WFS Deep Play AI Panel: The list and the room
Field note · World Football Summit, Madrid
163 people registered for Deep play: AI investment and integration in football at World Football Summit Madrid on 16 September 2026. I was there. By my count, around a third of them were.
Signing up, and turning up
The first number is the one nobody publishes
My estimate from the floor, not a measurement. I did not count heads; I looked at a room that was nowhere near the size of its list.
This is not a complaint about conference logistics. Everyone overbooks a schedule and then follows the day where it goes. But it is the cheapest possible demonstration of something worth holding on to: interest in AI is free to declare and expensive to act on, and the two get confused constantly.
The list is still the more interesting document, though, because 163 people were willing to put their name against this topic. That is a decent sample of who in football is paying attention. So I catalogued all of them.
Who signed up
Every dot is one registration
Job titles
Three people
Of the 163 who registered for a session about investing in artificial intelligence, three have AI in their job title.
All three sit on the buying side, and that is the interesting part. The organisations creating jobs with AI in the name are the clubs and the leagues, not the companies selling to them.
- AI & Growth, at a major European league
- Deputy CFO, Finance, AI & Innovation, at a Spanish top-flight club
- AI & Digital Change Manager, at a developing national federation
The buying side, up close
22 of the 29 had no technology remit at all
Narrow the list to the people who could actually buy: 29 registrations from clubs, leagues and federations. Count how many hold any brief for technology, data, digital or innovation.
The other 22 were in finance, marketing, legal, scouting, ticketing, sustainability and communications. Those are all substantial jobs. None of them is absorbing an AI system into how the club works.
Full composition
163 registrations, 145 organisations
What I take from it
Supply is not the constraint
The instinct after a room like that is to conclude football is behind on AI. I do not think that is what the numbers show. There were 37 registrations from companies building sports technology, most of it genuinely good. The supply of AI into football is healthy and growing.
The constraint sits on the other side. It is absorption capacity: the people, the plumbing and the mandate inside a club to take a capability and make it part of how the organisation actually operates. On the evidence of this list, roughly one in four buy-side registrations had anything resembling that brief.
The distance between signing up for a session and walking into it is the same distance, in miniature, as the one between buying an AI product and using it.
Both gaps are made of the same material. Declaring intent costs nothing. Absorbing something into how you already work costs attention you have not freed up, from people who already have jobs.
Which suggests the useful question for a club in 2027 is not which AI product to buy next. It is who owns the integration of the ones already bought, and whether that person exists.
Method and limits
The 163 figure is the session's registered attendee list in the World Football Summit event app, covering three speakers, one moderator and the registered attendees. It is a record of who signed up, not of who was present. The room count is my own impression from the floor and should be read as an estimate, not a measurement.
Each organisation was categorised by what it does, verified against company websites and public sources where they exist. Twenty-six organisations, accounting for 27 of the 163 registrations, had no verifiable public presence. They are counted in the totals and grouped as unclassified rather than guessed at.
Categories are my judgement and some are arguable: a multi-club ownership vehicle could sit under investment or under clubs. Registering for a session is a weak signal on its own, which is rather the point. No individual is named here, and none of this is published attendee-level.
