Best player 2022 — The AI invites itself to the golden ball prize list
The scientific article, “How Can AI Be Used to Make Decisions about awarding the Golden Ball?” written by the professor and researcher RUTAMBUKA DAVID, talks about a very controversial subject. The GOLDEN BALL award.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of scandals concerning the awarding of the Golden Ball prize to the world’s outstanding football player. For instance, the Golden Ball last year was handed out to Lionel Messi when a large part of the soccer community expected to see Lewandowski elected. This event was the latest example of the problems associated with the awarding of this title.
Despite the technological advances of recent years, particularly in data science and AI, the awarding of the title is still based on the votes of journalists. After reviewing the existing literature on AI and sports and analysing AI sports projects, Professor RUTAMBUKA proposes a model that uses artificial intelligence that can derive objective criteria for awarding this prize.
How would AI be used to award the golden ball to the best player worthy of such a title?
The proposed model takes into consideration all the criteria pertaining to determining the best football champion, which could include quantitative evaluation metrics such as the player’s results throughout the season, the number of goals scored and the player’s physical performance or qualitative ones which tends to be more subjective such as the footballer’s fair play, reputation, engagement and team spirit, all of which are criteria that may seem harder to handle by AI at first glance but are actually realizable if we are selective about the kind of datasets to be included in the RUTAMBUKA’s AI model shown below:
The article remains one of the most important contributions to the existing body of research on AI and Sports and clearly opens the debate on the creation of an algorithm that is capable of objectively judging who is the most eligible for winning the golden ball. This could be an important initiative in the world of football if this sport is to continue to be a passion, a sport and not a controversy.
To have access to the original article and other similar articles on a wide range of topics such as IT technology, data science, business and many more please visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter. More than 35,000 visitors have already joined us.
