Ryan O'Hanlon

So if one attacker is dribbling past a defender like five different times and the AI is like weakness detected, I think a coach has already seen that.

So yeah, I have a hard time seeing how there will be real actionable data given just the structure of soccer in real time.

Yeah, so I know I've probably sounded like a, you know, Luddite, nihilistic, we don't, none of this matters person, but I actually do believe that, like,

data can be used to make better decisions in soccer.

I do.

But I think, so the one thing that you've seen change, so soccer is just a very dynamic sport, right?

There's barely any rules, 22 players.

If teams wanted to, they could agree to stare at the ball for 45 minutes and no one could do anything to stop it.

The fans would be booing and the ref would be like, I can't do anything, sorry.

They're just standing around.

But there is an aspect of the sport, corner kicks, throw-ins, set pieces, that does sort of start to resemble American sports a lot more, mainly because the game comes to a halt, the players can discuss what they're going to do, and the coach, if he wants to, he can draw up a pre-designed play, right?

You have a corner kick, you can tell the players where they're supposed to run, who's going to set a pick, and sort of data analysis over time has found that this is a very underexploited area.

Some teams...

have been very good at it without getting worse at other areas of the game.

If you look at Liverpool, who's kind of one of the more sort of smarter teams in the Premier League, they collaborated with Google DeepMind and they created this app where you can kind of show where your players are on the field for a corner kick versus the defense.

And then

the AI-based app will be like, no, actually the positioning of the players, this would lead to a goal slightly more often.

So I think that is like the one area, because it's such an isolated part of the game.

that is prone for AI to potentially add even more value.

But what's happened, both in for good and ill, I would say.