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Liverpool FC: Extending data analytics and AI with neuroscience
Ulrich Lichtenthaler • Mai 23, 2022
On May 28, 2022, Liverpool FC with the manager Juergen Klopp have the chance to win another Champions League title after beating Chelsea to win the FA Cup 2022.
On May 14, 2022, Liverpool FC with the German manager Juergen Klopp repeated their Carabao Cup final win over Chelsea Football Club from February this year (when they successfully converted all 11 penalties!), once again in penalty shootout. Afterwards, Klopp praised the important impact made by neuro11, a German neuroscience company, in preparing for penalties and other set-pieces in the game. Liverpool FC started to collaborate with the company in 2021, and this neuroscience twist is just the most recent extension of the club’s continuous focus on data analytics and artificial intelligence.
The power of data analytics, AI and neuroscience
In my recent article
in the Journal of Business Strategy, I have examined Liverpool FC as a somewhat surprising example for achieving a competitive advantage from combining data analytics and AI with human expertise. In recent years, Liverpool FC has experienced a major revival in terms of sporting success and financial performance. Concerning sporting success, for example, the club won the Champions League title in 2019 and the Premier League title in 2020. This year, Liverpool finished the Premier League again as a very close second. Regarding financial performance, the brand value of the club and the market value of the players have substantially grown.
However, the club’s emphasis on data analytics and AI only contributed to this impressive evolution when it was complemented with the emotional intelligence and people skills of its manager Juergen Klopp. Definitely, Klopp is one of the best football managers, but the revival of the club is a more complex story. The recent success strongly builds on the combination of Klopp’s emotional intelligence and people skills with the club’s data analytics and AI capabilities – now extended by neuroscience. Without the Head of Research at Liverpool FC, Ian Graham, and his team, Klopp would not even have been hired by Liverpool FC back in 2015. After a partly disastrous last season at Borussia Dortmund, Klopp was heavily criticized in the press, but Ian Graham’s AI-based data analytics showed that Dortmund simply had been very, very unlucky in that season and that Klopp still was one of the best managers.
On May 28, 2022, Liverpool FC will once again be in the Champions League final, for the third time since Klopp took over. The particular way of using the power of data analytics, AI and neuroscience has a strong impact on these achievements. Liverpool and other major football clubs use AI and data analytics to determine which players should be signed or to analyze the opposing team’s tactics. While performance data, such as shots, ball possession or the speed of players, are considered in the analyses, Klopp’s personal assessment of team dynamics also remains essential at Liverpool. Thus, looking at algorithms, data analyses and neuroscience is not enough for success. The insights gained with the help of these technologies have to be combined with individual human skills. At Liverpool FC, this is particularly Klopp’s emotional intelligence and empathetic leadership style. Artificial and human intelligence thus complement each other productively. Of course, this is only possible because both sides, i.e. Klopp as well as the data analytics and neuroscience teams, are open to working together.
Integrated Intelligence beyond sports management
This combination of human intelligence and skills with artificial intelligence, data analytics and neuroscience is what Integrated Intelligence
is all about. This hybrid intelligence can be used not only in football, but in just about any industry. Although AI is being used in more and more companies, often only incremental innovations are implemented that make existing processes somewhat cheaper and more efficient. The competitive advantage that results is then only short-lived, as these incremental improvements become standard after a short while.
To stand out from the competition in the long run, companies have to open up completely new fields and solutions. Here, human intelligence can be the critical factor. Precisely because humans will be superior to AI in certain fields, such as emotions or empathy, for the foreseeable future, entirely new solutions can be developed in this way. Even if not all insights may be transferred to other industries, Liverpool’s Integrated Intelligence approach may indeed serve as a best-practice example for managers and executives far beyond sports management. For further details, please feel free to contact me for a keynote or talk
about ’Integrated Intelligence – What managers may learn from Juergen Klopp and Liverpool FC’.
As sustainability and ESG are on top of many firms’ strategic agendas, there is a growing need for specialized trainings, workshops, and keynotes.
Nachhaltigkeit und ESG stehen bei vielen Unternehmen ganz oben auf der Tagesordnung, daher wächst der Bedarf an spezialisierten Schulungen, Workshops und Vorträgen.
