Paris St-Germain spent last season winning the Champions League. On Friday they are at a League One club's training ground in Berkshire, listening to what Reading have learned about artificial intelligence. Ajax are there too, along with Crystal Palace and Como, and the whole thing is happening at Bearwood Park because Reading decided a year ago to build something nobody else in England had.
The man running it is Stuart Fenton, who holds the title of Head of AI and is the first person in English football to have it. The department was set up under new owner Rob Couhig. Twelve months on, the reigning European champions have asked to come and see how it works.
Reading are not pretending this is a level playing field
Fenton's framing of the visit is worth noting. He told BBC Radio Berkshire that he is a Reading fan himself, that every supporter dreams of European nights against teams like PSG, and that this is not quite that. What it is, he argues, is Reading being in the conversation with those clubs about where the game is going, which for a third-tier side is its own kind of achievement.
He also said they are not starstruck, and pointed out the direction of travel: these clubs are coming to Reading rather than Reading going to them. That is the part he seems proudest of, and it is hard to argue with the logic. The event doubles as the launch of a programme between the club and Setanta College covering sports technology and AI.
Recruitment first, but it has spread
The model here is familiar. Brighton and Brentford built competitive advantages out of data while bigger clubs were still arguing about whether numbers told you anything, and Reading are following that road with newer tools. Recruitment is the main application, which is where the money is. Data in football is enormous, as Fenton put it, and the question is how to process it fast enough to give the recruitment team useful information about players anywhere in the world.
What has surprised him is where else it has turned up. Tactics, retail, and the grass itself. Fenton described the ground staff coming to him and explaining that they are now using AI models for grass cutting and turf protection at the Select Car Leasing Stadium, which is not the application anyone would have predicted when the department was created.
His point about culture is the more interesting one. He is explicit that the aim is not replacing people but making the people already there more effective, and that the win is when somebody walks up with an idea and asks whether it can be done. Everyone assumes AI is a switch, he said, and that flicking it makes you the smartest team in the world. If it were that easy, everybody would have done it.
A strange sentence to write about a League One club
Reading beat Notts County 2-0 recently, and two days ago Roberts was saying their results on the road need tidying up. That is the ordinary business of a season in the third tier. None of that changes because PSG turned up for a conference.
But something has shifted at a club that spent recent years as a cautionary tale about ownership. A year ago the AI department did not exist. Now it is the reason Ajax and the European champions have a date in Berkshire.
Event details: AI summit at Reading's Bearwood Park training complex on Friday 25 September. Attending clubs include Paris St-Germain, Ajax, Crystal Palace and Como. Reading's AI department was created a year ago under owner Rob Couhig and is led by Stuart Fenton.
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