Hawthorn Football Club uses Google Cloud AI to boost performance analytics

The Hawthorn Football Club has teamed up with Google Cloud to revolutionize its analytics capabilities using artificial intelligence. In elite football, speed is crucial, both on the field and in the analytics team. The collaboration aims to leverage enterprise-grade technology to solve complex challenges, demonstrating how AI can transform sports performance.

The club faced a significant challenge: a single AFL match generates over one million data points, scattered across siloed systems like GPS tracking, match stats, medical logs, and handwritten scouting notes. Manually integrating this data was time-consuming and inefficient. To address this, Hawthorn and Google Cloud partnered with Premier data analytics & AI partner intelia to deploy enterprise AI solutions.

The result was a unified data platform built on Google Cloud BigQuery, which organizes performance numbers and qualitative coaching notes into a single, verified source of truth. This platform allows coaches and analysts to create insights quickly, reducing the time to answer questions from weeks to the same day. The club plans to use Google Antigravity to build front-end applications and Gemini Enterprise to enable conversational data agents, removing technical barriers for staff.

Dean Westaway, Hawthorn’s General Manager of Technology, Data and Analytics, expressed excitement about the ability to converse directly with data and analyze sources in ways previously impossible. The collaboration also aims to lift AI literacy across the club’s staff, with future applications in fan engagement and matchday experiences. Joel Collins, founder and director at Intelia, highlighted how the partnership demonstrates the potential for unexpected organizations and technology partners to solve unique problems.