From Moneyball to the Summer Window: A Conversation with KAI Football's Ilai Amar

I had a great chat recently with Ilai Amar, Head of Football Data at KAI Football. Ilai sits at the intersection of statistical modelling and player recruitment — the kind of role that didn't really exist in football twenty years ago and now feels essential at any serious agency. We covered a lot of ground: how he got into the industry, what makes KAI tick, the cultural quirks of doing international business, the rush of a summer transfer window, and where the agency world is heading.I wanted to share some of the highlights here.

A football fan who couldn't play

Ilai's origin story is the one a lot of people in this industry quietly share.

"I always loved football but the problem was I was just never very good at playing it. So I had to figure out a way to keep that passion alive."

He grew up obsessed with the game, and credits his parents for keeping that flame alive when he was a kid. The path forward came from a book and a movie a lot of us know well.

"I was always very passionate about the intersection between statistical analysis and football scouting. Specifically inspired by the concept in the book and movie, of Moneyball. How could those specific theories or equations be applied and adapted in a mathematical conversion that makes sense for football?"

That curiosity turned into actual work. Years of crunching numbers. Building predictive models. Hunting for the right kind of value, not the obvious 18-year-old phenoms, but the almost invisible ones.

"Specifically the margins of players from the age of 21 to 26 who perhaps are past their young days but still have potential for ROI — the ones that are very obscure, from very obscure clubs that you wouldn't expect, but they could have some interesting statistical fit."

That's how he started writing scouting reports for clubs, and eventually how he got connected with Andrea Radrizzani. From there he and a team of machine learning engineers built out a scouting algorithm platform — predicting, from a single dataset for Ligue 1 in France, what player could fit which team and why. The backend, the equations, the conversions: that was Ilai's world. It still is, only now it's the whole agency's data infrastructure.

Advice for the next Ilai

I asked him what he'd tell someone younger trying to break into the industry. His answer was less about hacks and more about temperament.

"Dream big, in a sense where the sky's the limit. Once you kind of dream it and see it, believe it. Then ask what are the plans and necessary steps that are needed in order to take action upon that dream."

He's a big believer that the road map already exists if you go looking.

"All the pathways, hypothetically speaking, in terms of career-wise — they're already created. You can analyse trends of different people's careers, study them. Even going back to what they studied, what they did in school, in college, what skills are needed. Every job posting is pretty cyclical. If you don't have the qualifications this time around, you already have exactly what they're looking for next time."

I said something about right place, right time. He pushed back, gently.

"You have to be open to it. You have to put yourself in those situations, and to work for the joy of working — not the outcome. Because the outcome, I don't know, you don't know, God doesn't know. The outcome is one day at a time."

The team — and the philosophy behind it

When I asked Ilai what the best part of his job was, he didn't talk about deals or models. He talked about the people.

"Honestly, I have to say the people. The people specifically within KAI Football. Incredible team and experience all the way from the top to the bottom."

He walked me through the cast. Andrea Radrizzani, the co-founder, former owner of Leeds United and former chairman of Sampdoria. Giovanni Santoro, the other co-founder, a hugely experienced agent with a long track record. And Gleison, KAI's Head of Scouting, a former Serie A player who's run scouting departments at Italian clubs.What ties them together, in Ilai's words, is Andrea's bet on young players — the same bet that paid off at Leeds.

"Andrea's philosophy of developing top young players, like he did at Leeds United — when you look at how he really built out the academy infrastructure, there's Kalvin Phillips, there's Summerville, there's so many top players. Even Willy, who came from Switzerland, came straight to the Premier League — instant impact. He's brought that philosophy over to KAI Football."

Ilai sees his job as supporting that philosophy with data. Quietly making the work more efficient, more precise, harder to second-guess. He used a word for himself that made me laugh, because it's the most honest self-description I've heard from someone in his seat in a while.

"I'm a big nerd, if that makes sense — from a math, from a football perspective, but also just from data."

The challenge nobody warns you about: culture

I asked about the hardest part of the job. I half-expected something about transfer fees or compliance. Instead he went somewhere more interesting.

"American to American is quite different to American to British, American to someone in Spain, someone in Mexico. When you start speaking languages that perhaps are not your mother tongue, you still think in your mother tongue. So it's always interesting to collectively get over those language barriers, those cultural barriers."

He's right, and it's something we run into at ATHLIVO constantly. We're based in North America. Our clients are everywhere. A phrase that sounds friendly in one language can come across as blunt in another. A custom that's normal in Milan would be unusual in Mexico City. Being present to those differences, as Ilai put it, is half the work.

Why digital tools actually matter

There's a lot of noise about AI in football right now. Ilai is calm about it.

"There's a big AI and tech boom at the moment in terms of the buzz, but the amount of efficient tools that, in the long term, could be useful — it's quite minimal. There's not many of them."

