How AI is discovering athletes that human scouts miss | Richard Felton-Thomas (re-release)

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When you picture sporting greatness, who comes to mind? Lebron James, Simone Biles, or Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Killian Mbappe?
With the World Cup final coming up soon, all eyes are on the biggest names in soccer, or football, depending on where you live. The players who made it all the way to the world stage. But sports scientist Richard Felton-Thomas is interested in the talent we might miss.

**Richard Felton-Thomas** (0:37)
One thing that's commonly overlooked is that they got an opportunity and were visible. See, talent exists everywhere. It's finding the talent that can be the challenge.

**Elise Hu** (0:46)
Richard studies biomechanics or the science of motion, and he's using AI, computer vision, and smartphones to rethink how young athletes get discovered. Which raises a question I'll admit I really hadn't thought about before hearing this talk. What does AI have to do with sports equity?
Because for all the romance of being scouted, the reality, he says, is a lot more limited. Who gets noticed can depend on access, geography, gender, money, or just being in the right place at the right time.

**Richard Felton-Thomas** (1:16)
What if we took all this lab protocols, all the data, all the equipment, and put them to a set of standardized smartphone drills? Any kid, anywhere in the world, could be tested fairly and equitably.

**Elise Hu** (1:29)
Richard is exploring how technology might help make athletic talent more visible, not just in the places we already know to look, but everywhere. That's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Richard Felton-Thomas** (1:48)
Now, I'm going to start by getting you to visualize sporting greatness. And what do you see? It's probably athletes like LeBron James, Cailin Clarks, Saquon Barkley, Simone Biles, Ronaldo, Messi.
You see, we tend to think of athletes from quite a small subset of countries. So I'd forgive you for thinking that the best talent in the world just comes from those places. That's not strictly true.
Because talent existed long before their sporting greatness. And many things have to happen along the way for them to realize their potential. Now one thing that's commonly overlooked is that they got an opportunity and were visible.
You see, talent exists everywhere. It's finding the talent that can be the challenge. So how do we do that? Now typically, that's scouting. It's every young athlete's dream to be scouted. You see the old guy up in the bleachers, writing his notes, and late, you get the call. He wants you to try out. It's a thrilling fantasy for so many people. There's only so many scouts. Now I'm from the UK, where Chelsea Football Club have one of the most prestigious, well-funded youth academy programs in the world.
But each Premier League team or each Premier League scout can only see about 2,000 players per year, but millions play the game.
And even from those 2,000, it's already super limited by the players' geography, their cost factors, their access factors. Lots of young people are now taking that into their own hands. They're uploading social media clips of their best plays online. But now we've just replaced a human with an algorithm that's not designed for talent ID to decide who gets seen. What do we do about that? It's simply not possible for a university football club to see every talent in the world.
Or is it? You see, there's technologies now, like computer vision, AI and deep learning, that are helping us bridge that gap.
Now personally, I'm not a scout or a coach. My route was biomechanics, which is the science of motion. And like many people in my profession, we work in sports laboratories or with clubs, with a remit of improving athlete performance or reducing injury risk. And I was working in my lab that one day, my now founder and CEO, Darren Perry, walked in with his son, Reef, who was struggling with an injury. And we started analyzing him with all this wonderful equipment.
And we got talking about the scouting problem. And he noted just how unfair and biased scouting could be. He'd seen it himself. Entire futures could be decided in one day by one person who has an opinion. He noted how completely devoid of data youth scouting can be. And he said to me, what if we took all this lab protocols, all the data, all the equipment, and put them to a set of standardized smartphone drills so any kid anywhere in the world could be tested fairly and equitably? For me, it was a brilliant vision to a genuine problem. So I joined his team, ai.io, where we build AI-based solutions across all of sport.