The Augmented Touchline

Elite football has more data than any sport and less shared understanding of it than its investment implies. Tracking, event feeds, video, medical systems and scouting platforms all improved. The decision they exist to inform, which is what this player should do this week and why, is still made in a meeting, from memory, and is still very rarely recorded in a form that survives a change of manager. This paper argues that the opportunity is an explainable decision layer that connects tactical, technical, physical, medical and contextual information, states its own uncertainty, and leaves a named human being accountable. It argues against three things the market currently sells, which are single-score readiness indices, individual injury prediction, and models trained on a club's own past selections that then recommend the same selections back with a decimal point attached.