Naama Barak
August 21, 2020, Updated August 20, 2020

Soccer lovers around the world can now train like some of the biggest names in the industry thanks to a collaboration between Chelsea Football Club and Coach-AI, a company led by Israeli businessman Mati Kochavi.

The two developed a personal trainer app called Perfect Play that fuses together the know-how of the leading club with computer-vision and augmented-reality technology.

The app, developed at Coach-AI’s labs in Israel and Germany, enables anyone with a smartphone and a ball to improve their performance and train as if they’re at the Chelsea FC Academy.

Aspiring footballers are assigned a series of exercises and challenges to perform in front of their phone’s camera. The virtual coach studies their moves, analyzes them and provides professional feedback in real time.

“The technology allows us to understand complex human actions and activities, interactions with dynamic objects and environments as well as interactions with virtual objects in augmented reality environments. This combined with a powerful mobile processing engine allows us to create virtual and real training grounds everywhere,” explained Thomas Bader, CTO of Coach-AI’s AI labs.

“Perfect Play has been created with the experience and expertise of the management and players of the Chelsea FC Academy, which is one of the elite football academies in the world,” added Chelsea FC Chief Executive Guy Laurence.

“Our vision is to share this immersive focus on technical, tactical and physical football development, not just with the select few who are fortunate enough to train at Cobham, but with every young footballer around the world with the desire to succeed in football,” he was quoted by the club as saying.

Currently available in the US and UK to iOS users, the app is soon set to launch on Android systems.

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