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By Joe Lemire

Colin Brett is a soccer analyst who spent time working for tracking company ChyronHego and betting analysis provider Football Radar. He noticed a gap in data coverage for players in the League of Ireland—it was “inaccurate at best,” he recalls—so he started building a platform to fill that void.

During the pandemic pause on sports, however, Brett recognized an even greater deficiency in the player development infrastructure, so he pivoted his startup, PlayerStatData, to address the Under-13 through Under-19 population. The target user is currently academy directors and player development coordinators, but Brett says further iterations will likely suit coaches and the athletes themselves.

The PlayerStatData app, which launched in the US and Canada earlier this month, seeks to provide objective performance data culled from video analysis, physical test results, a centralized library of coaching assessments and, crucially, a monitoring system for psychological and socio-economic insights.

“We want to see be a solution for all and to be an all-encompassing solution as well, which means that we want to be accessible, affordable and available to all clubs at all youth levels across the US and Canada,” says Brett, the CEO and co-founder of the Waterford, Ireland-based company. “And we want to give them the full picture of a player’s development.”

Context is critical. Family backgrounds and finances all play a role in player progression, especially in the North American pay-to-play model with costly club and travel teams representing an important pathway. Teenagers’ mental health and perspectives need to be considered, too.

“Coaches have become a lot more open to psychological output because, especially with the age that we’re looking, 13 to 19, there’s a lot going on physically and mentally with them at that age,” Brett says. “There’s a lot of stuff to understand with them too. So that’s where we want to get the best advice, because it’s important to get that right.”

For that, Brett has turned to Laura Finnegan, a lecturer in sport management at South East Technological University in Waterford, as an advisor. Her master’s thesis was in sports psychology, and her Ph.D. dissertation studied the organizational structure of talent development in Irish soccer. Finnegan has done research work on behalf of Uefa and US Soccer as well.

“It’s valuable everywhere to be able to see the player in the round,” she says. That 360-degree view, which PlayerStatData will incorporate piecemeal in future updates, is a novel approach to a market that does have several digital scouting video platforms, GPS wearables and new sensors already. “I really think that’s what’s going to set them apart,” Finnegan adds.

Malcolm Gladwell detailed in his book Outliers that a disproportionate number of NHL players were born in the early months—January, February and March—because the Canadian youth program cutoffs were at the start of the year, thus favoring the slightly older kids. Finnegan has noted similar patterns in academies in the United Kingdom and thus advocates for delayed selection of players because many physical skills don’t manifest until after puberty.

“It’s all stacked with boys that are our early maturers, and in the early years, all born earlier towards the cutoff as well,” she says of the academies. “That was one example of something that we could layer in so that you’re not just necessarily comparing Boy A with Boy B, but actually, you’re comparing boys with someone of the same maturity status as him. You’re trying to be fairer for those kids. For me, it’s just adding an extra lens for coaches.”

PlayerStatData has done some early work with the academy of Waterford FC, which competes in the League of Ireland’s First Division, and has attracted some early clients overseas such as Ottawa University Arizona, a nationally ranked NAIA program. PlayerStatData also sponsored a local Under-14 tournament where it did analysis for the participating teams, which included a team from the Blackburn Rovers, whose first team is one rung below the Premier League. Brett envisions a platform that’s truly customizable so that users can meet their needs no matter the staffing and resources.

“What’s useful is we did some bespoke design,” says Waterford FC academy director Mike Geoghegan. “So Colin sits down and asked me, what information am I looking for? What’s the sort of things that I want to track as a head coach? Because it may not be the same for every head of academy.”

For now, the PlayerStatData staff manually tags video and collects data, but computer vision algorithms developed in conjunction with professors at the local university are being developed. Brett wants that process automated within 18 months so that coaches only need to upload video into the app. “We want to get into a situation where it’s drag, drop, collect, and pick up the reports,” he says.

The Waterford academy, for instance, is staffed by part-time coaches who don’t always have the time to “extract and properly manage the data and draw insights from that data,” Geoghegan adds. “So I’m saying, I’ve got lots of recordings, lots of football, lots of coaches, but I’m not really getting this information in any way because it’s no one’s job.”

Brett sees the US and Canadian soccer systems as needing a tool like his to eliminate subjective coaching bias; the volume of players and vastness of geography make it hard for objective monitoring.

“It’s a bit of a wild west when it comes to pay-to-play and the sheer size of the market,” he says, adding: “There’s an openness to data, there’s an openness to finding that edge, it’s an openness to use a couple of innovations to get ahead, be that as a club or be as a player.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

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By Joe Lemire

Before 17-year-old Linda Fruhvirtová took the court for her first match in the main draw of a Grand Slam, she entered the US Open’s indoor practice facility, set down her red Wilson tennis bag and immediately took out a virtual reality headset.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has signed on as an advisor to Sense Arena after seeing a demo and calling it “about as realistic as you can get without actually hitting the tennis ball.”

Founded in Prague by Bob Tetiva—whose father, Jaroslav, was a member of the 1952 and 1960 Olympic basketball teams for the former Czechoslovakia—Sense Arena is a partner of 30 pro hockey teams, including the Los Angeles Kings, New Jersey Devils and Vegas Golden Knights among its five NHL clients. It has begun accepting pre-orders for its tennis product, which costs $300 for a yearlong subscription and, for a limited time, includes a free haptic racquet.

