the rest of their life or whether they’re on a pathway to hopefully win us a World Cup.”
“We need to be able to scout way more players in this country,” he added. “And we need to make sure that way more players are a part of our pathways than currently exist today.”
It’s certainly true that talented young athletes across sports have a tough time getting seen, be it by college, professional, or national team coaches and scouts (or all of the above). And while the square mileage of the Earth versus how much time and money sports organizations can budget for recruiting does play a role in which players get a national team nod, pipeline issues also have a lot to do with more fundamental access problems. Do young players have access to quality facilities and quality coaching? Do their families have to break the bank or drive hours away from home, if that’s even an option for them?
AI might help national team scouts cover more digital ground in their quest to source new players. But discovery is only one part of the equation, and an algorithm that finds fresh talent isn’t what gets promising young players on a field in the first place.
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