HBKU’s college of science explore the viability of AI to enhance player performance in football

Innovative artificial intelligence (AI) based models have been developed by researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) College of Science and Engineering (CSE) to enhance the performance of professional football league players.

The AI-based models have been developed by Ph.D. student Jassim Mohammed AlMulla, a Qatari with a passion for football, and under assistant professor Dr. Tanvir Alam’s supervision.

The model will help analyze and recommend key performance metrics to win matches for the Qatar national team players. With less than two years to go until Qatar hosts the first-ever FIFA World Cup tournament held in the Middle East, the researchers are optimistic that the study could boost the national team’s overall performance. 

Dr. Mounir Hamdi, Founding Dean of CSE

Matches held in the Qatar Stars League (QSL) between 2012 and 2019 were analyzed using AI-based models, analyzing players’ performances in a total of 864 QSL matches. For each match, the collective performance of the players in key playing positions (defender, midfield, forward) was analyzed to understand their effectiveness in winning games.

The researchers formulated the study as a classification framework under machine learning (ML), which is a major branch of AI, to distinguish the winning team from the losing team in a match. Different ML models were considered for the classification task, and the logistic regression-based model was considered the best performing model with more than 80% accuracy.

The proposed methodology can be used by the football management team to identify players’ performance metrics that could be considered as contributing factors to determine match results.

Several sophisticated mathematical models (based on AI) were then developed to analyze the players’ performance in QSL matches, and the study revealed some key winning strategies for the teams. The research work has been published in the IEEE Access Journal.

Dr. Mounir Hamdi, founding dean of CSE, expressed his happiness in being able to showcase the achievement of their graduate students and working closely with their talented faculty members.

For more information on HBKU’s CSE, please visit cse.hbku.edu.qa

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