FC Barcelona is giving the beautiful game an AI-powered upgrade.
Last year, the iconic football club started working with Qloo, a personalized recommendation and data enrichment startup, to better understand its global fan base and optimize player performance both online and on the pitch.
Popular apps or consumer tech like Spotify, Netflix and Expedia are no longer the only companies that need finely tuned personalization and recommendation algorithms, Alex Elias, Qloo’s founder and CEO, told AdExchanger.
One of the big reasons FC Barca brought Qloo on is to provide data enrichment and personalization to places – in the real world and online – where the club didn’t historically have much data to work with.
Peace and Discord
Take social and messaging app Discord.
It’s far less public than Instagram or TikTok, but it’s by far the fastest-growing channel for soccer fandom, said Jordi Mompart, FC Barcelona’s director of research and AI. “And we need to understand what’s going on there and how to grow it.”
The first use case Barca wanted help with was being able to associate fans on Discord with their preferences: how they watch games, for example, what brands or products they wear or use, their taste in entertainment.
Qloo has a tool called Taste AI that provides real-time data on fan behaviors and interests, which FC Barcelona can use to analyze audiences by language, nationality and contextual data.
But it’s not just private online apps and forums where Barca’s fan base is expanding.
The club actually has “five times more fans in Indonesia than in Spain,” Mompart said.
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FC Barcelona also uses Qloo’s AI to personalize content for fans in other regions based on their language, taste and preferences, including running a TikTok and Instagram challenge between December and March that let fans engage directly with players.
From viewers to players
But there are other applications with perhaps even more importance to the club overall than fan engagement and media use cases, Mompart said.
For instance, FC Barcelona is also using Qloo to analyze its players, facilities and scouting capabilities.
AI technology is being seized upon by many sports organizations as a way to improve the health and preparation of athletes, Mompart said.
For example, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently shared that the NBA convened an expert panel that will use AI to study the sudden increase in Achilles tendon injuries in the league this year. There were seven bad on-court tendon ruptures this season – and zero last year.
Why the sudden increase? Seven is, by far, the highest number of Achilles tendon injuries in a single season.
The NBA plans to feed all of its footage into a generative AI service to try and understand what might connect those incidents and help the league ensure those ruptures are back to being a once-in-a-blue-moon type of injury.
FC Barcelona doesn’t have a sudden rash of injuries to understand. But it’s also planning to use AI tech to improve player performance, health and fitness by looking at training and game tape, nutrition info and even biomedical data from players who consent to the data collection.
Qloo’s generative AI solution should help the club’s teams train for specific opponents – whose tape will also be reviewed by the AI model.
According to Elias, FC Barcelona’s embrace of AI tech and its cross-pollination of marketing with other enterprise business solutions is typical of the new category of AI and personalization or mar tech services.
Qloo itself was traditionally sold into the CTO org within a business, Elias said, but increasingly that’s expanded to the CMO suite.
Media and marketing groups are often early adopters of emerging tech. “There’s been more of a convergence between technology and marketing that has come to the fore,” he said.
