Exploring Stakeholders' Perceptions of Interactions in Competitive Sports: A Study on the Introduction of AI in the Process.

Elite competitive sport is a team effort. Many stakeholders contribute to the performance of an athlete: the coaching team, the medical team, the administrative leaders,... This can be represented in the form of a strongly connected network, whose balance tends today to be changed with the progressive introduction of artificial intelligence. This phenomenon can be analyzed using tools such as social networks analysis, but the main difficulty is to build the networks in the absence of data from the various stakeholders. This paper has two objectives: (1) to understand the pattern of interactions between stakeholders via their respective perceptions, (2) to study the impact of the introduction of artificial intelligence (A.I.) as a stakeholder in the process. To answer these questions, we proposed a questionnaire on the perception of stakeholders’ interaction to the athletes, coaching teams, medical teams and administrative leaders presented at the European Championships in Munich 2022 via an application that we developed for smartphones. One hundred and eight stakeholders responded for the following sports: athletics, canoe sprint, cycling, gymnastics, rowing, climbing, table tennis and triathlon. The results of these questionnaires were used to construct social network-type graphs. The results show significant differences between the networks, which confirms a discrepancy in the feelings of the different stakeholders. Also, a privileged relationship between the athlete, the coaches and the health professionals emerges but is attenuated by the introduction of A.I. in the process.