BusinessDayTV Sep 20, 2026 15m 5m saved
With Chris Venter, Performance Analyst at the Lions · Taka, who works on the digital and sponsorship side at the Lions
Days before a match, when the opposition names its squad, the Lions' performance analyst runs it through an Excel database the club keeps and through Claude, and gets back a prediction built on past results, stats and injury news.
Most of what is written about AI in sport is about automatic cameras and wearable trackers. At Ellis Park the analyst says the cameras are the part that does not work yet, and the value is in the archive nobody had time to watch.
"It definitely helps you to go further back in time. Get a lot through a lot more detail and info and trends than what manual labor would be. It gives you time on hand. It merges data to video. Makes all the workflow so much quicker, so much more accurate."
Chris Venter, the performance analyst at the Lions, on BusinessDayTV, prepares the opposition work the coaches use on match day; Taka, who works on the club's digital side, is the person who has to tell a sponsor what its logo on the jersey was worth. The segment was filmed at the Johannesburg stadium the club plays out of, which has carried the 10bet name since August.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it. 15 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
The club's squad-list prediction runs through an Excel database and Claude, and Venter says it is a background check rather than the match-day plan
The AI cameras still follow a ball thrown off the side of the field, which is why the club uses AI on old footage instead of the live picture
Kick technique can be graded by labeling clips successful and unsuccessful and letting the model find what separates them
Tackles, carries, lineouts and scrums are what AI picks up; a coach's own language about technique is not
Venter's worry about a TMO tool is not accuracy but the human factor, which he says is "probably a good thing" to keep
Every sponsor logo on a jersey is tracked across broadcast, social and the boards around the ground, and given a monetary value
The chest and the back of the shorts are the two spots that sell, because a rugby broadcast shows all 360 degrees of a player
Brands on the east side of the ground get the most television time, because the cameras sit opposite the shaded grandstand
1. What AI Gives An Analyst
The presenter opened at Ellis Park, the stadium where South Africa beat the All Blacks in the 1995 World Cup final, and put it to Venter that AI is now part of how a club prepares. Venter's first answer was about depth of history rather than cleverness.
The gain is reach back through old footage, and video tied to the data
It definitely helps you to go further back in time. Get a lot through a lot more detail and info and trends than what manual labor would be. It gives you time on hand. It merges data to video. Makes all the workflow so much quicker, so much more accurate.
Chris Venter
He put one condition on all of it, and he put it on immediately.
The output is only as good as the question asked of it
If you are asking the right questions and looking at the right stuff. Otherwise you've got all this info that can be misleading.
Chris Venter
2. Squad Lists And Claude
The presenter asked what happens in the days between an opponent naming its squad and kickoff, since that is the window where an edge would show up.
The club's own database is run together with Claude to produce a prediction
I spoke about it Excel database sheet that we have that we collaborate with Claude and it gives you prediction based on stats, previous results, internet info regarding injuries, squad availability especially international windows when some teams lose the international players.
Chris Venter
Venter then took the weight off it. The prediction is a thing to hold in mind, not a plan, and the named squad can change anyway.
It is not what match-day preparation is built on
So having that info days before as you said when the teams get released the outcome might slightly change. But as I said it's not something that we will base our game day prep on.
Chris Venter
3. Kicking, Frame By Frame
The presenter brought up Morne Steyn's long-range kicking for the Springboks and asked whether AI can help a fly half. Venter described a training set rather than a product: clips of one kicker's attempts, labeled by outcome.
Label the clips by result and let the model find the difference
If you look at your kickers and just comparing the video footage, the actual clip of their technique and just label them as successful kicks and unsuccessful kicks. How it will automatically or on its own determine what is the better technique per kicker.
Chris Venter
What he wants back from it is a biomechanical report — whether the kicker was off balance, leaning to one side, standing too close to the ball, and the angles and degrees of the strike.
4. Could AI Help The TMO?
The presenter, describing the arguments players have with referees about shoulders and arms in the tackle, asked whether AI could assist the television match official. Venter said it is worth exploring, and framed it as a flag rather than a verdict.
A referee cannot stop the game for everything, and a prompt would be fair both ways
I think it's something definitely worth exploring if you can teach AI about especially in crunching games moments where the ref can't stop the game for everything. Player just runs in front of him and he misses a certain incident. And that's the human factor that we still have in sport and in humanity as a whole, which is probably a good thing.
Chris Venter
The person in front of the screen is already there to sweep up foul play and safety, he said. A system that knows what an incident is supposed to look like would tell that person where to look, and would do it for both sides, which is his answer to the supporter who thinks the referee is one-sided.
5. The Cameras Are Not There
Asked how much progress he has actually made, Venter was blunt about where his time goes: finding time to test whether a thing works at all. The one experiment he named was the automated camera, and it failed on rugby.
