Imagine a world where anyone on the planet can compare their football skills directly to professional or academy players, enticing scouts to watch them and sign them up to Premier League sides.
Step forward Darren Peries. Darren isn’t a football man – ice, hockey, actually – but his sons are. His oldest so much so that he was in Tottenham’s academy until he was released five years ago.
Naturally, a parent wants the best for their child. Darren’s son wanted to be a footballer, so Darren would do what it takes for that to happen.
‘He’s a very successful businessman,’ Richard Felton-Thomas says, smiling, as he describes Darren, his business partner, exclusively to Mail Sport. ‘But he didn’t have a clue. He didn’t know any of it.’
Scouts got in contact – as they would – to see if they could snap up a young talent coming out of one of the best academies in the country. And Darren learnt quickly. Quickly to help his son, and quickly enough to build a business named ai.io that is changing the football and scouting industry.
ai.io is helping change the face of football scouting with an app that allows anyone in the world to compare their skills to professional and academy players
Richard Felton-Thomas (left) spoke exclusively to Mail Sport to explain how the system works
It was founded by Darren Peries (left), a businessman who wanted to help his son achieve his dream of becoming a footballer
‘In the pro world, you sign players now with lots of data,’ Richard continues. ‘In the grassroots world, it’s basically non-existent. That intrigued him enough to find out how players like his son, regardless of being in the right place at the right time, can prove to scouts beforehand that they’re worth their time. That’s what started the idea. He then found my sports science lab.’
Richard’s bread and butter is sport science. He sells equipment to professional leagues all around the world.
‘He asked me if we could put all the data in a mobile phone so anyone in the world can generate this data,’ he says. ‘Five years on, we’ve done it.’
But how? It feels obvious, making it easier for the players and the scouts, benefitting all parties. ‘We built an expert team across lots of different industries,’ Richard adds. ‘Data analytics, AI, the business side of things, the sport science side, the coaching side. A lot of the team weren’t football experts.
‘We took industry experts to approach grassroots recruiting in a different way. Sometimes we fall into a bottle, and we only see what’s inside the sport, so having people outside the sport who are experts in different fields that know they can apply that solution from their field into this one is good.
‘I always ask myself why it didn’t it happen 10 years ago. Sometimes the best ideas are a bit like that. Football is the biggest sport in the world. A lot has worked well, but you can get caught in the bubble and not think outside the box. We can do it another way. It maybe had to be non-football people to find that solution.’
The footballing people are well on board now. Some mega partnerships have formed and more than 150 clubs are on the waiting list to access the app, AiSCOUT, ahead of a bigger launch before the new football season.
Todd Boehly’s Chelsea was one of the first clubs to form a partnership, one Felton-Thomas is extremely grateful for
Players could end up featuring for Mauricio Pochettino after being scouted through the app
Chelsea were one of the first partners, taking a chance on AiSCOUT in its early days, and they’ve reaped the rewards.
Others are now clambering over each other to get involved, with 78 players signed to clubs and academies because of the technology, including Burnley’s Jez Davies and Bournemouth’s Ben Greenwood, who was identified through the platform by Chelsea and invited to trial with them before signing for The Cherries.
‘We were very lucky to get Chelsea as an early research partner,’ Richard says. ‘They’ve been with us from day one and really believed in what we were doing. They really opened the door to speak to their scouts and coaches.
‘Then in the research and scientific world we work with great partners like Loughborough University London and Kingston University to validate the metrics. If we say a player is this fast, if we put them in a laboratory with gold standard equipment, do we find the same result? That’s an ongoing process.
‘The three biggest helps overall, you’ve got Chelsea, Burnley, where we did our first launches and put branded drills into the app and that was part of the validation process.
‘There’s an academy called Reliance Foundation, Young Champs in India, and that was a huge validation of completely different territory and quality of mobile phone devices.
‘If we’re saying this is for the world and anyone can be seen, does it work over there? They actually came to us because they had massive issues in the pandemic of being able to scout.
‘Having people in their gardens and fields with just a mobile phone was a huge solution to them.
ai.io have recently partnered with the MLS in what promises to be their biggest deal to date
The app offers access to perform specific drills that can be recorded on their own phone, which is then analysed against other players who have been signed to professional clubs
Since the interview, ai.io have partnered with the MLS in what promises to be their biggest deal yet. From December 2023, clubs across the MLS, MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT will have access to AiSCOUT and aiLabs.
‘We believe this partnership is going to be a real solution to some of the most important issues faced in soccer across North America, namely cost, geography and accessibility,’ said MLS NEXT technical director Fred Lipka of the deal.
‘It’s very different in the US,’ Dylan adds. ‘But they have been hugely valuable, and we are starting to get global teams on board.’
With the app free for players and scouts and clubs having their own software to set criteria and see the data coming through, it appears a seamless process that will move the football world forward. With the product ‘ahead of the curve’, according to Richard, the technology could become to go-to in the next few years.
‘You download it from the app store, you put your profile details in, and can enter trials from there,’ he adds. ‘For your age group, you’ll have a list of drills and you do them while being recorded.
‘All that video then goes into our cloud and comes back with all the scores and gives you some feedback to say how that stacks up in comparison. It’s specific for the teams and it’s that simple. It’s a really nice app, and with the new app we do player development too.
‘It helps the player if they are going to be getting signed when they won’t have otherwise, that’s obvious, but we found there’s a big wall between grassroots and the standard of what’s in an academy.
‘Being able to show players where they are meeting the criteria and where they’re not, there’s some transparency coming through. That’s helped players be more guided of where to trial.
There’s also a partnership with Burnley, with over 150 clubs on the waiting list ahead of a bigger launch before the new season
And the numbers are staggering. A single scout can watch just 2,000 players of 265million that play football world-wide, Richard says. But now everyone has an equal opportunity.
‘If your data is good enough, you will be seen,’ Richard’s bottom line. ‘I think it will become a way of working. You’re just flipping the process. It would be go and watch them, then maybe bring them in and collect data. You can now sweep the net wider and filter into the players you should be watching.
‘You can spread it across multiple sports as well. Maybe someone has played football all their life, but the data says they should go and give basketball a try. Gen Z are connected to their phone.
‘If we can make them want to go and do some exercise with that, we’re probably solving an issue for parents in getting kids out the house. Hopefully it will become a standard process.’
Chelsea, Burnley, the MLS and who knows next. ai.io could well take the football world by storm. Watch this space!
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