THE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION | SPORTS

AI Innovation for a Global Leader in Sporting Experience

Custom AI functionality and CMS integration for Wembley Experiences’ personalised fan photobooks.

Services

  • UI/UX Design
  • Strategy
  • AI Development
  • API Integration
  • Automation Strategy
  • Data Privacy & Security

Results

The integration of AI into the Wembley Experiences platform delivered a seamless, fully automated photo-book creation process, eliminating the need for manual curation and ensuring every user’s story was told beautifully and accurately.

  • 93% success rate in automatic focal-point detection and cropping accuracy
  • Corrected and ordered thousands of photos using AI-driven time estimation
  • Fully automated workflow from user upload to final printed product
  • Enhanced user and client experience: books now generated automatically, with no need for manual photo correction
  • All data securely anonymised, encrypted, and deleted post-delivery

The Brief

Wembley Experiences offers fans a premium way to capture their day at Wembley Stadium through personalised photo books combining official match photography with their own images.

The challenge lay in the complexity of user-generated content: thousands of photos taken across multiple devices, orientations, and sources – some missing metadata, others sent via messaging apps that stripped time data entirely. The result was inconsistent image placement, cropping errors, and misordered timelines that disrupted the narrative “story of the day.”

To ensure the product could scale commercially and deliver consistently high quality, the process had to be fully automated. The solution needed to identify focal points, crop intelligently, and determine the correct sequence of photos – all while maintaining data privacy and operating seamlessly within the existing CMS.

The Solution

Scout designed and integrated two bespoke AI-powered systems directly into the photobook CMS, allowing editors and users alike to benefit from advanced automation without ever leaving the platform.

 

1. Optimal Focal Point:

A custom AI feature built to analyse and understand image composition. The system identifies key elements within a photo and determines the optimal focal point between them. This ensures that every photo is cropped intelligently – preserving key subjects and moments whether placed in portrait or landscape slots.

    • Achieved a 93% success rate through iterative testing and random batch validation.
    • Removes the need for users to manually adjust image positioning.
    • Enables thousands of photos to be processed automatically and accurately.

 

2. Time Estimation:

To correctly order images in the “story of the day,” Scout built a system to analyse visual cues – such as sky colour, lighting, and even scoreboard details – to estimate when each photo was taken.

  • Corrects inaccurate or missing “date taken” EXIF data, especially for images shared via apps like WhatsApp or Messenger.
  • AI successfully placed photos within an average of 18 minutes of their true chronological order during testing.
  • Merges user-generated and official event photos into a single, unified timeline.

 

Both systems are fully embedded within the CMS, with no need for external tools, logins, or third-party uploads. The AI is accessed via bespoke, complex API integrations, developed and implemented entirely by Scout – a rare capability that highlights both the technical and architectural expertise behind the project.

Crucially, all user data is anonymised, encrypted, and deleted once the book is produced and delivered, ensuring full compliance with data protection standards.

The Outcome

The result is a completely seamless process that delivers outstanding results for both fans and The FA:

  • Fans simply upload photos and receive a polished, perfectly ordered photobook without any manual intervention.
  • The FA and Wembley Experiences teams can confidently scale the product without requiring staff to curate or correct photos.
  • The technology works invisibly – ensuring fans focus only on the finished product, not the process behind it.
  • Demonstrates The FA’s leadership in adopting advanced technology to enhance fan experiences.

Through this innovative solution, we have been able to demonstrate the ability of the Scout team to conceive, build, and integrate complex, AI-driven systems which solve real-world business challenges.

Key Features

  • Custom Web / CMS Development
  • UI/UX design
  • Custom AI Functionality
  • AI CMS Integration via API
  • Secure Data Handling
  • Intelligent Automation
  • Data Analysis

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