Are clubs doing their due diligence on transfers?

"A lot of content is being generated by most athletes – pictures they are putting on Instagram, Tweets, Facebook posts, interviews with clubs websites or other publications, psychological tests they have participated in and so on.

“We can feed this data into Watson and he has the ability to decipher the language, the context and create connections and provide insight. We are working on creating overall sentiments for coaches and scouts that can help them decide whether a player will be passionate enough, whether he will gel with the team, or if he will have any issues of character we are going to have to be aware of.

"We can use Watson to give them that sentiment. We can also look at historical players and try to identify players who are similar from a character perspective.

“One of our experiments is to go through Instagram photos of potential College draft players and map that against team schedule and try to derive insights. If we see pictures of an athlete partying the night before a game on multiple occasions – which involves teaching Watson what partying looks like – that is a sentiment we can communicate to team managers.

“The ultimate goal is to define any small piece of information that could be useful for consideration of a potential signing. There’s a ton of data out there. In the recent NFL draft, a player [Laremy Tunsil] was being picked at a high round and someone dug out a picture of him on social media smoking a bong.

“That could have multiple levels of impact – it could tell you something about the character but also have a huge impact on the overall perception value or organisational value of a club. Those are things you want to look at and see how you want to manage it."

Knowledge is power. If a club is aware of potentially damaging information like this, they are on the front foot and have options - to not sign the player, or to sign them but carry out damage limitation, by getting them to delete the information.

This is something Burnley might have appreciated before they signed striker Andre Gray, who, unknown to them, had posted a series of homophonic tweets while playing for non-League Hinckley United in 2012. The tweets led to widespread condemnation and a four-match FA ban last year.

Farid says: “Among new players there is this general ignorance toward privacy and how data may be used, either for or against people. My 12-year-old cousin puts everything out there, not realising how it may be used in 10 years.”

Probably a warning to us all. Does this potentially risk clubs assembling teams of robots afraid to go ‘off message’ or say anything controversial though?

"There are always the Cantonas and Suarezs of this world," Farid admits. "There are always exceptions. Our goal is not to say there are players you should absolutely not consider, but we want to point out the potential grenades that could have an impact to your team.

“And the masses of data will define if it was an anomaly or routine occurrence. Your behaviours and natural traits are things that are being used every day by every platform. I agree this is a massive ethical area.

"But when you are looking at a player you are hiring someone you could potentially be paying millions of pounds to. If you look at player contracts, there is a lot of discussion around this and even beyond this.

"And I would never say that a signing should be based purely on this data. It should be a part of the decision-making process and not everything."