sKora Tech: AI Innovations for Future Athletes

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sKora AI
Image Credit: sKora Tech

Amid the sports revolution in the Middle East, sKora Tech is a Qatari AI technology startup developing platforms for footballers to launch their professional careers.

Founded in 2020 by Adel Saad, the former Chief Technology Officer of Kora Stars Sports Agency, (a player representation agency which incorporates AI into its work), he has assisted in propelling sKora Tech onto the global state.

Residing within the world-renowned Qatar Science and Technology Park in Al-Rayyan, sKora has engineered its own AI, known as sKora.AI, to guide the next generation of players.

Through its AI, sKora aims to democratise football by offering aspiring players a way to more consistently reach the top echelons of the sport without relying on expensive training advice and regimes from elite coaches and clubs. Via this goal, sKora hopes to even the playing field and reduce the barriers to entry, enabling players from countries with less representation on the global stage to break through.

sKora Player Platform

When players become a part of the sKora network they submit their athletic and performance data to be analysed by sKora’s AI. Once the AI has computed through the data, sKora generates a player profile for each footballer known as a “Pro Player CV”.

This profile transforms a player’s data into a marketable suite of information for interested clubs and scouts, featuring a range of information such as a player’s footballing history, their individual characteristics and skills.

Additionally, these profiles highlight key metrics players are proficient at, but also showcase what areas they have room for improvement in.

This latter part is especially relevant for sKora, as the organisation prides itself on providing a unique roadmap for each player to help them improve.

This roadmap is tailored by a range of factors and aims to guide players to improve their pitfalls and maximise their strengths, in order to increase their proficiency and marketability at a professional level.

All of these features can be accessed readily at any time on sKora Tech’s very own app, known as the sKora App. In addition, players can share clips of their performances on the app, allowing them to further entice potential scouts.

Global Impact

As a Qatar based organisation, sKora was on display in in the lead up to and during the Qatar World Cup 2022, showcasing the country’s and the wider region’s rapid ascension in the sport’s technology sphere as a competitive force.

Across this period, sKora’s was repeatedly recognised for its work and technological innovation, winning the Hamad Bin Khalifa University Industrial Innovation Fund in 2021, and featuring as a finalist in the 2022 KPMG Private Enterprise Tech Innovator in Qatar and the 2021 Startup of the Year Award and Founder of the Year Award by Global Startup Awards.

Since then, sKora has continued to excel, accruing major partners as it seeks to support football’s major 300 million plus community of players.

Notably, sKora Tech achieved a partnership with enterprise AI organisation, GPTBots.Ai in late September last year. GTPBots.Ai is a significant player within the AI business market, providing organisations with assistance in implementing and integrating AI models and AI agents across a range of departments such as human resources, data analysis, customer service and more.

Conclusion

Recognised by a range of global institutions and boosted by new major global partnerships, sKora Tech has quickly become a significant presence within the football technology industry.  Furthermore, the organisation features the ability to continue to grow via its Pro Player CV service and unique player roadmaps, all supported by the company’s very own sKora.AI.

For more information on sKora Tech, check out their website.

 

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Football Victoria and VicHealth partner on anti-racism program as community sport data reveals systemic problem

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Football Victoria has partnered with the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation to roll out the Set The Standard initiative across the state’s football clubs, in a collaboration that signals a significant shift in how Australia’s most popular club-based sport is approaching racism and cultural exclusion at the grassroots level.

The partnership brings together the state’s peak football governing body and its primary health promotion agency around a shared finding that can no longer be treated as incidental. According to the 2025 report Enhancing the Capacity of Victorian Community Sport to Tackle Racism, 56 per cent of surveyed participants had experienced or witnessed racism in community sport. In a state where football draws participants from some of the most culturally diverse communities in the country, that figure represents a systemic failure the sport can no longer address through conduct policies alone.

Clubs that subscribe to the Set The Standard newsletter will be entered into a draw to win one of three $1,000 vouchers, available for equipment, facility improvements, events or other community initiatives. The incentive is designed to drive early engagement with a program whose ambitions extend well beyond a newsletter subscription.

What the Partnership Signals

Racism in sport has historically been treated as a conduct and governance issue, managed through complaints mechanisms that require incidents to be formally reported and tend to significantly undercount the actual prevalence of harm. VicHealth’s framing of racism as a public health problem repositions the entire conversation.