What he wants, and what he says any agency needs in 2026, is a small number of tools that genuinely work. One centralised database. A few algorithms. The basics, done well.He walked me through what KAI was doing before integrating with ATHLIVO.

"For club requests, it was managed initially on an Excel spreadsheet. After that, realising it's not only time consuming and tedious — there needs to be a more efficient way. You could share the link to an Excel spreadsheet, but if someone doesn't have Excel, the formatting might be a bit different, a bit uncomfortable."

He even considered building a CRM from scratch.

"I was looking into building a CRM from scratch, but then the complications of the constant additions… you need a team there to support the agents' operations, but you need expertise. Which is why we're at ATHLIVO."

That part meant a lot to hear. We built ATHLIVO precisely because agents shouldn't have to also be software engineers. The job is hard enough.

"ATHLIVO has made it much easier for our sense to streamline, but also to view and present sometimes very complex information, and store a lot of different data. The constant support, constant updates — that's really easy to streamline and explain to anyone, from a scout to an agent to someone that maybe is not as technical-friendly."

That last bit is the one I think about most. A tool only works if the least technical person on the team can use it on a Tuesday morning without help.

How a club request actually works

This was the part of the conversation I'd been waiting for. I asked Ilai to walk me through what happens when a club sends KAI a request.

"Let's say someone from our team receives a request from AC Milan. Most likely attached will be the position, but in addition to that, characteristics. Let's say they're looking for a left-footed centre back. They might want a specific height. They might want him to be good on the ball, or perhaps good in the air. Then a deep dive on the additional characteristics."

That's just the football part. Then comes the money.

"There'll be a budget for either weekly or yearly salary, in net or gross, and then the transfer fee range. So with that, it's a very complicated Rubik's cube — which is quite interesting and fun to solve internally."

That line has been stuck in my head since the call. A Rubik's cube. That's exactly what it is. From there, KAI's data platforms, algorithms, scouting team, and partnerships all converge on potential names. They compare, analyse, and eventually send a profile back to the club: one with a real statistical fit, not a gut feel.This is exactly the workflow ATHLIVO's Club Requests feature is built for: turning that chaotic, multi-variable brief into a structured pipeline the whole agency can see.

May, the month nobody sleeps

We're recording this in spring. The summer window is a few weeks away. I asked what May looks like inside the agency.

"Most likely all hours of the day for everyone, really. It's crunch time. About a month until the window opens, and everyone is working within their strengths, working together to plan accordingly for the strategy and overview for the summer window."

He gave us a kind shout-out on the strategy side.

"Shout out to ATHLIVO for the strategy aspect, which is lovely to see in terms of streamlining — because all the ideas can be implemented really clearly on the platform and saved to be viewed later by everyone on the team."

If you've ever tried to run a distributed scouting operation across Italy, Spain, and England on a shared spreadsheet, you understand why this matters. Time zones, languages, and version-history headaches are not great for closing deals.

Where the industry is going

I asked Ilai for his read on the future of athlete representation. The conversation in this corner of football is endless. Family members representing players, players representing themselves, a thousand boutique agencies popping up.His take was different and more structural.

"The agency space is becoming a lot more of a corporate world, in the sense of the impact the United States is having on it. When you look at the big agencies — CAA Base, Stellar — more of them are seemingly following those structures of a top-down organisational flow and efficiency. It's becoming more and more corporate, which I think is a good thing — especially for players, but also for teams, because it might be more simple when everyone comes from somewhat of a similar background working-wise."

That mirrors what we see at ATHLIVO. The agencies that are growing are the ones that operate like real companies: clear processes, shared systems, accountability. Charisma still matters. It's just no longer enough on its own.

Agency data vs. club data

The last thing I asked Ilai was the difference between doing data work at a club versus at an agency. His answer was the most poetic moment of the call.

"With an agency, it's much more artistic. A club is usually looking for one kind of left-footed centre back, one kind of right back, one kind of striker. For an agency, it's quite open-ended. You're not really always looking just for one certain profile. What's quite interesting and different is the wide-net range of exploration within the agency world, which is quite different from the structure of a club."

I love that framing. Clubs ask narrow questions. Agencies ask wide ones. The data work has to expand or contract accordingly.

Final thought

What stuck with me most from the conversation wasn't the algorithms or the Moneyball references. It was Ilai's tone. Curious, grateful, calm. Excited about the people he works with. Not chasing the outcome.

"I'm super grateful for what I do, the incredible people I work with. At the end of the day, life is good. It's one day at a time."

That's a pretty good way to head into a transfer window.

Learn more about the agency: KAI FootballWant to see what Ilai and the KAI team are using day-to-day? Take a look at how ATHLIVO helps football agencies run cleaner operations, or book a demo and we'll walk you through it.