ChatGPT und generative KI werden uns nicht überflüssig machen – auch wenn die aktuelle Berichterstattung genau diesen Eindruck erweckt. ChatGPT hat uns allen verdeutlicht, wie schnell sich manche Felder künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) aktuell weiterentwickeln. Auch wenn einige dieser Entwicklungen schon seit Jahren erwartet wurden, ist die Geschwindigkeit vieler Verbesserungen selbst für manche ExpertInnen erstaunlich. Der aktuelle offene Brief des Future of Life Institute, der von über 1.000 Personen unterzeichnet wurde, ist daher grundsätzlich nachvollziehbar. Darin wird insbesondere auf die Risiken von KI hingewiesen und eine sechsmonatige Pause für das Trainieren leistungsfähiger KI-Lösungen gefordert. Eine ausreichende Beachtung der Risiken von KI ist unbedingt erforderlich, auch wenn die aktuelle Berichterstattung dazu oft zu kurz greift. Noch erstaunlicher ist aus betriebswirtschaftlicher Sicht jedoch das Medienecho der letzten Wochen und Monate zu den Auswirkungen von KI auf die Arbeitswelt, das sowohl in klassischen Medien als auch bei Social Media zu beobachten war. Dort wird häufig gefragt, ob wir als Menschen noch schlau genug sind im Vergleich zur KI. Auch wird diskutiert, ob KI künftig die meisten Führungskräfte ersetzen wird. Besonders oft steht also wieder einmal die Frage im Mittelpunkt, wie viele Personen durch KI ihren Job verlieren werden. Diese Frage ist auf den auf den ersten Blick vielleicht nachvollziehbar, weil durch KI-basierte Automatisierung in den nächsten Jahren tatsächlich in nennenswertem Umfang Jobs verloren gehen werden. Insbesondere werden auch solche Büro-Jobs betroffen sein, die bisher noch nicht automatisiert werden konnten. Dadurch sind mit offensiven Schlagzeilen sicherlich hohe Klickzahlen zu erreichen. Außerdem werden auch Arbeitsplätze in der Medienbranche automatisiert werden, wodurch sich die Berichterstattung zusätzlich erklären lässt. Integrierte Intelligenz strategisch oft wichtiger als eigenständige KI Dennoch wird viel zu oft ein einseitiger Schwerpunkt gelegt und damit auch ein falscher Eindruck vermittelt. Der wirklich entscheidende Teil der Entwicklung für die meisten Unternehmen und ebenso für die meisten Arbeitskräfte liegt in der Kombination von KI mit menschlicher Arbeit – und eben gerade nicht in der vollständigen Automatisierung von Jobs durch KI. In den letzten Jahren kamen verschiedenen Studien immer wieder zu ähnlichen Ergebnissen. Der Grundtenor ist dahingehend identisch, dass sich deutlich mehr Jobs verändern werden als komplett wegzufallen (vor allem, wenn die Zahl der Arbeitsplätze berücksichtigt wird, die durch KI zusätzlich entstehen). Diese Kombination von menschlicher mit künstlicher Intelligenz wird auch als integrierte Intelligenz bezeichnet.
Despite the massive attention to sustainability and ESG, many firms still underestimate the opportunities for innovation beyond reducing CO2 emissions.
The GREEN GRASS STRATEGY goes beyond traditional sustainability, and it refers to developing innovative solutions for a ‘net positive impact’. What is the GREEN GRASS STRATEGY? The GREEN GRASS STRATEGY is a sustainability strategy that focuses on innovation and new business opportunities rather than limiting sustainability programs to resource efficiency and the optimization of established processes. As such, the GREEN GRASS STRATEGY goes beyond traditional sustainability concepts that often focus on avoiding harm (no net loss) to consider positive sustainability and to embrace doing good (net positive impact). The GREEN GRASS STRATEGY enables you to leverage sustainability for innovation and value generation, and it can be systematically developed with the SUSTAINABILITY INNOVATION MAP , which helps firms to achieve a competitive advantage by systematically pursuing sustainability innovations in all ESG dimensions – environment, social, and governance.
Generation Z – and what is next? Many of today’s students are ‘sustainable natives’ and expect companies to make a positive contribution to solving ecological and social problems. In an international survey of more than 27,000 people, GlobeScan found in 2020 that for 60% of younger participants, climate change and social inequality are top priorities, combined with the expectation that companies should contribute to solving these challenges. Very importantly, the young generation expects positainability , i.e. making a positive contribution and not just reducing negative effects of doing business, for example by reducing CO2 emissions. To implement this positive sustainability approach, companies would need to pursue a GREEN GRASS STRATEGY . So far, however, many companies are hardly prepared for the future changes due to the ideas of those persons that will be starting their careers in the next few years. In fact, this new generation of ‘sustainable natives’ presents new challenges and opportunities for companies (as I have explained in more detail in a recent article in the Haufe Personalmagazin ). In particular, the following typical perspectives of this ‘Generation PI’ – Positive Impact – have to be considered. 1. Sustainable natives Many current students are ‘sustainable natives’ because they perceive sustainability as a core topic since their early youth. In contrast to the extensive public discussions about ‘digital natives’, the role of ‘sustainable natives’ has been mostly ignored so far. 2. Doubtful prospects Typical for ‘Generation PI’ are doubts whether their future standard of living will remain as good as their current situation and as the life of their parents, especially due to climate change. 3. Expected limitations Many current students expect restrictions on possible behaviors to enable a more sustainable economy and society in the future, for instance bans or massively increasing prices for air travel or the consumption of less sustainable food. 4. Positive contribution Beyond the goal of no-net-loss, ‘Generation PI’ is ready to make a positive contribution in terms of a net-positive-impact. Here, companies need to focus on major innovations rather than limiting themselves to reducing CO2 emissions in established processes.
Positainability – or positive sustainability – refers to the combination of doing good and avoiding bad to arrive at innovative solutions.
How to use the proven tool that helps firms across industries to systematically pursue sustainability innovations.
There is more to sustainability management than enhancing the efficiency of established processes to reduce emissions – much more!
Many firms have started digitalization and sustainability initiatives – but they neglect to profit from the combination of these megatrends.