Experiences of racism are associated with measurable negative health outcomes including anxiety, depression and social withdrawal. When community sport, which governments and health agencies actively promote as a vehicle for physical and mental wellbeing, becomes a source of those same harms, the public health cost is direct and quantifiable.

Resources, not Rhetoric

For Football Victoria, the partnership brings something the governing body cannot provide on its own. VicHealth’s credibility, resources and public health framework give the initiative a foundation that a sporting organisation working alone would struggle to establish. Set The Standard offers clubs practical tools and guidance built around progress rather than perfection, which reflects a realistic understanding of how cultural change works inside volunteer-run community organisations.

The $1,000 vouchers are not a side note. Most community clubs operate on tight margins, depend on volunteer administrators and are already stretched managing growing participation demands. Finding room to invest in cultural development programs on top of everything else is difficult. Providing tangible resources directly addresses that constraint at the point where clubs are most likely to disengage.

The program also arrives at a consequential moment. Football in Victoria is absorbing significant participation growth following the AFC Women’s Asian Cup and sustained increases in junior registrations, bringing new communities into the game in large numbers. The 2025 data suggests the environments those communities are entering are not consistently safe or welcoming. Participation growth and cultural safety work need to move together. A sport that grows larger without becoming more inclusive has not actually improved the experience of the people playing it.

The Man Who Built a Women’s Football Program from Nothing is now an Award-Winning Gender Equity Leader

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Image Credit: Football Victoria

Eight years ago, Spring Hills Football Club did not have a girls’ team. Today it has one of the most recognised women’s programs in Melbourne’s west, a senior NPLW side, and a head coach who has just been named Gender Equity Leader of the Year at the Melton City Council Volunteer Achievement Awards.

Tom Markovski, Spring Hills’ NPLW Head Coach, received the award at a ceremony coinciding with National Volunteer Week, recognised for his community leadership, promotion of gender equality and commitment to advancing the status of women and people of all genders in sport. The recognition comes from outside the football community entirely, awarded by a local council celebrating volunteers across every sector of civic life in one of Melbourne’s fastest-growing regions.

Building from scratch

When Markovski arrived at Spring Hills, women’s football at the club did not exist. His first act was to champion the establishment of the club’s first all-girls team, a process that required persuading a club culture built around men’s football that the investment was worth making.

Women’s football in community clubs has historically struggled to access the same facilities, scheduling priority, coaching resources and institutional support as the men’s game. Clubs have been slow to invest in programs whose return is less immediately visible than a senior men’s premiership, and in a growing outer-suburban community like Melton, where volunteer capacity is finite and demand across every program is high, the case for building something new always has to compete with the urgency of maintaining what already exists.

Markovski made the case anyway, and kept making it across eight years of coaching senior and junior NPL teams while simultaneously building the structural foundations of a women’s program designed to outlast any individual’s involvement. The club’s first all-girls team became multiple junior girls teams. Those junior teams created the pipeline for a senior women’s side. The senior women’s side created visible pathways for younger players to see where the game could take them within their own club.

The outcome is a program that Spring Hills now holds up as central to its identity rather than supplementary to it. The club has become a leader in female participation in Melbourne’s west, and recently made history within the NPLW Victoria structure by fielding junior teams coached entirely by female coaches, a milestone that reflects the depth of the program Markovski helped build.

What the Award Recognises

The Melton City Council’s decision to name Markovski its Gender Equity Leader of the Year places his work in a frame that extends beyond football. Melton is one of the fastest-growing local government areas in Australia, a diverse and rapidly expanding community where the institutions that bring people together, like schools, councils, sporting clubs, carry an outsized responsibility for social cohesion.

Mayor Cr. Lara Carli, speaking at the awards ceremony, reflected on the role volunteers play in communities like Melton’s. “Volunteering creates friendships, strengthens communities and builds a sense of belonging,” she said. “It helps people feel connected, supported and valued, and those things are more important than ever in a growing and diverse community like ours.”

For the girls now playing football at Spring Hills who were not playing anywhere eight years ago, Markovski’s contribution is not abstract. It is the specific and concrete fact of having somewhere to play, someone to coach them, and a pathway that leads somewhere.

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