From data to fan experience: how data and AI provide insights into the popularity of PSV players

Player popularity is determined by more than just on-pitch performance. Social media engagement, sentiment, media activity and sponsor exposure also provide insight into how players are perceived.

The students brought these various data sources together in the PSV Popularity Dashboard. The interactive dashboard illustrates how players’ popularity evolves over time and how changes correlate with matches, events, media activities and sponsor visibility.

The overview page visualises the key insights, including trends in fan sentiment and various social media insights.

AI for sponsor exposure

A notable aspect of the project is the allocation of AI resources to track sponsor logos in PSV content. The students developed an AI-powered feature capable of recognising sponsor logos in social media content. The results are then displayed on a separate page within the dashboard.

In this way, data, AI and marketing come together, enabling a process that previously required a great deal of manual work to be supported in a different way.

Collaborating on innovation

The project was carried out with PSV as the client and Citric Labs as the partner. Citric Labs is an AI and data start-up that emerged from the Fontys ICT Student Incubator programme and works closely with the SPARC innovation network (Sharing Platform for Applied Research Co-operation) and Fontys ICT in Eindhoven.

SPARC brings together companies and Fontys ICT around applied research and innovation. Within this collaboration, students, lecturers, researchers and partners from the work field work on ICT challenges.

For this project, different worlds thus came together: the practical realities of professional sport, the expertise of an AI and data partner, and the practice-oriented education provided by Fontys ICT.

And that is precisely what makes this project so special: students are not only working on a real-world problem, but are given the opportunity to use their knowledge and ideas to make a real difference at an organisation such as PSV.