Losing the match? Follow the science. Change the kit!

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Artificial Intelligence software has shown that two different Manchester United gaffers got it right believing that kit and stadium seat colours matter if the team are going to win.

It is 1996. Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United are doing the unthinkable. At half time they are losing 3-0 to lowly Southampton. Then the team return to the pitch for the second half and they've changed their kit. No longer are they wearing their normal grey away kit but are in blue and white, and their performance improves (if not enough to claw back such a big lead). The match becomes infamous for that kit change: the genius gaffer blaming the team's poor performance on their kit seemed silly to most. Just play better football if you want to win!

Jump forward to 2021, and Manchester United Manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who originally joined United as a player in that same year, 1996, tells a press conference that the club are changing the stadium seats to improve the team's performance!

Is this all a repeat of previously successful mind games to deflect from poor performances? Or superstition, dressed up as canny management, perhaps. Actually, no. Both managers were following the science.

Ferguson wasn't just following some gut instinct, he had been employing a vision scientist, Professor Gail Stephenson, who had been brought in to the club to help improve the players' visual awareness, getting them to exercise the muscles in their eyes not just their legs! She had pointed out to Ferguson that the grey kit would make it harder for the players to pick each other out quickly. The Southampton match was presumably the final straw that gave him the excuse to follow her advice.

She was very definitely right, and modern vision Artificial Intelligence technology agrees with her! Colours do make it easier or harder to notice things and slows decision making in a way that matters on the pitch. 25 years ago the problem was grey kit merging into the grey background of the crowd. Now it is that red shirts merge into the background of an empty stadium of red seats.

It is all about how our brain processes the visual world and the saliency of objects. Saliency is just how much an object stands out and that depends on how our brain processes information. Objects are much easier to pick out if they have high contrast, for example, like a red shirt on a black background.

Peter McOwan and Hamit Soyel at Queen Mary combined vision research and computer science, creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that sees like humans in the sense that it predicts what will and won't stand out to us, doing it in real time (see DragonflyAI: I see what you see). They used the program to analyse images from that infamous football match before and after the kit change and showed that the AI agreed with Gail Stephenson and Alex Ferguson. The players really were much easier for their team mates to see in the second half (see the DragonflyAI version of the scenes below).

Dragonfly highlights areas of a scene that are more salient to humans so easier to notice. Red areas stand out the most. In the left image when wearing the grey kit, Ryan Giggs merges into the background. He is highly salient (red) in the right image where he is in the blue and white kit. Details matter and science can help teams that want to win in all sorts of ways. That includes computer scientists and Artificial Intelligence. So if you want an edge over the opposition, hire an AI to analyse the stadium scene at your next match. Changing the colour of the seats really could make a difference.

Find out more about DragonflyAI: dragonflyai.co/ [EXTERNAL]