AI match-analysis could be a game-changer for RugbySmarts

The Irish tech start-up plans to raise €600,000 to commercialise a product to aid video analysis of rugby and other field sports such as GAA and soccer

Yvonne Comer, former rugby international and chief executive of RugbySmarts: ‘If you do analytics right, rather than just producing numbers and data, you can actually pull out real in-depth insights that could change a game.’ Picture: Andrew Downes

A new tech Irish start-up is aiming to raise up to €600,000 to fund the commercialisation of an AI-based product that it hopes will change how sports teams carry out their video analysis sessions.

RugbySmarts was founded in 2020 by William Johnstone, an entrepreneur and software expert, and Yvonne Comer, a former international rugby player.

The Enterprise Ireland-backed firm, which is based in Galway, is already running a number of trials with amateur clubs around Ireland, and has also begun working with an underage squad at Connacht Rugby.

It is about to start another trial with a British rugby club, ahead of fully rolling out the product by the end of the year. Comer, who has degrees in sports science and business administration, said the idea for RugbySmarts emerged out of a very practical need.

“On top of running his own software company, William was doing some work as a part-time coach for Connacht and also doing some analysis for Corinthians RFC in Galway,” she said. “He realised there had to be a better way of doing it.”

Johnstone worked out that by automating the process of categorising events during matches, he could vastly reduce the amount of time analysts spent on their work. He then approached Comer with the idea, and RugbySmarts was born.

“In the process of video analysis, someone has to sit there and watch what’s happening, and say ‘there’s a scrum, there’s a lineout, there’s a ruck, there’s a maul’,” Comer said.

“They spend hours and hours just literally naming what’s happening in a match or session, before they can get to any in-depth analysis of it. And that’s the same across every sport – it’s a manual data entry process first before you can get to any of the performance parts at all, and it takes so long. We can take that away.”

Initially, RugbySmarts is targeting amateur teams playing at grassroots level. “At a professional level, they have the resources and the funding to do the manual part of the analysis, but that doesn’t exist at the amateur level,” Comer said. “We want to give those teams the ability to do that professional level of analysis.”

But the company, which currently has eight staff, believes its product can benefit clubs in other sports and other countries too, Comer said. “We’re looking at GAA and soccer as well, and we’ll be testing that also.”

Comer said the firm was receiving almost universally positive feedback among the clubs it was working with so far, particularly among coaches with professional analytics experience. But she said they were also trying to target coaches who were less fluent in the language of video analysis.

“It’s about bringing coaches along with you, to show that if you do analytics right, rather than just producing numbers and data, you can actually pull out real in-depth insights that could change a game,” she said.

If all goes to plan with its funding round, RugbySmarts expects to expand properly into the British market soon after it raises capital. “If we want to launch in Britain, we’ll need business development managers over there, and we’ll probably need more staff on the software side of things too,” Comer said.