Innovation Award
AiSCOUT
Any boy or girl that has kicked a football as a child has dreamt of one day lifting the FA Cup, or winning the league in front of thousands of adoring fans.
But, aside from the requisite skills, the one thing that stands in their way, is being spotted.
The AiSCOUT platform is revolutionising the opportunities for aspiring players, scouts and clubs, using AI to find amateur footballers globally, through a mobile phone.
And it really works…
Outstanding beta & MVP testing resulted in 77 amateur players being trialled & signed for professional football clubs, as well as being selected for national squads – 47 of these players trialling in 2022 alone. The player and scout app has been proven to deliver 100% efficiency gain for scouts, as well as uncovering talent that simply would never have been found using traditional methods.
AiSCOUT is being successfully used by professional clubs including Chelsea FC, Burnley FC, and amateur players in 125 countries.
In September 2022, AiSCOUT was signed by Chelsea FC as its Official Academy Recruitment Partner, with the platform to become an integral part of the club’s recruitment and scouting process for academy players over the next five years.
Bristol Rovers FC
Bristol Rovers became Bristol Razors, as players, coaches and club staff shaved their heads in support of defender Nick Anderton, who was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer, in October 2022. To raise awareness and funds for Nick, we engaged in a variety of activations, from events, national media appearances and setting up a GoFundMe, which currently stands at more than £44,000.
DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga
The technological speciality of our international Bundesliga 2 production is based on three topics: cost-effective cloud-based remote production in the AWS Cloud, automatization, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). DFL media partners, and therefore international fans, now have access to ready-to-air live stream signals of all 306 Bundesliga 2 matches per season. Amongst others, viewers of ESPN+ in the USA, Viaplay in Scandinavia and OneFootball in Brazil have benefitted from the upgraded live stream. The success of this solution is clear: international broadcasts of Bundesliga 2 matches have almost doubled (+98%) and international reach has almost quadrupled (+189%), compared to the previous season. With our integrated business model and extensive experience in media production, the DFL is not content to only produce the highest quality of live sport. In fact, innovations are constantly tested and – if they prove successful – are quickly adopted into series production. The collaboration between the DFL’s specialised subsidiaries, such as Sportcast, Sportec Solutions and DFL Digital Sports, is key to success.
Hawk-Eye Innovations
Hawk-Eye’s Semi-Automatic Offside Technology (SAOT) is the world’s first optical tracking innovation that detects the precise location of the ball and individual player in real-time so that officials, fans and more can see the exact moment an offside incident occurred in a state-of-the-art virtual replay of the event.
Hawk-Eye’s SAOT offers a new level of technological intricacy and accuracy that no other provider can, impacting the game of football, broadcasters and fans alike all over the world.
Match officials can use the system as part of the VAR process to support offside decisions in live major football matches. The state-of-the-art replays are then made available to the broadcasters, commentary teams and big screens in-venue for clarity to all fans and viewers watching at home.
Through its seamless integration with officiating and production workflows, the system makes the game significantly faster, ensuring less broadcast air-time wasted and a reduction in extra time due to officiating decisions. What could have previously taken minutes, now takes seconds!
Hibernian FC
As one of the biggest Football Clubs in Scotland, it was identified that our match day hospitality and catering had not been refreshed nor upgraded for several decades Inspiring to be the leading club in Scotland off the pitch in a number of areas, the summer of 2022 saw the Club undertake a complete refurbishment of our matchday hospitality offering for the 2022/23 Season When reflecting on how these six new match day hospitality offerings have performed overall since launch, there can be no playing down of the success of the project Of the over 800 covers available each match day, 580 now belong to seasonal members With the remaining covers being sold on match-by-match basis, the new offering has been completely sold-out at every game of the 2022/23 season In comparison to previous seasons, this has seen the number of hospitality guests at Easter Road increase by over 55% each match day which has in turn seen profits increase by over 100% We are immensely proud to have improved the level of matchday hospitality at Easter Road by such drastic proportions over such a demanding length of time
Hoof
hoof is the ground-breaking social media platform to be the first of its kind dedicated solely to football.
The platform is taking a stand against big social media with a zero-tolerance approach to online hate and discrimination following a rise in digital abuse throughout the game.
An abusive language auto-rejection system and a dedicated moderation team is at the
foundation of hoof’s proactive, preventative approach to any form of intolerance with the guarantee to ban accounts found to be posting discriminatory content.
Unique content creation tools, including in-depth statistics, curated topic feeds on the
biggest talking points and database-powered graphics, are all available to users to not only fuel unrivalled discussion and produce innovative posts, but ensure that the conversation never stops.
In addition to content creation, users can also follow the action across a variety of divisions around the world all in one place with hoof’s live league tables, fixture lists, game statistics, minute-by-minute match updates and commentary.
Available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, hoof is the new home of online football.
The FA: England Football X Fifty Digital
In 2021, The FA created England Football. A public-facing brand with an ambition to link the grassroots game to England’s elite. The goal? To build the ultimate grassroots community to drive widespread UK participation across all forms of the game. From casual players and spectators, to referees and volunteers.
Armed with a logo and a vision of ‘creating chances for everyone,’ we built a fresh brand with a clear personality and a meaningful social community.
From a standing start, we’ve grown the England Football brand significantly. Achieving 53% unprompted awareness among English audiences and a 16% increase in football participation.
We did this using a mix of football culture, reactive moments, platform innovation, community outreach and grassroot programme activations. Key to our growth and success was creating an engaged audience of players and clubs and we have seen a marked increase in engagement across platforms.
WSC Sport
WSC Sports’ proprietary AI and machine learning technology is revolutionising the way teams, leagues and broadcasters create content and engage their footballing fanbases.
Utilizing advanced AI technology, the WSC Sports platform automates the creation and distribution of sports highlights for 300+ rights holders, including global soccer clients, such as LaLiga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Premier League Productions, UEFA, the English FA and Italian Football Federation.
During 2022, WSC Sports continued to innovate its industry-leading product and pioneered a partnership with Google to automatically publish video stories in real-time to the top of Google Search – the most valuable real estate on the internet – during live matches.
WSC Stories – the proposition developed for Google integration – was utilized most prominently during the FIFA World Cup when more than 20 broadcast partners benefitted from the reach and engagement associated with having video content posted directly to the most popular search destination on the web.
WSC Sports has consistently delivered incredible results for its football clients by significantly increasing the volume of video shared on social, owned and operated channels which has, in turn, universally delivered greater reach and engagement than ever before, alongside major uplifts in social followings and monetization opportunities.
