One of the panels, moderated by Carlo De Marchis, a tech executive and long-time advisor to some of the world’s biggest football clubs, featured Alejandro Ugarrio, Director of Innovation at Club Atlético de Madrid, and Ben Mirvis, Business Development Manager at WSC Sports. Their conversation centered on the partnership between the two companies and what fans can expect to see from their respective work in the future.
Ugarrio heads Atletico Madrid’s newly formed innovation department, Atleti Lab, which helps other teams within the organization reach their goals with innovative new technologies. The club’s motto, “Another way of living,” is something he says is part of the DNA of the team.
For Ugarrio, introducing WSC Sports has freed up the content team to work on more creative endeavors instead of spending their time manually clipping highlights from every match. His team has been testing other applications of AI, including stream-lining monotonous tasks, like automating some of the development team’s reports.
When it comes to the content team, he said that the implementation and use of the tool was a success from the outset.
The content team was really happy because the software gives them a lot of options to create different types of content. Now, after using it, we’ve come up with new innovative projects, like using the technology to analyze historic footage from our archive.”
For clubs, Mirvis explained that content is one of their most important assets. Being able to 100X your organization’s content output not only helps content editors, but also monetization and marketing teams tasked with sourcing advertisers and sponsors. It gives them that much more real estate to work with. Another challenge that clubs are often faced with is a rights embargo on when and where they can post—so also having that content ready to share in just a few clicks is essential.
“Sports clubs are no longer just teams, they’re also media houses,” he said. So we’re providing them with the tools they need to automate some of their content, and tailor it for the different types of fans they have.”
So what can fans expect to see in the future? Ugarrio spoke about continuing to implement technologies that will provide fans with new experiences in their 5-year-old stadium, Riyadh Air Metropolitano. Part of that has been installing HD cameras all over the stadium that allow fans to get a different view of the game, so they’re no longer isolated to a specific section.
For WSC Sports, Mirvis touched on a few interesting use cases being developed in the company’s GenAI department that are focused on producing the next generation of football fans. So things like leveraging existing LLM’s that will allow both the content creator and/or the fan to generate content in kids-friendly formats, like turning athletes into animated characters or inserting personal avatars into the action.
Together, Atlético Madrid and WSC Sports are pushing the boundaries of technology and creativity, ensuring the beautiful game continues to inspire fans from every generation.