Sevilla Fútbol Club, based in Seville, Spain, is a prominent team with seven Europa League titles. The club is striving to maintain its competitive edge in talent scouting by leveraging advanced technology. With over 300,000 scouting reports at their disposal, Sevilla FC has partnered with IBM to create Scout Advisor, an AI-driven tool designed using IBM's watsonx and Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B Instruct model.
Elias Zamora, Chief Data Officer for Sevilla FC, explains the role of Scout Advisor: “Scout Advisor uses Llama 3.1 70B Instruct’s advanced natural language processing to bridge the gap between qualitative human insights and quantitative data analysis.” This tool aids in evaluating essential player qualities like attitude and leadership more efficiently than traditional methods.
Previously, recruiters spent extensive hours analyzing player shortlists. Now they can use Scout Advisor to quickly generate AI summaries of players' performances by simply querying the system. The tool integrates human-centric and data-driven approaches in identifying potential recruits.
Scout Advisor is tailored for the soccer industry using IBM’s watsonx and Llama's capabilities to understand specific terms accurately. It enriches queries automatically for precise search results relevant to soccer context rather than irrelevant general-purpose outcomes.
Zamora highlights the choice of Llama 3.1 70B due to its proficiency in text enrichment and summarization, particularly in Spanish. Since adopting Scout Advisor, Sevilla FC has noted improvements such as reduced evaluation times and enhanced talent identification.
Victor Orta, Sporting Director at Sevilla FC states: “This is a revolutionary tool for a football director... In perhaps two minutes, I can get all the information that I need to make a decision.”
Looking ahead, Sevilla FC plans to explore new versions of Llama to further enhance Scout Advisor's functionality as part of their commitment to maintaining a competitive advantage through AI innovation.
