New Rules of the Game: AI Takes the Soccer Field
Sber AI, Sberbank’s artificial intelligence team, has outlined how AI could help soccer coaches. The team held a conference on the use of generative AI, computer vision and big data technologies in soccer.
More than 80 sports professionals attended the event, along with executives and coaches from regional partner schools participating in Futbolnoye Budushcheye (Football Future), a joint project of PFC CSKA and Russia’s Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), as well as scouts, analysts and medical professionals.
From Video Analysis to Athlete Health Monitoring
Sber AI presented several key products designed for coaching and club management. They include a service for viewing, clipping and organizing match video, helping coaches analyze passages of play and create training materials. Another solution is designed for training planning and calendar management. A separate service monitors athletes’ health, collecting and visualizing data from wearable devices and giving coaches and medical staff access to key metrics through a single interface.
One of the biggest questions facing any sports management team is who makes the roster. Sber has developed a dedicated player-search tool for that purpose. It helps scouts and sporting directors evaluate and compare players using statistical data.
Mutual Benefits
The partnership between Sberbank and PFC CSKA benefits both sides. The club gains effective tools for managing its operations, while Sber AI gets an opportunity to test and refine its technologies based on feedback from people using them in practice.
“The Futbolnoye Budushcheye project gives us an opportunity to bring AI tools directly into the work of youth coaches, helping them analyze the training process, receive objective feedback and make better-informed decisions. At the same time, our dialogue with coaches helps us improve our products, making them genuinely useful for Russian soccer and the development of young athletes,” said Semyon Budyonny, managing director and head of advanced technology development at Sberbank.
Professional collaboration among the partner schools, the Sber AI team, PFC CSKA and ASI helps improve digital services and create products that respond directly to coaches’ current needs.
But the main goal of the partnership is to improve the training of Russian athletes and help them achieve stronger results. Joint projects can give coaches in the regions access to the software, methodology and analytics they need, while high-quality training delivered with CSKA’s direct involvement can improve the development of young soccer players. AI offers real advantages in sports, and those advantages are there to be used. A new generation of coaches is already prepared for this shift and is waiting for new digital tools.
“A modern coach has to be not only a mentor and psychologist, but also a data analyst. The technologies presented today will naturally complement human experience with digital logic: computer vision sees the game, AI tools evaluate it, and a wise coach brings it all together into a winning strategy,” said Nina Dobrynchenko, project director at ASI.
Five Minutes From Full Digital Transformation
The Futbolnoye Budushcheye project aligns with the Russian government’s plan for the digital transformation of physical education and sports through 2030. The plan calls for a unified digital environment, electronic athlete passports, a system for analyzing industry data and stronger digital skills among sports professionals.
All of this requires a technological foundation, and Sber AI is already supplying parts of it. Some of its latest technologies have recently been put to the test, including video analytics based on ordinary cameras. In July this year, Sber AI and CSKA unveiled a technology for long-term identification of soccer players from footage captured by a single camera. The solution is designed to lower the cost of analytics and make it accessible to regional clubs.
Russian technologies could also find customers abroad. Russia can offer foreign clubs, leagues and sports academies systems for video tracking, automated statistics collection and scouting. In 2025, K2Tech solutions were already used to analyze matches at the Media Football League Super Cup in Abu Dhabi, demonstrating that Russian sports AI products can be deployed beyond the domestic market.
In the near term, the technologies presented at the conference are likely to be introduced at CSKA partner schools, alongside the creation of a unified methodological framework and the integration of video analytics with training calendars and wearable-device data. If their effectiveness is confirmed, the Sber AI solutions could eventually be extended to other sports.
