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Artificial intelligence will eventually come for all our jobs. For now, however, it could be speeding up the process of your club completing its deal for a shiny new signing.

With five days to go before the summer window’s deadline, the pace is quickening as teams rush for that missing piece they hope can tilt the balance.

And when it comes to finalising contracts, one Cambridge-based company has created a tool to save clubs time, money and the need to hire external legal assistance.

“An actual player contract is very standardised,” says Rafie Faruq, the founder of Genie AI. “And the smaller clubs don’t have in-house legal teams, making it a perfect fit.”

A footballer’s contract, whether they are on £300,000 per week at a superclub or £1,500 in League Two, follows a very similar template. So Gemini takes care of the tedious box-ticking elements and all the clubs need to do is finesse it to include details such as sell-on clauses,

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“You follow the criteria and terms for 80 percent,” Faruq explains. “But then there’s about 20 per cent that’s the opposite, highly customised. Those are the player bonuses and all that.

“We help the clubs utilise the language bit. So for the standardised bit, the 80 per cent, all you have to do is chuck the template into Genie and it will build a questionnaire that can be filled in really quickly. It also prevents mistakes and ensures it’s compliant with EFL standards.

“For the customised bit what we do is take existing contracts and we create a playbook of clauses that you can use to customise bonuses and things like that. It’s really about reusing that tried and tested language to speed up the process.”

Football's relationship with tech is between a rock and a hard place – some clubs and staff are keen to be at the cutting edge of innovations, others are adamant that the way they have always done things is proven to be successful and requires no change.

Faruq, however, believes that there is a simple answer for those concerned about AI being a threat. “One club, I can’t say who because our deal with them isn’t finalised, had a first reaction that was: ‘We’re quite traditional and we do it this way and we have our lawyers,’” he adds.

“But what I said was we’re not modernising or creating new language, we’re just making it faster and making sure you don’t miss anything.”

Genie’s first confirmed client was Cambridge United, a club that is maximising its ability to think differently and embrace new ways in lieu of a relatively low financial ceiling.

AI is being used to inform decisions on the pitch, too, especially when it comes to measuring player load and trying to predict injury risks before an issue sidelines a player for several weeks.

Faruq, who is full of praise for the League Two club’s decision-makers, sees a big future around “how AI going to transform how football is done … particularly around simulation and predictive analytics.”

In the not too distant future all the existing data and video clips could be interpreted by a machine to offer managers and coaches clear guidance on the most effective way to bypass a team’s high press or a particular weakness in their defence that should be targeted.

He adds: “How do we help the industry do its job better? In football it’s to win more games and what I think is really interesting is how can you simulate possible outcomes and possible scenarios to then create strategies ahead of matches? That’s really exciting.”

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