Emerging technologies produce recurring effects. Things change quickly in the spaces around them. And innovation comes from unexpected sources.
In the spring of last year, Reading Football Club were perched on the brink of oblivion. A disastrous eight-year spell under the ownership of Chinese businessman Dai Yongge had brought ever-worsening financial chaos, multiple English Football League (EFL) points deductions and relegation to the third-tier League One.
That period of neglect reached a terrifying crossroads in April 2025. With Yongge disqualified as an English soccer director, the Royals were warned they had to provide proof of funding or find a new buyer. Failing that, they would be expelled from the EFL. Mercifully, for a club founded in 1871, deliverance came just a few weeks later.
American businessman Rob Couhig, who previously owned nearby Wycombe Wanderers, returned after an earlier failed bid to take full control of the club. He set about reintroducing stability and pointing the club’s gaze back towards the heights from which they had fallen. A return to the Championship, and then the Premier League, is once again the target.
A few months into his tenure Couhig was approached by Stuart Fenton, a lifelong fan working as a private consultant in artificial intelligence (AI) after spells in telecoms, the academic sector, and the UK’s Department for International Trade. Impressed with his manner and philosophy over a series of exchanges, Couhig hired Fenton last August as the first-ever head of AI at any English soccer club.
“They wanted to think differently, and they took a bet,” says Fenton. “The bet wasn’t on AI. The bet was on timing.
“We know this is the way the game’s going. We know that teams are looking to be more intelligent. We want to make sure that we’re at the forefront of that.”
Fenton is speaking during an on-stage presentation and an interview at SportsPro AI and Tech, held in late September at the London Stadium. He explains what that bet could mean for the Royals on their long journey back to English soccer’s elite.
“I mean, the goal is to get out of this division,” he says. “Ask anyone at Reading Football Club, and we’re talking about promotion.
“We shouldn’t be a League One club. Our infrastructure is Premier League. We have fantastic owners; we have fantastic coaches and staff and manager. So AI is a contributor to it. It won’t be the only reason we go up. You can’t say it was just AI. It’s everything at the club. Every single thing that everyone does contributes to it.
“AI will contribute to it, but it’s still the success of humans.”
Starting with culture
For a club operating at Reading’s current level, automation carries the promise of cost savings and efficiency. Still, Fenton’s prospects in West Berkshire depend on selling the project to his colleagues.
“When I joined the club, what I didn’t want people to see me [as] was the Grim Reaper,” he quips. “‘If I come and sit next to you in a week’s time, you’re gone.’ I would never have the trust if that happened.”
Instead, his first priority has been helping staff think about where AI can improve their working lives. That can mean using the technology more intelligently, not more often – Fenton is especially wary of “shoehorning” in software just because it is available.
“We are human-centric, data-fuelled,” he says. “That is the mantra we have across the club. AI will never make the decision for us.
“People are in control of their own destinies; they can do things how they want. It will never make the decision. We try to empower people with as much information as possible, and how they use that’s up to them.”
That internal education process has taken several forms in Fenton’s first year, from building skills and awareness to “a de-fearing of AI”.
“There’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of fear in the media around it,” Fenton notes.
While Fenton stresses there is no one way for staff to adopt AI – “some people like Claude, some people like ChatGPT, some people like Grok” – safe practices around commercial protections and players’ medical information are non-negotiable.
“Privacy, IP, and security – it’s a massive thing for us, especially for our academy,” he confirms. “We’re really hot on who we work with in our academy. Everybody wants to be involved in academy football. The biggest challenge is it’s kids’ data and it’s kids’ health data.
“We have to be very protective about who we use. We’ve put an AI policy in place with our academy and across the club, so people know what they can and can’t do.”
Achieving the right buy-in is essential for Fenton, whose whole mission is engineered around bringing the rest of the organisation with him.
“I don’t have an AI department,” he reveals. “We see my role as a capability across the club.
“And that was deliberately done. I think once you have an AI department, it can kind of live and die in that department. When we’re looking at transformation across the club, we want everyone to take ownership of it.”
As Fenton sees it, this culture-first approach means subject-matter experts can turn AI on their own real problems, rather than finding uses for tools they never requested. He believes this is organically producing some positive outcomes – citing how ground staff have applied AI to grass maintenance formulas at the training centre and the Select Car Leasing Stadium.
“I’ve done some really cool things at this club,” he recalls, “but probably if anyone asks me, that’s one of the best things I’ve done.
“These guys never used AI. They never thought about using AI. Now we have someone like myself here able to bring this into the club, they feel comfortable to do it. And they’re starting to see the results in their work now.”
Whatever attention Fenton’s arrival at Reading has generated, it will be those tangible returns that really matter.
“For us everything is about value,” he says. “Does it help us win? Does it make us money? Does it save us money? If it doesn’t, why are we doing it?
“There’s no vanity metrics at League One level.”
Reading recently partnered with Marquee, whose platform will support player recruitment, match analysis, set-pieces and player development (Image credit: Reading FC)
An innovation hub
Despite its unassuming profile – a town of just under 205,000 people, around 35 miles from central London – Reading is a fitting crucible for AI-led innovation and collaboration.
This is a significant regional tech hub. Reading is the UK home of huge multinationals like Microsoft, Oracle, Huawei and Cisco, who take advantage of easy access to the capital and Heathrow Airport. Thousands of other companies have been drawn in by that heavyweight presence, as well as initiatives like the University of Reading’s Thames Valley Science Park.
