Phone cameras outpace field scouts, showing how algorithms redesign Saudi sports talent

Saudi company “Humane”, owned by the Public Investment Fund, presented at the Leaders’ Week conference sessions at Stamford Bridge in London a technological model aimed at reshaping the system for discovering and developing sports talent. The paradox that Richard Felton Thomas, head of operations and sports science at the company, opened his discussion with, summarises the core of the football crisis: a full century of World Cup history has seen only eight countries crowned, and competition has remained confined to a limited set of teams in Europe and South America, despite the expansion to 48 teams in the 2026 edition, the same number planned for the Saudi World Cup 2034. The hypothesis the company starts from is clear: the crisis does not lie in a scarcity of athletic talent, but in the limited traditional scouting tools and the geographic scouts' inability to reach every field and neighbourhood worldwide.

The initiative relies primarily on the “aiScout” platform, which emerged from Humane’s acquisition in February 2025 of the British company ai.io and the launch of “Humane Sport”, where the platform uses computer vision to analyse athletes’ movements from video recorded on an ordinary mobile phone without the need for physical sensors. A young player can film specific drills, such as running, jumping, shooting and passing, with the help of family or friends, and the system analyses the recording, evaluates performance and extracts data that are presented directly to the platform’s partners, including English club Chelsea and the Saudi Arabian Football Federation. The system does not stop at the initial assessment; it integrates with the “aiLab” product to collect motion measurements, monitor sleep and conduct physical strength tests, with the aim of buildinga unified digital recordthat follows the player’s journey from early age stages to professionalism.

These solutions were tested in the field in environments that struggle to cover their talent pools; in Senegal, the company partnered with the International Olympic Committee in preparation for the 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Dakar, distributing tablets to schools that uncovered wrestling, climbing and martial-arts talent among children who were otherwise running or playing football, leading to the selection of 40 athletes for the Senegalese team. The experiment was repeated in India in partnership with the Reliance foundation to sort village talent and provide training scholarships in Mumbai. Despite these results, the company stresses that vision algorithms do not replace the human scout’s judgement, but rather redirect it, and shortening the on-ground selection phase enables specialists to focus directly on promising individuals who would not have been recorded in official registers.

We see in the details of this shift that the real bet does not rest on the app interface, but touches institutional depth as Saudi Arabia prepares for the 2034 World Cup after its national team failed to progress beyond the group stage in the last three editions. Here, Ivan Peric, former adviser to the Saudi Football Federation, explains that the main obstacle was not a lack of talent but the exclusion of under-18 groups from organized qualification pathways before recent reforms, noting that initiatives such as the Mahd Academy and the “Grantify” platform in Jeddah require an intake structure that goes beyond the initial scouting stage. For sports officials and investors in the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant, this transition means thatthe major economic value does not stem from isolated testing applicationsbut from building unified data warehouses that integrate athletes' physical indicators and fan behaviour.

The Public Investment Fund’s strategy, through its “Sarag” arm and statements by sports-investment officials Firas Sharif and Al-Anoud Al-Thunayan, shows that the path is moving toward club governance, training facilities and age-group programmes to generate long-term financial returns. Early detection via phone cameras reduces the high cost of geographic scouting, but it imposes a direct operational challenge on regional clubs and federations: establishing academies capable of absorbing what the algorithms identify. Possessing digital files for thousands of promising players remains without competitive payoff unless it is accompanied by a training system that can turn digital scouting into impactful on-field performance in major tournaments.