Automatic cameras follow the wrong ball
One thing we did look at was the cameras, the AI cameras specifically, which is a good thing for certain sports in rugby. It hasn't perfected it yet
Chris Venter
Somebody throws a ball on the touchline and the camera follows it, he said, while the thing you wanted was the event it missed. So the club has pointed AI at the archive instead — previous data, historical data, trends, and the styles of play that come out of a given position.
6. The Job He Wants To Keep
The presenter asked what Venter wants from AI over the next few years, then asked the harder version: is it going too far? Venter said he thinks about it often.
He hopes it does not reach his own line of work
I hope it's not something that comes into my line of work that will replace me because I think at the end of the day if you look at many industries where AI is taking over and putting people out of jobs but in the end at the end of the day it will push people to be more creative to find that the human factor and because everybody and everything needs a human in it
Chris Venter
What he wants is narrower: keep the job, get through more work in a shorter turnaround, and hand players and coaches a better summarized and more accurate picture. When the presenter put it back to him as adding to the coaching staff rather than shrinking it, he agreed twice.
On technique, he drew the line where the coaching vocabulary starts.
Main events are machine work; a coach's own reading of technique is not
But your actual your own individual lingo and coaching aspect, what you look at as a coach and what I would look at it as an analyst would be the technique stuff.
Chris Venter
The exception is repetition. Given the compiled data, he said, it can show him a consistent error in a player — a flaw in technique, in ability, or in what the club would call attitude.
7. Sponsor Logos, Tracked
The second half of the segment moved to the commercial side, with Taka, who works on the club's digital side. He started from why any of this is funded at all.
Sponsorship is what makes the professional game run
Marketing is basically the lifeblood of sport if you want to call it that professional sport. Yes, we need the athletes, we need everything else, but to make everything happen, you need sponsorship to make sure that everything can run fluidly.
Taka
Every logo on the jersey is tracked, because the sponsor bought a return
All of those are tracked because sponsors sponsor teams for a return on investment.
Taka
The mechanics, as he described them: the club emails the new sponsor's logos and its own jerseys to the people who run the tracking, a prompt is written, and from that point the brand is counted on the jerseys, on the branding inside the stadium and across the social platforms. A report can be called up at the end of a week or whenever it is wanted.
The report is images, exposure and a value per brand
you call up a report and it shows you the different images of where the brand was tracked and the value behind each brand and the exposure that it got.
Taka
What goes back to the sponsor is broadcast time, social time, digital out-of-home boards, and what he called the likes of impressions and reach.
And a figure for what the attention was worth
and we can give them reports back that can actually give you the likes of your impressions that you got the reach that you got and also to a certain extent what the monetary value could have been from all the eyes that have seen your brand on that jersey on whatever platform it was.
Taka
8. Why The East Side Sells
The presenter, pointing at his own shirt, asked whether a logo in a less prominent spot costs less. Taka said it does, and named the spots that carry a premium.
The chest is the maximum-exposure position
As you can see, there's different spots on the jersey, and I mean, every sport fanatic out there will know that there's key spots on the jersey that gets the most exposure during the game. For example, on the chest gets maximum exposure during the game.
Taka
Rugby is unusual, he said, because a broadcast gives the full 360 degrees of the jersey and the player. That makes an area most sports would treat as dead space valuable.
The back of the shorts is a key spot, because of the scrum
So you must remember the back of shorts is quite a key spot.
Taka
The same logic runs to where a board is bought inside the ground. The grandstand is where people prefer to sit because it is in the shade, the main cameras sit on that side, and so the shot that goes out faces east.
The east side gets the television time, so that is where the brands go
And the cameras on that side giving the view at home the best view. And the best view would then be of the stadium would be facing the east and most of our brands on the east because that gets the most TV time.
Taka
Bonus Insights
The reporting runs quarterly, half-yearly and annually
What we do is on a quarterly basis on a bianually and annually we obviously try to give back reports and we give back reports and in that we look at what we do we look what works what didn't work as well and we try to enhance that all the time.
Taka
The empty seats are the other half of the commercial problem
The presenter framed the whole marketing section around filling the ground, for test matches and for United Rugby Championship games alike, and closed by saying the advice was aggressive marketing with a clear view of who the target audience is.
One thing the club will not move
Asked where the lion badge sits, the presenter answered his own question: over the heart, and that does not change.
Venter's bottom line is that AI has already changed what an analyst can get through and how far back he can look, while the two jobs clubs assume it is doing, running the cameras and reading technique, are the two it cannot yet do; Taka's is that the same technology has turned a jersey and a stand into priced inventory, counted logo by logo and reported back to the sponsor with a number attached.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
The Lions (The Johannesburg club both speakers work for, and the subject of the whole segment: analysis on one side, sponsorship reporting on the other)
Claude (Used with the club's own Excel database to produce a prediction on a named opposition squad, from stats, previous results and injury news)
10bet (The naming-rights sponsor of the stadium and the club since August, and Taka's worked example of a new brand being loaded into the tracking)
United Rugby Championship (The competition the presenter named alongside test matches when he made the case for filling the ground)
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