What will football of the future look like?

This article appeared for the first time in Revue Telecom , and is republished for #Mondial2018.

Football is the most popular sport on earth, played regularly by more than 300 million players. But between the first matches organized by the Football Association in England in the 19th century, and our current practice, what has changed? “I am surprised that, in this day and age where innovation is omnipresent in all areas, nothing is being done for football.” says Jacques-Henri Eyraud, president of Olympique de Marseille, the flagship club of French football. Not so surprising when we know that another legend of French football, Michel Platini, has publicly spoken out on multiple occasions against the implementation of certain technological devices such as video refereeing; football should remain a popular sport, a universal language, that everyone can play with a simple ball. But its practitioners, whose habits evolve, whether they like it or not, at the frenetic pace imposed by technological advances, wouldn't they want to see their favorite sport evolve with them?

I offer you an overview of the evolution of football as I perceive it, from my five years managing a start-up which puts cutting-edge technologies at the service of amateur players.

The bad example of professional football

There is one aspect of sport that we think of directly when we try to approach it through a scientific prism, and that is the statistical analysis of performances. However, we are not talking about anything new here since in the 1950s, the English analyst Charles Reep made the observation, which we will caricature in the following way: the more the ball is present in the opponent's area, the more chances you have of scoring , it is therefore advisable, as soon as you have the ball, to send it as quickly as possible into the opponent's area. Thus was born the kick and rush strategy, which, although eternally discussed, is still used by some teams today.

If the stats have been taken into account for half a century, it is only in recent years that we have seen their explosion, as evidenced by the rise of companies like Opta (bought in 2013 by a media group for $60 million) , whose activity consists of collecting data on the game to resell it in real time to the media in particular. And how do these actors generate the data? Well, sorry to break a myth, but there is indeed an employee who watches each match and notes the actions one by one. Or rather three employees, one for each team and one who supervises. Enough to feed the growing appetite for statistics among the general public, particularly sports betting enthusiasts, but we are far from a technological revolution that will change the way each of us plays football.

What happens when matches are not filmed? Do pro teams measure their data during training sessions? We are now used to seeing these players in training wearing “GPS bras” which would lead us to believe that this is the case. A nice communication move for these bra manufacturers who are displayed on the chests of the biggest players in exchange, one imagines, for a lower price, but is the data collected really used? The German company SAP says it provides the German national team with a 200-page report of statistics per player at the end of each session. I invite even the most dataphiles among you to imagine the workload that this analysis can represent, which therefore involves at least the hiring of people dedicated to this task, but you still need to find capable people on the market to do so, and clubs having the financial means. We are therefore in the presence of a niche market which will not scale up to be adopted by everyone.

A sport created by the people, for the people

Professional football has a colossal impact on society, to the point of elevating certain players to the rank of demigod in the eyes of certain people, yet it is only a showroom of world football, the essential actor of which remains the practicing. In commercial terms, professional football generates an annual activity of 4 billion euros in France, the income of which comes largely from sports betting and the media and therefore indirectly from the players who live their passion. And professional clubs are adapting to please this target, like European clubs which are finding Asian players in order to increase their popularity within this emerging market. So if each individual player gets into the habit of collecting and analyzing their personal statistics from their first steps on the pitch, then the whole of football, including the pros, will adapt to this new way of taking performance into account. .

It remains to define the actor who will transform the practice of football among players. We could think of the federations which are there in part to define the rules of the practice and ensure its proper functioning. However, historically the federations have always had a conservative position in relation to innovations, even if it means going against the mass of practitioners. A blatant example are the cycling federations which are today fighting against the presence of electrically assisted bicycles in competition, while this technological progress represents a major revolution in the history of sport, allowing a very large number of amateur cyclists to tackle the legendary passes of the Tour de France, and thus democratize access to the discipline.

If we follow economic logic, we would need an actor who has an interest in popularizing the practice of football even more, for example to transform the player into a consumer of energy drinks... It is indeed Red Bull that the In 2018, we found the initiative of the Neymar Jr's Five, a 5-a-side football competition organized simultaneously on five continents leading up to a world final in Brazil. A somewhat special World Cup since the rules are as follows; if you score a goal, you choose a player from the opposite team to eliminate, until one of the two teams no longer has a player. A hell of a departure from the usual rules which would make many reactionaries choke, but after all the players are there to have fun, why not offer them as much as possible?

It is also no coincidence that the competition is organized on the basis of 5-a-side football, which is itself a simplified version of traditional 11-a-side football to make it more spectacular, more attractive and accessible. For 10 years in Western Europe we have seen a proliferation of private centers allowing a football pitch to be reserved at 5 an hour, allowing the emergence of football on demand. No need to register for a competition over a year, all you need to do is bring together 10 players occasionally, for example during an afterwork event, and reserve the nearest pitch to be able to practice your passion in ideal conditions, All without commitment. In France it is estimated that there are now more players who play this type of football at least once a year than those licensed by the FFF. However, it is difficult to know whether this practice will develop uniformly throughout the world, since it encounters serious barriers, particularly with the price of land; Note that there is only one center in Paris intramural, at Porte de la Chapelle. On the other hand, the need for players to practice their passion is indeed universal, so an innovation that democratizes the practice and increases the player's pleasure should find its audience in the four corners of the world.

5-a-side football, fertile (synthetic) ground

If they have not yet conquered the world, private 5-a-side football centers are an ideal laboratory for trying to design the football of tomorrow, since we can consider that every enthusiast sets foot there at least once a year . This is the terrain that we have chosen at Footbar to develop artificial intelligence capable of understanding everything that happens in a match, every move, every pass, every strike, etc. from a sensor worn on each player's leg. So when you reserve a pitch, the center distributes a sensor to you each, you make your match, and at the end our platform offers you your “Ligue 1 equivalent”, namely the professional player to whom you most resembled by your behavior in the field. An immediate and fun way to characterize your performance and compare it to that of your friends.

The perspectives offered by collecting data from each player are numerous, for example we can imagine the cultivation of a virtual avatar from your sports data. Where some people still wonder whether video games are a sport, we believe that the physical/virtual boundary will fade and that the sport of tomorrow will systematically include these two components; the competition will still call on physiological qualities but its broadcast channel will be digital. Like Pokémon Go, which managed the feat of sending an entire generation of geeks out for a walk, we believe that the champions of FIFA or PES can return to the field, if the game is worth the effort. The secret lies in the experience that we offer to the player, which also places private centers, not in competition with other sports, but with the entire industry of leisure between friends, of escape games. to the cinema or even to the amusement park, it's who will make groups of friends want to come and spend their money the most. And with its popularity, football has a serious card to play, but it still needs to know how to take its digital turn and adapt to the demands of players today.