AI and high-performance football: I want to learn, but when?

It happened while I was preparing a presentation.

I asked AI for help. The first answer wasn’t quite right. I explained it better. I corrected it. I changed the format. I explained it again.

And then I thought: “I could have finished this faster on my own.”

In high-performance football, learning something new competes for time in a week that’s already full: preparing training sessions, looking after players, coordinating with other professionals, analysing information and getting to the next match.

It’s not a lack of interest. It’s about finding a way to fit that learning into the work that’s already there.

And AI doesn’t wait. Just as I get to grips with one tool, another comes out. Models, agents, context windows, connections between applications. I end up asking myself where to start.

Over time, I realised something that made me uncomfortable: I was using AI as a chat tool.

I’d write, wait for an answer, correct it and write again. It’s what I see almost all of us do when we’re starting out, and it’s what I did. It’s very difficult to see its potential that way. Each conversation started without knowing who I am, what criteria I use or what my coaching staff expects. I had to explain everything every time.

Chat is just the entry point. The value comes when AI works with your context: your criteria, your documents, the way you prepare for a meeting, what you’ve already learned. When that’s organised, you don’t have to start from scratch.

Imagine how your week could change. An AI that knows your model of play, how you work and the format of your reports. That gives you more relevant answers because it understands your context. That saves you the repetitive work, while you review and decide. And that doesn’t depend on which tool comes out next week.

It’s not magic. Some tasks will still be quicker to do by hand, and AI doesn’t work equally well for all of them. But with the right context in place, getting started becomes less difficult.

That’s why, at SportSync, we’ve developed a way of working that combines building a knowledge management system tailored to each professional with guidance in learning how to use it with AI. It’s not enough for the tool to remember things: that knowledge needs to be organised and usable. I explained this in Your AI’s memory is not your knowledge management system.

Today, we’re working with sports professionals, starting with how they work, what they need and what they want to achieve. We help them build their system and learn to use it independently, so they can spend less time looking for information and explaining everything again, and more time applying their knowledge. If that’s where you are, I’d be happy to listen and see how we can help.