RICHARD GILLIS Moderator
Editor, Unofficial Partner
JAMIE CARRAGHER Former Liverpool and
England defender turned sports broadcaster
ERIK DURM
Ex-Borussia Dortmund, Eintracht Frankfurt & Germany international
NICOLO D’ERCOLE
EVP for Technology & AI, Sportradar
Te opening panel session hosted by Richard Gillis saw Jamie Carragher, Erik Durm and Nicolo D’Ercole explore how the rise of data and artificial intelligence is reshaping the modern game and why, despite rapid technological shifts, the human essence of football remains irreplaceable.
Carragher opened the discussion with a reminder of just how far the sport has travelled. When he made his Liverpool debut in January 1997, he said, “Tere was no conversation about data. Te only data we saw was the match rating in the newspaper the next day.”
Coaches relied on instinct, players relied on what the crowd told them, and the closest thing to performance analysis was the look on a manager’s face. Te arrival of systems like ProZone in the early 2000s represented a seismic leap, even if the first generation of tracking was basic.
Carragher laughed as he recalled teammates gaming the numbers: “Players would start doing pointless runs just to bump their stats. Danny Murphy once ran right across my zone and said, ‘I need to get my numbers up!’” Tese early innovations felt revolutionary, he explained, but they were limited, largely confined to training sessions, and a long way from what we see in elite football today.
For Erik Durm, who came through a generation later, the role of data was transformative in a much more personal sense. His entire career changed after a conversation with Jürgen Klopp at Borussia Dortmund. At the time Durm was a young striker, but
Klopp saw something different in him. “He told me reaching the top as a striker might be difficult - I was maybe too thin. He said, ‘You can sprint, you can run, you recover fast. Let’s look at you as a full-back.’”
With Klopp’s support and the club’s early use of tracking technologies, Durm made the transition far more quickly than either expected, earning his Dortmund debut in 2013 and then a spot in the German national team that won the World Cup the next year.
“It was surreal,” he said. “I didn’t get minutes, but being part of that team - unbelievable.” His main frustration from those years was the delay in receiving performance data: “I always wanted the numbers right after training, but we often had to wait until the next day. Tat’s where AI is huge now - real- time feedback.”
Nicolo D’Ercole offered a window into what that real-time world looks like. Modern tracking, he explained, involves systems capable of monitoring 20 to 30 skeletal points on each player, 60 times a second. “We can track acceleration, speed, reaction time, even how the ball is spinning,” he said. Te numbers aren’t just descriptive - they are contextual and actionable.
Coaches can understand whether a player is favouring one leg, whether the risk of injury is rising, whether a winger’s movement is improving or destabilising the team’s structure. Substitution decisions can be guided by patterns invisible to
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