How technology will be democratized in sport

This article was originally published in Newstank on 09/18/2020. It is the first part of a collaboration between this media intended for sports professionals and the SporTech collective .

In 2020, we no longer find images of professional footballers training without them wearing a “GPS bra”. Publicity stunt or real revolution? In the general public, the association is made: professional athletes have now adopted cutting-edge technologies. In reality, it is far from being so obvious. Is there a team that can claim to have won a Championship, or at least improved its performance, thanks to technology?

Tracking technologies: from GPS to video capture

For 10 years in particular, clubs have been able to equip themselves with tracking devices, notably under the leadership of the Australian startup Catapult, which was founded in 2006 and offers a bra equipped with a satellite positioning system ( GPS).

We can first question the relevance of a GPS alone for measuring the athlete's positioning .

“GPS alone has limits”

The standard system has a precision of around ten meters and allows a few measurement points per second, it seems suitable for following the route of a cyclist, but has limits for measuring speed during an interval exercise. , or simply an indoor competition. This will quickly be associated with other types of sensors capable of measuring the movement of a body, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, (if the two are coupled, we call it an inertial unit). By merging the data, we therefore obtain coverage of both background movements and precise movements , allowing a more precise measurement of the player's behavior. Many companies offer equipment of this type, such as the Swiss startup ASI, or the French company McLloyd.

A second question concerns the positioning of the sensor . Bras favor a measurement of the movement of the torso, which can be relevant in rugby for example, since it makes it possible to measure the force of the impacts received. We can also evaluate the speed of the runs carried out by the athlete, but we are limited if we want to obtain measurements on the stride for example, which can make it possible to detect fatigue and prevent injuries. It appears more relevant to place sensors as close as possible to the relevant movement of each sport.

Thus in tennis or golf, we will equip the racket or the club, as proposed by the Swiss company Piq, in football we will favor the leg, like the American Zepp and the French Goaltime and Footbar, or the foot like Adidas or the Israeli startup PlayerMaker, in order to measure more relevant information such as touches of the ball.

Another branch of tracking has developed in parallel in recent years, that of video .

“Using video data requires significant manual work”

This seems logical given the explosion in the number of competitions broadcast, or at least filmed; For many years, companies like Opta have been using this flow to manually measure performance indicators. It is mainly this data that feeds the sports press today, but this requires significant manual work. Several startups use artificial intelligence tools to automate this work, such as the French from SkillCorner. If the video stream is a common element in professional sport, the democratization of access is an issue that the French startups NGTV and BallIn are tackling, which install their own cameras, or Rematch, which relies on spectators' smartphones.

However, are we going to impose one tracking technology at the expense of another?

“The cost will always depend on the characteristics of the competition”

It's all a question of the ratio between the quantity and quality of the statistics provided , compared to the installation costs. It is a safe bet that with time and technological progress, the quality of the statistics provided by the different methods will converge. As for the cost, it will always depend on the characteristics of the competition. For example, a team systematically playing in the same stadium will undoubtedly have an interest in equipping it with video technology, while a team traveling can easily rely on its fleet of trackers. To this democratization will be added the problem of rights and data ownership , it will therefore undoubtedly take another decade of progress for the situation to settle down.

Exploitation and marketing: without an outlet, there is no viability

If so many startups are embarking on the race for performance tracking, it is undoubtedly not only because there remains room for progress in tracking methods, but also and above all in the business models around the analysis of performance. performance. If professional clubs really used this data today, we would undoubtedly have fewer muscle injuries and less open competitions .

In 2014, during Germany's overwhelming victory in the World Cup against Brazil (7-1 on 07/08/2014), the giant SAP publicly announced that it had been one of the tools of this victory, by providing the “Mannschaft” of statistics giving him an advantage over his adversaries. At that time we could indeed give him the benefit of the doubt, but we will notice that the Germans communicated less after their elimination at the end of the group stage, four years later, in Russia. They claimed at the time to provide reports of several pages of statistics for each player to their staff, but is this staff capable of digesting these reports and drawing conclusions?

“Focus on the user interface”

We must realize that these people learned their trade at a time when statistics in sport were far from being a given . If training courses are now starting to offer sports data analyst courses, it will still take years before the trained generation takes power, hence the interest, for companies that want their technologies to be adopted, to emphasize the user interface. Martin Buchheit, then performance director of Paris Saint-Germain (Ligue 1 Uber Eats), published in 2017 in the Aspetar Sport Medicine Journal (Qatari magazine which has become a reference in sports science), an article which summarizes the essential points in the use of data by staff, which according to him are:

• A deep understanding of data in order to use, not as much as possible, but to highlight the most relevant ones.
• An emphasis on the presentation and visualization of data in order to make it accessible.
• Communication skills on the part of the staff in order to make the data understood.

Is the main use of data for professional clubs really improving performance?

“To go further would involve too great a cost”

According to Mathieu Lacome, Director of R&D at Paris Saint-Germain (Ligue 1 Uber Eats), who studied the body of research publications dealing with the use of training data for performance improvement, we have achieved a state where, according to Pareto's law, the majority of results involving these techniques have been obtained; going further would involve much greater costs than those incurred so far.

Will clubs be able to assume this financial effort when other uses of data offer a much greater return on investment?

Let's take the example of fan engagement: to caricature (in the extreme), the business model of a professional club consists of investing massively in quality players in order to produce a show bringing together as many fans as possible in order to generate revenue, directly via ticketing and merchandising, or indirectly via TV rights or income from sponsors who use the club as a showcase to reach fans.

“Clubs are quite successful in bringing fans together”

The clubs are quite successful in bringing together fans since, according to the simple and effective barometer that constitutes social networks, some of them reach hundreds of millions of followers, and are thus among the most popular brands in the world. In view of this, the average revenue generated per fan is ridiculously low: Real Madrid CF (LaLiga Santander): $896 million for 90.9 million Instagram followers, or $9.9 per follower. Coca-Cola: $31.85 billion in turnover for 2.8 million followers, or $11,375 per follower (= 1,149 times more).

“Give clubs new tools to monetize their audience”

It's easy to imagine the room for improvement if we gave clubs new tools to monetize their audience. For example, tracking tools previously reserved for the elite could allow fans to directly compare their personal statistics to those of their idols, thus generating data for clubs allowing them to use basic tools customer relationship management (CRM).

Other clubs have developed an alternative business model: banking on young players to develop their talent and subsequently reselling them to the biggest European clubs, pocketing the added value. Recruitment work today is largely manual, based on evaluation by scouts. Equipping amateurs around the world with tracking systems providing longitudinal monitoring of performance would make it possible to carry out filtering work, reducing the use of human expertise, and therefore the cost of tracking. This would also be accompanied by an increase in transparency and equal opportunities which would not displease amateur players. For the moment, they dream of seeing their performances analyzed like those of the pros. This dream should soon be realized, because if the past decade was that of the emergence of technologies in sport, this will undoubtedly be that of its democratization.