As football clubs bring AI into their analysis departments, Alexander Bodo has a warning for them: if the data underneath is poor, “the language model will give you a better version of the wrong answer”. Bodo was Head of Strategy for Mercedes’ global motorsport activities and now runs Paceteq, a company that develops software and AI tools for motorsport. In his view, football is now where motorsport was some 20 years ago in its use of data. At WFS Madrid 2026, in a session presented by Paceteq, he and other motorsport experts explained what football can take from that experience.
Data and judgement, together
Football has relied mainly on qualitative information, such as the coach’s opinion or the mood of a player, and only now has positioning, video, sensor and wearable data to work with. In motorsport, that shift did not take people out of the decision. Pedro de la Rosa, Aston Martin Aramco F1 ambassador, recalled that the driver used to be the only important sensor in the car. “Now we have 200 sensors in the chassis,” he said, and yet drivers remain “the only sensor that can tell engineers” what they need to make the car faster. For Javier Sevilla, COO of Epic Championships, the promoter of the F4 Spanish Championship and Eurocup-3, telemetry and the driver’s feedback both count: “both sources of information are true”.
For Bodo, that is the lesson football should take. Motorsport learned to combine technology experts with domain experts: software developers and AI specialists working alongside the analysts and coaches who understand the sport.
Departments that share what they know
Bodo applies the same principle to the whole organisation. Formula 1 teams used to keep their trackside engineers, the R&D department at the factory and the commercial and partnership staff apart. Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes became “commercially highly successful entities”, in his words, once they broke down those silos.
In football, he sees the same untapped potential. The commercial and partnership teams may still work apart from the coaches, the medical staff and the analysts, and clubs that have grown over a century carry structures and cultures that are hard to change.
Start with one decision
Bodo’s advice is to start small. A club picks a decision it takes again and again, such as the starting line-up or the approach to a commercial partner, and looks at which data can support it. Once the data improves that decision, the result helps convince the rest of the organisation. It is the same habit Sevilla described on the track: measure, change the set-up, send the car back out and compare the result.
Four principles for a football club
Asked what he would do if he took over a football club tomorrow, Bodo summed up motorsport’s experience in four principles: shared context, because “a lap time alone doesn’t tell you the story”; a feedback loop, with data used before, during and after each event; clarity about which decisions the club needs to take; and technology and domain experts working together. AI, which he called “the accelerator in sports”, will speed all of this up. A new owner who applies those four principles, he said, “may be very successful”.