England haven’t been football World Champions since 1966, and are looking at every avenue that can give them an edge to end their long drought in North America next year.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used in almost every facet of human endeavour and the Three Lions are banking on it to turn from contenders to winners.
From taking penalties to tactical decisions to looking after players’ wellbeing, the decision-makers are determined to leave nothing to chance, BBC Sport reports.
Penalty shootouts have given England a lot of grief over the years, as they have often bowed out of World Cups or European Championships. Even at Qatar 2022, in the quarterfinal against France, Harry Kane missed a late penalty in the near-miss.
“AI can show certain tendencies for where opposition players put their penalties that we probably weren’t thinking of,” explains Rhys Long, the Football Association’s head of performance insights and analysis.
“When we get to a World Cup, we have 47 teams’ worth of information to profile – where has every player in every squad put every penalty since they were 16?”
The new technology has made it possible to collate information much quicker than before.
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“It used to take us five days to collect one team’s worth of penalty-taking information. Using AI, that can now be brought down to about five hours. Then that becomes a five-minute conversation with our goalkeeper, for five seconds of them hopefully saving a penalty.”
It also helps penalty-takers to do what is required of them.
“There was a diagram up on the board of where you’re more likely to score, then they would give you individualised information on where they think is best for you to go,” Conor Coady, a member of the 2020 Euros and 2022 World Cup, said.
The diagrams are based on what every opposition goalkeeper is likely to do, such as the direction in which they are going to dive, and how each England player prefers to strike the ball.
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Tactics and in-game patterns are areas where AI is being used, and England is one of the countries to have invested heavily in it, and more importantly, the players seem to have bought into it.
“England have a big resource and have heavily invested in this. They have data engineers, data analysts and performance specialists behind the scenes across all their teams from juniors up to senior,” Allistair McRobert, professor of performance analysis at Liverpool John Moores University, was quoted as saying.
Players’ wellbeing, fitness and prevention of injuries are other areas where AI is helping.
“You wake up every morning and as you’re going down to breakfast, there is a wellness area where you fill out a form on an iPad,” Coady said.
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“’How did you sleep? How did you feel this morning? Are you fatigued?’ And then you leave comments on it – maybe ‘my hamstrings are sore from training yesterday’. And then the staff cater for you during the day, in terms of what you need in training, your food, how they set up a session.”