THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL - How AI and Big Data are Changing Football

  • The unobserved revolution: AI is changing football as we know and love it.
  • Escher's bestselling title Der Schlüssel zum Spiel sold 30,000 copies with rights sold to Greece (Salto) and Korea (SamHo).
  • Over 100,000 copies sold of his previous titles. 
  • English sample translation will be available.

A new era in football has begun: Every movement, every touch of the ball, every centimeter of the pitch is measured, analyzed, and evaluated by AI systems. Match events, player movements, and fitness status on the field are passed on and evaluated in fractions of a second.

Clubs pay large sums of money to consulting firms to maximize success on the pitch using data. Top clubs have long established their own analysis departments to help identify the world’s greatest talents before the competition snaps them up. FC Liverpool, for example, assembled its championship team with the help of its own dedicated data department.

Ultimately, the big question remains: Can football be deciphered solely with the help of data, numbers, and AI models? How do the models that are revolutionizing the view of football work? How important is the human factor?

Tobias Escher reveals the opportunities and the downsides of the new data-driven professional football, showing what happens behind the scenes and how clubs are preparing for the future.

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  • Publisher: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
  • Release: 15.05.2026
  • ISBN: 978-3-499-01916-6
  • 272 Pages
  • Author: Tobias Escher

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Buchcover von THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL - How AI and Big Data are Changing Football: Wie KI und Big Data den Fußball verändern
Tobias Escher THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL - How AI and Big Data are Changing Football
Portrait von Tobias Escher
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Tobias Escher

Tobias Escher is the co-founder of the award-winning blog Spielverlagerung.de . He also analyses Bundesliga games for a web show called Bohndesliga produced by Rocket Beans TV. As a freelance journalist, Escher writes for Die Welt  and the football magazine  11 FREUNDE . In 2013,  Medium Magazin  named him one of Germany’s top ten sports journalists. His most recent books published by Rowohlt include  Der Schlüssel zum Spiel  and  Was Teams erfolgreich macht .