Ahead of their Europa League tie with Crystal Palace, Matt Hardy spoke to TSG 1899 Hoffenheim and SAP about how technology and AI is driving their team.

The last couple of months have been littered with stories of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models going rogue, causing havoc and ignoring their human handlers; much like a superstar striker who refuses to sit in a 4-4-2 formation and park the bus.

Football is embracing technology. Computers and screens are being used to give or strike off goals; data is now firmly embedded in player analysis – in a move that has helped the likes of Brighton and Hove Albion and Hearts – and now Bundesliga side TSG 1899 Hoffenheim are using AI to help in their deadline day recruitment and matchday preparation.

The club take on Crystal Palace in south east London on Thursday, and their head of football intelligence Timo Gross says that their use of technology developed by German software firm SAP – the club’s front-of-shirt sponsor – is aiding them in spotting which weaknesses to target in the struggling Premier League side.

AI driving standards?

“We think about game preparation through a quicker search for clips, different patterns which are then used to really understand the opponent’s movements or patterns,” Gross tells . “Especially for this game, the preparation is still running but it’s in the end phase so we’re ready to get this game running.”

While its main market continues to be the German top flight, SAP’s sport strategy lead Fadi Naoum says that the firm’s Sports One system has undisclosed customers in the Premier League and was used by some national teams at this year’s men’s World Cup. 

But is there a risk of the AI going solo and modelling itself based on rival data? Could one club use its systems as if it was its opponent and unlock an advantage? The answer is rather boring, if not reassuring, sadly.

“We are very strict when it comes to the GDPR, security and privacy,” Naoum says. “Why all the Bundesliga and our customers trust us is because we have for every club its own system – there is no cross-data, it’s up to the club what kind of data you feed the system.”

The growing use of technology in sport has some fans worried, and Gross admits that AI “will change the whole landscape of job profiles” at Hoffenheim and beyond. He talks through a scenario whereby the SAP technology is used during a transfer window to identify potential signings, injury replacements and to do last-minute reconnaissance on a player who has arrived into the transfer mix close to the deadline.

Patterns and behaviour

Their use of AI not only allows for the analysis of player patterns – shots, dribbles, chances taken and the like – but behaviours too. “You can think about body language, data points which weren’t there but now you have it as a side product,” Gross adds. But it won’t see human scouts replaced entirely.

“The data is then connected to an action to give actionable insight,” Gross, who joined Hoffenheim as an intern in 2013, says.

“This is where the validation process with a human being is also in place, but with the help of AI, everything is more efficient and more to a level that we have questions to ask which we didn’t before.”

It was inevitable that sport would eventually need to embrace the technologies that are going to power much of the world’s business sector across the next century. And while Artificial Superintelligence is unlikely to have much influence on players – they’re human beings after all, for now at least – Artificial General Intelligence will likely be adopted.

Naoum describes the sporting sector as a “lighthouse for presenting actual technology” to the wider industry. So the chances are the football pitch could become an industry leader for the future of AI and technology, if it hasn’t already.