Jake's Road Report is Gemini Sports founder Jake Schuster’s weekly update from professional football's frontlines. He travels globally, meeting club executives to share candid insights on AI's role in football. These raw, actionable thoughts are delivered weekly, with meeting details kept confidential and specific intel omitted.
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"One club needs fast muscles, the other needs tall players with toughness. The computers can't help me find that."
A Brazilian ex-national team World Cup-level player was telling me about his current role as a player agent. He knows exactly what all the biggest clubs in his country need, but there aren't objective metrics to capture them. Fast muscles. Toughness. Presence. The qualities that separate merely good players from great fits.
This is precisely why any good player evaluation should contain both: a critical notes section capturing expert observations and an AI summary synthesizing it all. A subject-matter expert's observation on matters like these can be a more valuable data point than any objective metric.
The best clubs understand this. They unify objective data with the subjective art of scouting. They don't treat them as competing philosophies—they treat them as complementary forces.
I believe in the dual yin and yang power of art and science, objective and subjective, tech and human. You can't have one without the other. A scout’s subject-matter-expert opinion may be the most important data point available!
Noticing a player's body language in the 89th minute or recognizing a cultural fit from a single conversation won’t show up in any database, but they often determine success or failure.
The best platforms aren't built for mindless robots. They're built for living, breathing, thinking, opinionated, skilled human beings who know what they need and where they need to go—and need the best tools to help them get there.
Tools should be made for the people who use it, designed around how they think and work, not how engineers think they should think and work.
In football, as in everything else, the art needs the science to scale.
And the science needs the art to matter.
