The Spanish club, currently having a prolific season, and the Amsterdam-based sports-tech company BrainsFirst begin their collaboration with a focus on finding and selecting the brightest football talents this month. The partners have a common goal: making the process of talent identification & evaluation more data-driven and scalable. In these times in particular, remote testing is of great value. By combining gamification and neuroscience technology, BrainsFirst offers an online validated assessment game platform.
Football IQ assessment
As part of the BrainsFirst programme, Real Sociedad are capable of assessing a player’s football IQ, or game intelligence. This information is seen as a crucial part of the overall talent puzzle. Following previous experiences in the Netherlands, implementing BrainsFirst as an early-funnel recruitment tool increases the number of justified admissions and rejections and as a result the efficiency of the overall process.
“We constantly look for relevant innovation and see cognitive data in respect to a very specific profile of a future professional football player as an added value for us”
Relevant innovation
Roberto Olabe Aranzabal, Director of Football for Real Sociedad explains: “We constantly look for relevant innovation and see cognitive data in respect to a very specific profile of a future professional football player as an added value for us. We want to have a holistic view and understand as early as possible the probability of the talents to meet those high requirements of elite football. BrainsFirst has proven to be an experienced and reliable partner for this aspect.”
Spain
The first experiences of BrainsFirst in Spain are with Celta de Vigo and Numancia. “Real Sociedad decides to take this approach to talent identification & evaluation for the long term. They prove to have a clear vision and want to use today’s tools to succeed in the future. We are very happy to work with this club,” says Jens Urlbauer, Director of Business Development at BrainsFirst.
What makes a professional football player?
In 2019 at Unleash Amsterdam we spoke with Andries van der Leij, who gave us a demo on how BrainsFirst works. In the interview below he shows the tool and explains how it works. Read the whole article here.
