At 18, cybersecurity student Sami Maghnaoui developed Playback IQ, an AI tool that “replays” soccer matches using raw data. After catching Google’s attention, he traveled to San José to present his project. It is the story of a self-taught innovator whose passion for soccer meets the discipline of coding.
It all began with a childhood fascination with computers. “When I was three years old, I’d press the keys and see that something was happening” 18-year-old Sami Maghnaoui told TelQuel. His first major technical breakthrough came at 14, when he began building games on Roblox, the popular game-creation platform, and learned the Lua programming language. He later switched to Python, which he found “pretty easy” before moving on to automation, scripting, and eventually cybersecurity. The Hack The Box platform, with its simulated environments where users hunt for vulnerabilities and capture “flags” became his training ground.
At the same time, the young man from Fez followed the path of a typical ould chaâb. He attended a Moroccan public school and earned his high school diploma in physical sciences with a score of 13/20. But Sami never saw himself fitting into the traditional education system. He describes himself as an entrepreneur at heart, a self-learner who thrives on experimentation and hands-on projects. That pragmatic mindset naturally drew him toward the United States, long a dream and now a concrete goal. He chose what he considered the most realistic and affordable path: higher education. For the past ten months, he has been living in Detroit, where he is studying cybersecurity. He selected Michigan for its relatively low cost of living and affordable university tuition, made possible through his father’s financial sacrifices.
For Sami, one factor has tied everything together: English. Having practiced it from a very young age through video games and online communities, he says it has served him “enormously”. In the tech world, he explains, the language opens doors, to resources, communities, tutorials, and competitions.
AI at the back of his mind
It was this spirit of experimentation that led Sami to develop Playback IQ, inspired by a simple personal observation. “Like many Moroccans, I love soccer” he explains. His original idea was to build an AI agent capable of analyzing live matches. But he quickly ran into a major obstacle: broadcasting rights and copyright restrictions made working with live footage impossible. So he pivoted. Instead, he turned to publicly available match data: the ball’s exact position, player movements, scoring opportunities, shots, tactical information, and more. The raw material already existed. He simply saw an opportunity.
The principle behind Playback IQ is to visually recreate a match from that data, producing a fully commented and analyzed “playback”. The application first generates a pre-match briefing, covering team backgrounds, records, expected tactics, and practical information. After the match, it delivers an analysis that, according to the Google demonstration, breaks down the game “second by second” while processing thousands of lines of data.
On screen, players appear as moving circles in real time. The match unfolds minute by minute, complete with animations for stoppages, shots on and off target, corner kicks, and continuously updated statistics. Users can click on any key moment, prompting a query-based tactical analyst to reconstruct passing sequences and player positioning before providing a detailed breakdown of the play. The entire experience is accompanied by AI-generated commentary powered by Google Search grounding and a text-to-speech engine.
“Dream Big”
This architecture earned Sami recognition through Google’s AI ecosystem. As a participant in the Google Cloud AI Agent Clinic, a program in which Google engineers help developers debug AI projects live, he collaborated extensively with the company’s engineers and visited its offices in San José. In the recorded session, Google Cloud engineer Luis Sala described the experience as “immersive” remarking that Playback IQ felt like “three or four apps in one” rather than a single application.
“In Morocco, people don’t dream big enough”
However, for Sami, the project is far more than a showcase. The main technical challenge, the very reason he joined “clinic”, is speed. Content generation, he says, remains too slow. A soccer fan, he argues, will not wait 60 or even 120 seconds to access a simple match briefing. The bottleneck is not functionality but latency.
Asked what lessons he has drawn from his early journey, Sami offers advice that doubles as a philosophy. His first recommendation is simple: “Dream big”. Sami elaborates “In Morocco, people don’t dream big enough” convinced that meaningful impact begins with ambitious goals. His second piece of advice is to prioritize self-learning, which “forces you to move quickly, to search, to test, to make mistakes, and to start over”. Rather than chasing trends, he encourages young people to pursue what genuinely interests them. School, he says, provides the foundations, but curiosity does the rest. With discipline and the wealth of resources available online, “you can go very far.”
Hackathons, he adds, have also played a defining role in his development by teaching him to build under pressure and rapidly transform ideas into working prototypes. He believes Morocco still lacks enough of these events. He recalls one Moroccan hackathon where AI tools were banned, calling the decision “a mistake”. Rather than restricting participants, he argues, organizers should equip them with every available tool and let creativity flourish.
In the short term, Sami is moving ahead without a rigid roadmap, juggling multiple projects while constantly monitoring technological developments and experimenting with new ideas. Five years from now, however, his ambition is clear: to found a company operating at the intersection of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He believes AI-powered robots will one day become as commonplace as personal computers, creating unprecedented opportunities while introducing entirely new security risks, not just data theft, but the possibility of machines themselves being physically compromised. His conviction reflects his own path: that of a teenager who left Fez with little more than a computer and an insatiable curiosity.
Beyond grades and connections
“Ah, young people today, they’re not hardworking enough, always looking for the easy way out…” Such remarks have become almost routine. Older generations have long underestimated the young, sometimes to the point of overlooking how profoundly their world has changed.
When Gen Z-led protests erupted, many older observers had never even heard of Discord. They discovered, perhaps too late, that political engagement could emerge through channels entirely different from those they themselves had known.
Against that backdrop, Sami’s story deserves attention. An 18-year-old ould chaâb invited by Google to present his AI project, he did not graduate at the top of his class. He did not attend elite schools or benefit from influential family connections. He simply pursued what fascinated him. Faced with the shortcomings of the education system, he chose to teach himself: refining his English, mastering the art of pitching, and learning through digital communities and open-source documentation, a world far removed from routine and the logic of bak sahbi.
Ultimately, there is nothing extraordinary about his story. What it demonstrates, above all, is the power of a simple realization: the greatest barrier is often a mental one. It is the barrier of resignation, the belief that limits are fixed. “Dream big” he says not as a slogan, but as a principle to live by.
Written in French by Zakaria Choukrallah, edited in English by Amina Kadiri
