Barely a week goes by without a club announcing an alliance with a major tech company or unveiling an artificial intelligence project. The narrative is familiar: football is becoming a data industry and clubs are becoming technology companies. But if you set aside the sporting side — signings, tactics, injury prevention — and look at how a club is actually run from the inside, the picture is considerably more modest. AI has entered football, but it has come in through the shop, not through the office.
The most widespread and most mature use is in content. LaLiga has been working since the 2022-23 season with WSC Sports, a company that automatically generates clips and highlights from Primera and Segunda División matches, and the same technology is used by the Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1. A system detects goals, chances and cards, cuts the footage and prepares it in vertical format for social media within minutes of each incident. This is real AI, it works every day, and it has an obvious economic logic: more videos, faster, across more channels, with fewer people.
Alongside that, the biggest clubs have built data platforms that are not always artificial intelligence, but that lay the groundwork for it. Real Madrid has spent years working with Microsoft to bring together data on its supporters around the world, with one clear goal: to know the fan better in order to sell to them more.
Internal management tells a different story. A Deloitte report from December 2024 describes how many clubs are modernising their management software to centralise finances, payroll and human resources, improve their reporting and comply with UEFA and league financial regulations. It is a necessary transformation, but it is not artificial intelligence: it is putting in order data that until recently lived scattered across spreadsheets. Bayern Munich, which has moved its internal management and the records of millions of members and supporters to the cloud with SAP, is one of the most advanced examples of that journey — and even then it is modernisation, not algorithms making decisions. Before AI can help a finance director, the club needs to have its numbers in one place, and many are still at that stage.
A Spanish case illustrates this well. Sevilla has one of the most advanced AI projects in European football: using IBM technology and a Meta language model installed in its own environment, it has built a tool that searches and summarises more than 300,000 scouting reports. It is a sophisticated development, but it serves recruitment, not management. Even the most advanced clubs put their best technology at the service of the pitch or the shop window, not the back office.
The explanation makes sense. Commercial AI pays for itself, because more videos and deeper knowledge of the fan translate into revenues that can be shown off in a results presentation. AI in the office promises savings, and in organisations where administrative staff is small, those savings are hard to justify against the cost of implementing it and finding people who can run it.
The problem appears when technology leaves the screen and touches the fan directly. Osasuna installed a voluntary facial recognition system in 2022 for entry to El Sadar. The Spanish Data Protection Agency fined the club 200,000 euros in a ruling from December 2024, ordered the system suspended and the data deleted. The agency found that the fans' consent was not valid, that the system was not proportionate and that it had security failings: to speed up entry to a stadium there were far less invasive alternatives than scanning the faces of thousands of people.
Something similar has happened with ticket prices just recently. Leeds United chairman Paraag Marathe proposed using AI to set ticket prices using a model inspired by the airline industry, which would take into account attendance, purchases and each fan's relationship with the club, with the idea of making access cheaper for the most loyal supporters and applying dynamic pricing in certain corporate areas. He himself acknowledged that the club already adjusts its prices, but without using AI. The reaction from the Leeds United Supporters' Trust and the Football Supporters' Association was immediate, and the club clarified that it currently has no plans to introduce AI-based dynamic pricing. In Spain, Valencia has applied dynamic pricing at Mestalla since the 2024-25 season, with prices rising according to the occupancy of each area and the proximity of the match, although the club does not present it as artificial intelligence. The difference in reaction shows how far the limit is set not by the technology, but by what the terraces are willing to accept.
This is how the map looks. AI advances quickly where the fan cannot see it — in the videos they consume or in the data they generate when they buy — and slows down where they notice it, at the stadium gate or in the price of their ticket. And in the offices, where a club could gain real efficiency, modernisation is moving forward, but artificial intelligence remains the exception.
That says a great deal about how clubs understand technology. They use it as a tool to grow outward, not to function better inward. As long as AI remains above all a way to sell more, football will be able to boast of being a technology industry in its presentations, while continuing to be run the same way as always in its back offices.
