Spotlight: Luke Ford’s AI-Powered AFLW Game Analysis System
At DeveloperBay, we love seeing developers push technology into new frontiers — especially when it blends technical innovation with genuine passion. Today, we’re showcasing a project by Luke Ford (lukeford.dev), who’s redefining how professional sports teams understand performance and strategy through AI-driven analysis.
Reimagining Game Analysis with AI
Luke’s system takes on a huge challenge: analyzing every AFLW (AFL Women’s) game ever played to build a deep, evolving picture of how each team performs across a season. It’s not just number-crunching — it’s pattern recognition powered by a custom fine-tuned large language model (LLM) trained specifically on AFLW footage and data.
Here’s how it works:
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Full Match Ingestion: The system automatically ingests every AFLW game replay, creating a season-long database of video and stats.
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Team and Player Insights: It identifies patterns like D50 exits, kick-in tendencies, stoppage setups, forward entries, and even late-game trends.
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Player Development Tools: Coaches and players get actionable insights into strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement — complete with automatically generated film clips.
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Opponent Preparation: Before each game, the system produces coach-ready briefs summarizing how the upcoming opponent plays, where they’re vulnerable, and the setups that exploit those weaknesses.
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AI Query Interface: Coaches can simply ask, “Show me all of Team X’s kick-ins through the corridor from the last three rounds,” and receive instant video reels and statistical summaries.
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Continuous Learning: As new games are uploaded, the system continually adapts — improving its predictions and insights over time.
Why It Matters
AI in sports isn’t new — top clubs like Liverpool FC are already experimenting with tools like TacticAI (a collaboration with Google DeepMind). But where those tools focus on soccer, Luke’s work is the first of its kind for the AFL and AFLW — leagues that rely heavily on spatial awareness, team structure, and set plays.
By combining computer vision, natural language processing, and advanced analytics, Luke’s system gives coaches and analysts a new lens through which to understand the game — and ultimately, to help players reach their full potential.
The Future of Sports Analytics
As Luke puts it, this is more than just an analysis engine — it’s an AI coaching assistant that understands the nuances of Aussie Rules and keeps getting smarter with every match. It’s the kind of innovation that proves how deeply technology can amplify human expertise — not replace it.
Explore more of Luke’s work at lukeford.dev
And if you’re building something equally innovative in sports, AI, or analytics — we’d love to feature you next on DeveloperBay.