“We’re really lucky where we’re based,” Fenton notes. “We have some brilliant companies around us, but it’s finding the right fit for Reading Football Club as well. So we’re trying to be a bit more intelligent in how we do this, leveraging commercial packages, leveraging data to say, ‘Actually, how can we put the best proposals forward for our sponsors and how do they get maximum impact as well?’”
Currently, brands based in ‘Silicon Corridor’ are perhaps underrepresented in the club’s commercial portfolio – headed up by betting company Mr Vegas and Select Car Leasing. Already, though, the emphasis on AI development is generating some tangible opportunities to work with the sector and carve out a distinctive identity.
“We’re already heavily engaged with our tech ecosystem,” Fenton says. “We have a very good business club that our commercial team run, but we’re having very good conversations with everybody in the region about what we can potentially do together.”
The past year has yielded a sequence of agreements that are building towards Reading’s AI vision.
World-leading AI chipset manufacturer Nvidia is another giant with a regional office in Reading. Together with hardware partner Lenovo – which has its own local base in nearby Basingstoke – and through London-based frontier AI company Stelia, it is supporting the Reading Football Club AI Centre of Excellence.
Announced in June, this aims to pursue best practice for soccer across several on and off-field activities, while also providing education and integration schemes across Reading and the wider Thames Valley region.
“There’s a great opportunity to do things differently,” says Fenton. “And being positioned as the AI club, it’s actually about doing stuff. The only way we can really do stuff at the pace that we want to is by working with partners, so it’s really changed the conversations that we’re having with people. But it’s putting Reading FC on the map as well.”
All of this has also created grounds for dialogue with other professional teams.
“We’re not competing for the same fans,” Fenton says, “so there is an openness, and I think because we’re at the quite early stages of AI in football, people are kind of in that experimental stage.”
Reading have even been using AI for grass maintenance at the Select Car Leasing Stadium and their training ground (Image credit: Getty Images)
That collegiate spirit may not extend to “the secret sauce about performance” and recruitment, where clubs are protecting their own particular edge, but there is real appetite for sharing knowledge. In that spirit, Reading hosted an AI in Football Summit at their Bearwood Park training complex in late September. It brought tech providers together with top-level European sides like Ajax, Como 1907, Crystal Palace, and Uefa Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain.
“I was asked a question about PSG joining,” Fenton says. “‘Are you starstruck by PSG coming to League One Reading?’”
“No, we’re not starstruck, because we want to be the leaders in this. We want to embrace what we’re doing here at the club, and equally, we’re not starstruck.”
The club are aware that commercial returns will come through a better understanding of their own fanbase. In May, it unveiled the One Royal subscription programme, which offers a selection of supporter benefits – including the option to spread the cost of a season ticket across 12 monthly payments.
“That’s allowed us to get a bit more insight into our fans,” Fenton explains. “We want to be in a position where we can really hyper-personalise things for them, but do it in a controlled way.
“No one wants AI slop or things thrown down your throat, and we’re really conscious of that.”
Reading hope that these initiatives will show “some real benefits” over the course of the season ahead.
A decisive advantage
After the trials of the past decade, there is one place Reading fans might welcome improvement most of all. Yet in the middle of the English soccer pyramid, clubs driving hard for promotion face an obvious central problem: most of their rivals share the same ambition.
“We can’t outspend teams,” concedes Fenton. “We’re a League One club. It is very challenging being in League One.
“You see the amount of teams dropping down the divisions. They’ve got parachute money. They’ve got ownership that are willing to throw things, throw money at the league. That’s not what our owners want to do. They want to create a sustainable business.”
The fundamental objective of the Reading experiment, then, is to accelerate progress on the field.
“Football has tonnes of data,” Fenton says. “Football doesn’t have a data problem; it has a time problem. Can people do things quickly? Can they understand it? And can they actually use it?”
With the right datasets, and the right tools to interrogate them, AI promises vital performance benefits in expensive and decisive areas like player development and injury prevention. While products that address those challenges have existed for a few seasons, the Reading strategy is intended to meet the Royals’ particular needs without foundering on their limitations.
“When you look at recruitment,” Fenton suggests, “you get hundreds of names thrown at you. On transfer deadline day, you could get 20 different names thrown at you. You can’t scout every player. You don’t know every single thing. It’s essentially about how do we have as much data as possible blended with our human insight to be able to actually make a decision.”
To that end, Reading are now turning their partner Marquee’s machine-learning models towards the transfer market.
“We don’t need 30 names,” he adds. “We can take a shortlist of 1,000 names, take it to 100, and from the 100, have three players that we want.”
The idea of an unheralded sports team using data to outsmart richer opposition invites some inevitable comparisons.
“Everyone calls it Moneyball, which I absolutely hate,” Fenton says. “I call it Readingball because we want to differentiate away from Moneyball.”
Joking aside, he acknowledges the “fantastic job” done by clubs like Brentford, Bournemouth and Brighton and Hove Albion – lower-tier mainstays who rode proprietary algorithms and smarter business models to Premier League success. To emulate those achievements, however, a team in Reading’s position must now look beyond them.
“Everybody’s trying to be data-driven,” he says. “Everyone’s trying to go down that approach, and when everyone’s doing it, it becomes standard. I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to be the AI team. I want people to think of us as that team. When people look at the metrics of success here, everyone says Brentford, Brighton.
“I want people to look back in the next three years and say: ‘Oh yeah, that Reading model is the one that got them up.’”
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