Revolutionizing player analysis with AI, a new approach is unlocking the psychology of elite footballers, providing insights into emotional control and leadership.
In recent years, football has become increasingly reliant on data to demonstrate physical attributes. However, assessing a player’s psychological qualities, such as emotional control and leadership, remains a challenging task.
Traditional analysis often focuses on counting the number of times players gesture or talk to each other on the pitch. While this provides some insight into their mental state, it only scratches the surface of what is happening on the pitch.
Yaw Amankwah, a former top-flight defender in Norway and Denmark, is at the forefront of a new approach to analyzing player behavior. By using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze thousands of hours of match footage, Amankwah and his team have developed a proxy ranking system that can identify players’ psychological strengths and weaknesses.
Amankwah believes that subtle nonverbal cues, such as body language and posture, can reveal a great deal about a player’s mental state. For example, ‘a player who blasts a 20-yard shot into the stands and receives a consoling pat on the back from a teammate is demonstrating quiet leadership.’
Over the past six years, Amankwah has worked with psychology professor Geir Jordet to analyze thousands of hours of match footage. The result is a dataset containing over 100,000 unique observations, which provides clubs with a benchmark for evaluating player behavior.
The data can demonstrate whether a defender’s emotional control is in the top 5% of players in the league or highlight red flags. ‘This new approach opens up a ‘new world’ of possibilities for clubs,’ Jordet believes, ‘allowing them to make more informed decisions about player selection and recruitment.’
Several leading clubs, including Bayern Munich and Brighton, have trialed the platform, employing the technology during Julian Nagelsmann’s time as head coach. Max Pelka, a former Bayern psychologist, is now using some of these techniques to analyze Brighton’s players’ on-pitch behavior.
Pelka believes that this new approach can help clubs identify emerging talents and provide a more nuanced understanding of player personalities. ‘Soon, we’ll have very little limit on how many teams we can analyze at any point in time… and then we can actually start to inform clubs about prospective new signings,’ Jordet notes.
