Deep Learning and AI in Sport
For experienced Python users, data scientists, and sports analysts working in football, basketball, or ice hockey who want to take the next step and apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to real tracking and performance data.
When: September - October 2025
Duration: Four weeks
Price: €1095 + VAT
By Dr. Pegah Rahimian & Professor David Sumpter
Course introduction
Twelve team up with Skillcorner to deliver the most advanced course in sport analytics. Tailored for participants with advanced Python skills, you will learn how to leverage cutting-edge AI methods on large data sets to analyze player performance, optimise strategies, and predict match outcomes in soccer and other sports.
The course combines theoretical foundations — deep learning, graph neural networks, autoencoders and transformers — with a project work — where you develop your own applications on tracking data and scout report databases. Pegah Rahimian, joined by David Sumpter, will lead you step-by-step through the skills. There is a lot of talk about the potential of AI. Learn how to put it to use.
Course content
Understand how concepts such as Expected Possession Value and Pitch Control can be used in football tactics.
Analyze player movement and interactions using spatiotemporal models and graph neural networks.
Identify and visualize team and player playing styles through clustering and dimensionality reduction techniques like PCA, Autoencoders, t-SNE, and UMAP.
Value in-game actions and optimize strategies using reinforcement learning.
Train football language models using transformers.
Pedagogical approach
Two lectures a week by Pegah Rahimian, David Sumpter and invited industry experts.
Engage in hands-on coding sessions using Python, TensorFlow/PyTorch.
Work on group project and presentations.
Dr. Pegah Rahimian
Dr. Pegah Rahimian is a football data scientist at Twelve Football and a post-doctoral researcher at Uppsala University. She holds a PhD in Football Data Science and has applied AI to derive in-depth analyses from football data, influencing various aspects of the sport.
Professor David Sumpter
Professor David Sumpter is a professor of applied mathematics at Uppsala University and the author of “Soccermatics,” a book that explores the application of mathematical modeling to football. He co-founded Twelve Football and has worked with major clubs and national federations worldwide.