Game1, a predictive AI platform for developing and scouting youth soccer players, is expanding its product from Europe to the US.
The app uses a smartphone camera to assess athletes performing a series of athletic and soccer-specific drills. Those results are compared to a half-million datapoints collected from European leagues to identify promising talent while also advising players what skills and physical abilities they should work on.
Developed by Swiss brothers Amir and Yaniv Donath and advised by former NWSL CMO Julie Haddon and RB Leipzig CEO Tatjana Haenni, the first woman chief executive of a Bundesliga club, Game1 previously raised $1.1M and now is seeking another $500,000 as it seeks to grow in the US market.
Game1’s goal, according to Amir, the CEO, is to prioritize future potential over current performance.
Coaches would tell him, “I can see which kid is the fastest or I can see which kid just dribbles by every other kid, but how could I know whether someone who’s good today is going to be a great player in the future?”
“We’re creating a baseline,” Amir said. “There is a certain minimum that you need for your first touch, for your speed, for your ball control. We don’t say that our technology is the best to find the next Messi, but it is very, very good and maybe the best to find any player who can play at a certain level. And that is true across continents, across leagues. The technology is particularly good at not overlooking any player.”
Yaniv, the company’s CTO, added that Game1’s algorithm is intended to help all players, even those who are late developers physically or those defensive players who have fewer opportunities to shine in games. “It’s not really about being cutthroat or anything,” he said. “It’s more about giving second looks.”
Haddon noted that Game1 has the capacity to help both men’s and women’s soccer and then to grow beyond into other sports.
“Every league and club, on both the sporting and business side, is asking how AI can accelerate their talent pipeline and operations,” she said, emphasizing the objective development guidance for players and the precision of talent development for coaches. “Coupled with a strong grassroots infrastructure, that’s a compounding effect that strengthens the sport for generations to come.”
The Donath brothers both played soccer growing up, with older brother Amir admitting that he made his then-4-year-old younger brother be a goalie while he practiced his shooting. But both went on to earn impressive academic and professional credentials: Amir was a McKinsey consultant who later earned an MBA from Stanford; Yaniv is a physics scholar, earning a master’s from Stanford and a PhD from Cambridge.
While at Cambridge using machine learning to understand the beginning of the universe -- Yaniv said Game1 uses similar techniques as he used in cosmology -- he met Petar Veličković, a lecturer who was also a senior scientist at Google DeepMind where he helped develop TacticAI, a tool for Liverpool FC. That, Yaniv said, opened his eyes to the possibilities of applying data in sport, and it soon led the realization that technology is focused primarily at the elite level. (There are some incumbents in the amateur space who compete with Game1, such as ai.io and JuniStat.)
“Actually tracking development was still something that has not been solved,” Yaniv said.
