Cardiff City Football Club has appointed Welsh AI company nisien.ai as its Official Online Safeguarding Partner, extending the real-world impact of research developed through Cardiff University’s HateLab.
The partnership is designed to help the Club move from retrospective monitoring towards proactive, intelligence-led safeguarding. nisien’s HERO platform detects and classifies potentially harmful online content, helping safeguarding teams understand its nature, severity and likely targets while an incident is still developing.
The approach was demonstrated during Cardiff City’s fixture against Wrexham. HERO captured and analysed the online conversation around the match, separating higher-risk activity from the much larger volume of general commentary.
For the Club’s safeguarding team, this created a real-time picture of where harmful content was appearing and which players might require additional support after the final whistle. Rather than waiting for abuse to be reported by a player or discovered in a retrospective review, staff could prepare appropriate welfare conversations and support.
The collaboration also reflects the close relationship between player welfare and performance. Timely support can reduce the burden on individuals and give safeguarding professionals clearer evidence on which to base decisions.
For HateLab, the partnership represents another stage in the translation of academic research into practice. Methods first developed to study online hate at scale are now helping a professional football club respond to emerging risks around its players.
Read the partnership announcement