SAP Sports One is pioneering new frontiers in sports recruitment, working together with elite German football clubs FC Bayern and Hertha BSC to introduce artificial intelligence to the talent scouting process.
In the fiercely competitive world of sports, the right talent can make or break a team’s success. Scouting for this talent, however, can be an arduous and time-consuming task. But what if the process could be streamlined, made quicker, and more accurate through artificial intelligence? Enter SAP Sports One, the groundbreaking solution from SAP, a global leader in business application software. SAP Sports One is a comprehensive sports management platform that aims to use the power of AI for a revolution in the world of sports recruitment.
SAP launched Sports One as a cloud solution back in 2015. The platform covers all sports processes with modules designed to manage everything from team communication, training, and performance monitoring to health and fitness management, recruitment, and match preparation.
The groundbreaking platform is powered by SAP Analytics Cloud and assists sports clubs in evaluating a wide spectrum of data provided by specialist partners. SAP Sports One has proven its mettle, with 12 of the 18 football clubs in the German Bundesliga currently leveraging its capabilities. The solution is not only limited to football but extends to other sports like ice hockey, basketball, and handball.
With a global presence in 19 countries, SAP Sports One has been instrumental in the success of many renowned clubs like FC Bayern and Hertha BSC, TSG Hoffenheim, FC Sankt Pauli (Germany), BSC Young Boys Bern (Switzerland), Genoa CFC 1893 (Italy), Slavia Prague (Czech Republic), Leicester City (England), Vissel Kobe (Japan), and SC Rasta Vechta (Germany, basketball). The platform is also endorsed by the German Football Association Soccer.
The AI Transformation of SAP Sports One
SAP’s Sports One solution now embarks on a new journey with the integration of an AI function for player selection. The collaborative effort with German professional football clubs, FC Bayern and Hertha BSC, resulted in an AI-based automation solution that summarises and analyses talent search reports. (InsideSAP often references articles from websites in other languages to bring you as much information as possible.)
Traditionally, countless recruitment reports generated during a season needed to be manually synthesized by selectors and recruitment managers. This time-consuming task demanded an innovative solution, and the integration of AI into SAP Sports One rose to the challenge. With a single click, sports directors can now access aggregated performance reports and player comparisons, thereby hastening and streamlining the decision-making process.
AI and Language Automation
The AI integration is unique in its ability to consolidate and specifically analyze unstructured data, mostly in natural language. It can take into account different languages and styles of note-taking and writing. The AI employed for recruitment is based on a large language model (LLM) capable of performing tasks in the field of natural language processing (NLP).
The AI’s language model allows for commands to be formulated in natural language, adjusted depending on the language, text length, or target audience. For instance, a scout’s reports, originally in Brazilian Portuguese, can now be automatically generated in German for club management located in Germany.
Co-innovation and the Power of Generative AI
The strength of AI was demonstrated through the co-innovation project with FC Bayern and Hertha BSC. Together, they developed a prototype for the automated summarization and evaluation of recruitment reports in SAP Sports One.
Both FC Bayern and Hertha BSC found immense value in the results achieved through the use of generative AI in SAP Sports One. They acknowledged the considerable time-saving potential, especially during the hectic transfer period. Furthermore, they recognized the potential of creating player comparisons and recruitment report summaries on an ad-hoc basis using generative AI.
SAP Sports One, equipped with AI-powered recruitment reports, is set to be available to customers worldwide in the second quarter of 2024. This revolutionary solution will undoubtedly redefine talent scouting and recruitment in sports, reaffirming SAP’s position as a global leader in business application software.
