A British artificial intelligence firm is looking to revolutionise the world of sports transfers by designing software that picks out bargain rugby players.

ASI Data Science has signed a deal with London Irish, the rugby union club, to help it find undiscovered gems by using cutting edge data analysis techniques.

While rugby scouting typically requires looking through hours of footage to assess a player’s ability, the software allows a club to enter the name of a star player and will assess match statistics to find players with similar styles.

It looks through around 100 different parameters taken from Opta, the sports data company, which covers every professional player on the planet, to find players similar to the star that a club would buy if money were no object.

The machine learning software clusters different types of players together, making it easier for scouts and analysts to find players and removing the biases that many believe cloud judgements when signing players.