Introduction

Hout Bay United FC is a third-tier team with a thriving academy in Cape Town, South Africa and is a sister club of Fleetwood Town in England and Dubai-based Fleetwood United. 

Hout Bay hosts various tournaments through their Fleetwood Town International Football Academy (FTIFA Cape Town) where they invite clubs from the Southern and East Africa regions. 

Alongside their league games, they use these tournaments to allow their academy players to play against competition from other countries for benchmarking. 

This also helps Hout Bay’s sister club in Dubai to assess the players for trials in the UAE 2nd Division before making it to Europe. 

However, the challenge is that there are no detailed data analytics and insights that support quick and efficient identification of players from such tournaments and league games.

The work carried out

As part of the FTIFA Easter Cup, TALNETS AG partnered with Hout Bay United to support their tournament with data analytics. 

Hout Bay United was already recording the matches of the tournament using Veo AI cameras and wanted to provide more value to the competing teams by providing player-focused analytics, digital player profile cards and highlights reels.

Implementation

This was both on-site and remote. The purpose of the on-site engagement was more for project management purposes due to the number of clubs Hout Bay United was hosting. 

We were able to advise on such things as Veo camera positioning for optimum video quality for the TALNETS AG AI platform capturing the players during the match. The player profile cards and analysis were done remotely through access to the match videos.

Outcomes

In addition to having recordings to share with the participating teams, Hout Bay United was for the first time able to provide added value through 150+ player profile cards created with TALNETS AG. 

As a talent developing and selling club, they were able to use the TALNETS AG platform to run detailed player analysis and highlight reels for a player that was subject to a loan transfer. 

TALNETS AG was able to benchmark this player with its Category 4 partner clubs in its ecosystem in Europe. This matched the club where the player was being sought for a temporary loan move ahead of a permanent move to Fleetwood Town FC in England. 

Overall, the use of TALNETS AG analytics and highlight reels, reduced the process of player assessment by almost 80%.