Aleel Samal and Ashish Kumar Parida, final year B.Tech students at NIT Rourkela, Odisha, have been declared as the global winners in the ‘Football Hackathon – Data-Driven Players Performance Assessment’. In addition, the team formed by graduated Andalusian engineers and mathematicians lvaro Beltrán, Sergio Cabezas and Francisco Ruiz received the highest score among participants from Spain.
The hackathon, held in early June, was organized by one of India’s most exciting youth football clubs, FC Bengaluru United, and their international partner, Spanish football giant Sevilla FC. A global-first initiative jointly organized by two football clubs, the Hackathon presented a unique opportunity to effectively use data science in the fields of professional football scouting and player performance analysis.
Sevilla FC in association with FC Bengaluru United gives participants access to one of the world’s largest proprietary scouting datasets – physical, contextual, kinematical, technical and tactical oriented data relating to players, teams and their opponents.
The hackathon aimed to leverage this data as a strategic asset to help break down, understand and evaluate player performance, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the quality of both Sevilla FC and FC Bengaluru United squads. The online hackathon was launched on 10 June in Bengaluru by the leadership team of Sevilla FC and FC Bengaluru United during the Spanish club’s inaugural visit to India.
A total of 4695 teams from all over the world registered for the three-day hackathon, with maximum participation from India. Participants from Spain, Nigeria, USA, UK, Germany, Canada, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil, France and Kenya were also part of the competition. Living up to its name of ‘Tech Capital of India’, Bengaluru had the highest participation from India, while seven Indian teams made it to the global top 10.
Expressing his excitement over winning the hackathon, Ashish while pursuing his biomedical engineering said, “Both Aliyal and I are huge football fans. And on top of that, it was a competition organized by FC Bengaluru United and Sevilla FC, both major football clubs. I feel strongly that such cooperation between European football clubs and India It will provide new global opportunities and technological challenges for experts in India and around the world. This will lead to the development of new ideas in this particular area. And we all knew that when talent meets opportunity, great results are inevitable. ,
Talking about the uniqueness of this hackathon, Ayal from the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Science, NIT Rourkela said, “This hackathon was unique in that it had certain constraints related to feature engineering within which we had to work. Features of working with those constraints. We’ve learned a lot of new techniques to deal with these kinds of problem statements.”
Expressing happiness over the success of this football hackathon, FC Bengaluru United owner Gaurav Manchanda said, “We were really amazed by the interest shown in the hackathon in India and globally. The use of data analytics to provide granular insights is gaining prominence in sports and football is no exception. Football is a sport that generates tremendous passion, and it was truly enlightening to see that enthusiasm marry with technological ingenuity as part of a genuine interest in providing data-related solutions. One of our long-term partnership goals with Sevilla FC is to work on projects that address technological innovation and the hackathon was in perfect alignment with that. India has lived up to its reputation as the global tech capital and you can be sure that more such hackathons will be organized by FC Bengaluru United and Sevilla FC in the near future.
Adding to Gaurav’s thoughts, Dr. Ilyas Zamora, Chief Data Officer, Sevilla FC, said: “The participants in the hackathon have developed machine learning algorithms, which have helped us gain a better insight into the key factors that evaluate players. While impressing our scouts. from different positions. A well-defined spectrum of position-dependent contextual, physical, kinematic and critical functions explains to some extent the opinions of our football experts on a given player’s performance. The results obtained at the hackathon have really fueled our department’s research line, oriented towards the identification of the fundamental performance components of football players. I truly believe that the information received during this event will have an impact on the formation of the Sevilla FC team in the next season.
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