Could an AI pundit join Neville and Carragher in the Sky studio?

Aida, represented by an avatar of a woman on screen, made her debut during the coverage of AIK’s 4-3 win over Norrkoping at the start of April.

Using Wyscout data, she gives analysis and cues into visualisations and data and is used to complement – rather than replace – the other experts in the studio.

Ida Höglund Persson, Head of Decision Science at Twelve Football, said: “I think it’s very important to say that. She is just going to see things from new angles and using our analysis and our data to see the kind of things that the human eye can’t see.” 

Max producer Marcus Sennewald came up with the idea after seeing Twelve Football’s Earpiece service, which he used to target potential transfers for Swedish clubs.

He told TGG: “[We thought] what if we could do the same thing with all the data we collect from Allsvenskan and create an expert instead of a scout to analyse and find interesting data in a new way.

“It’s our responsibility as a broadcaster to understand and think of ways to explain and present that to our viewers. We thought of this as a fun way to do it.”

When the idea was proposed, Sennewald told Twelve Football that the character of the avatar was the main requirement, rather than how it looked.

“Appearance wasn’t key more than that we wanted Aida to be female and although she looks human, it should be clear that she isn’t.

“The most important thing was to create a personality and language that was engaging. We used the late [academic and public speaker] Hans Rosling as an example, as he was a master of presenting data that was understandable for the people,” Sennewald explained.

During that first match, the host interrupted and asked Aida a question and future development could see her be able to respond and think on her feet when this happens.

“The idea has always been for Aida to be a part of our broadcast when there’s something special to bring to the table, something that our experts or us in the editorial team couldn’t find ourselves. Of course, everything can be improved and it will improve with every opportunity.”

So far, Aida’s analysis is being used a couple of times in the pre-match build-up.

Persson said: “Right now, she is mainly focusing on one team and how they should beat the other team, but nothing is set in stone as to what she will analyse – it will basically be what’s interesting this week.”

She believes this is the first time an AI analyst has been used in a football TV studio and, although Aida’s debut was not long, like many innovations in football it did not meet with universal acclaim.

Persson said: “It’s been very, very stormy in Sweden – everyone is talking about it and everyone is basically hating on her.

“Of course some people like it but, as you know, with football fans and social media it’s always the haters who are commenting.

“The sad part for us is no-one really listened to the analysis, everyone was ‘oh my god what is this?’. They don’t like the fact that it is AI presenting it. Many think a human could read out the text that Aida is reading and they don’t like that she doesn’t look that real.”

Sennewald said they would ignore the critics. “We will continue with Aida,” he said. “She won’t be part of every broadcast, that was never the plan.

“We know it’s controversial, still it’s quite amazing that a two-minute segment of a total of 180 minutes [of coverage] could stir up so many emotions. That’s the beauty of Allsvenskan!”

Persson explained how Twelve Football can turn its data into a watchable presentation from Aida.

“We have the statistics that we get which are very raw. We take them and put them into boring text – just presenting exactly the statistics – and then we tell the large language model to take this boring text and write it in a way that is engaging for fans and possibly for an AI expert to present on TV. Then it outputs a text that will be the one that we give to Aida to say.

“Everything that we do is in English. We have also developed a translate function where we translate everything to Swedish, which takes some work since all the metrics which are established in English don’t really exist in Swedish!”

Twelve Football is already thinking about expanding how Aida can be used in football coverage.

“We will develop her analysis in the way that in the future we would like to do live analysis so that she could say in half-time, for example, what a team should do in the next half. We also think that the more people see this, the more people [will] want AI presenting data.”