“You don’t have time in any sport to think, you just have to react,” says Tetiva, the CEO. “And to learn that, you can either play hundreds and thousands of matches in hockey or tennis, which will be very exhausting for your body or—here comes the beauty of virtual reality—we can throw you in the same environment in the first person to a controlled place where it’s actually only about you.”

The company, which has North American offices near Boston, Toronto and now Tampa, has raised $3 million earlier this year and $5.2 million in total, with participation from the Boston Bruins’ top scorer, David Pastrňák.

Available now on Meta Quest 2 and soon to be expanded to other VR providers, Sense Arena’s tennis software is currently usable as a one-person training tool, with multiplayer capability likely for the future as well as other updates, including the ability to practice serves and a pro-level strategy feature.

Users hold the proprietary racquet—which houses a Quest controller and vibrates when a player makes contact with a virtual tennis ball—and can replicate shots and volleys as well as engage in other cognitive drills.

“Forehand, backhand, it’s all about reaction, and it’s about repetition,” Navratilova says. “And then you get [to see] what the end result is, so you can fix it. The ball tells you what you did wrong. So you get that immediate feedback in the safety of your home.”

Navratilova has suggested some tennis drills to be incorporated and, even after her first product demo, recommended the inclusion of a pause button to help players visualize the angles of shots better. “Immediately she was intuitive giving us feedback on the existing product,” Tetiva says.

Tetiva plans to market the product to both elite teams—colleges, academies and the like—as well as individual players. B2C is likely to be the predominant sector because of its sheer size, he says, “but the credibility is built through the top tier of tennis.”

Yannick Yoshizawa, a former college player at South Florida who worked nearly nine years at the WTA, was hired to lead the tennis business at Sense Arena. The three main pillars of the sport, he says, are physical, technical and mental training. Physical and technical are more easily isolated in practice, but he has bought in to the potential of VR to train the mental component.

That was the early thesis of Tetiva when he began developing a hockey program. He had played some pro basketball in the Czech Republic before entering the IT industry when his son began showing interest in hockey. Sports training has evolved considerably in almost areas, he realized, with a notable exception.

“One piece is kind of neglected, and that’s your brain,” he says, “which actually controls everything.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch with Cameron Macdonald

Thierry Henry, an assistant coach with the Belgium men’s national team, wants to help players to develop what he calls their “camera”.

“I know it might sound strange, but people always wonder about the best camera they can buy,” he said. “You have it – it’s your brain.”

The former France international, who played for clubs including Arsenal, Barcelona and New York Red Bulls, was talking at the Leaders Sport Business Summit, which took place at London’s Twickenham Stadium last month, in his capacity as an investor in the virtual reality [VR] platform Rezzil.

The aim of the company is to augment the way players train in the modern era – from professionals in top-flight club and international games to the grassroots level. Rezzil’s suite of offerings ranges from their Player collection, which helps remove the barriers to entry from training, such as access to facilities or coaches, to their Index series, which compiles data collected from virtual drills to help identify player characteristics. With a particular focus on developing the ‘cognitive fitness’ of elite players, the platform has garnered interest and investment from other former players including Gary Neville and Vincent Kompany

“You have some players that will see stuff that some players will not see,” added Henry. “I always say your eyes are useless if your mind is blank. It’s something you can work on.”

Henry, who is widely considered to be one of the most cerebral footballers of his generation, described himself as a “thinker of the game.” He said: “You will often have a coach that will tell you how to make you faster, make you stronger and whatnot along those lines, but it’s rare that you can have someone to tell you how to make you smarter and help that muscle memory that you have.”

VR has its early adopters but there is still considerable resistance across the game. “People have to be more open to accept it. It’s tough to say to someone ‘your brain doesn’t function well’ – in brackets I want to say I’m talking about the game not talking about life.”

Henry retired from playing in 2014 after having won the World Cup, Euros, Champions League, English Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga and France’s Ligue 1 amongst numerous other honours during his 20-year playing career. He is also Arsenal men’s record scorer with 228 goals.

He began coaching Arsenal men’s under-15s in 2015 and, a year later, became an assistant coach with Belgium under Roberto Martínez. The Red Devils would go on to finish third at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Henry then took head coaching roles at another of his former clubs, AS Monaco, and at Montreal Impact, before making his return to Martínez’s coaching ticket at Belgium in 2021. The team are once again tipped to do well at next month’s World Cup in Qatar.

Inevitably, in the past seven years, there have been times when Henry has worked with players who were not blessed with the skillset he possessed as player. He told the audience that coaches must have empathy when highlighting a player’s shortcomings, let alone issues with their in-game cognition. “When you challenge someone about what they see and what they do and how smart or not they are, it can be hurtful at times,” he admits.

Stimulating the brain

Henry emphasised that it is important for coaches to make players think. “I played with players, and I won’t name names, but you ask them why they make that pass and they don’t even know,” he said. “[They say] ‘I don’t know. I saw a player and I passed the ball’. ‘Did we have an overload or did we have an underload?’. ‘I don’t know’. ‘You passed the ball on the side when there was one Arsenal player against four. If you turn the other way, we were on an overload. Why?’.”

VR can help a player repeat a scenario they played out at training. “You [can] ask players in their room, not only on the field, to recreate a scene that they played in the morning; option A, option B, option C or whatever it is. ‘Why did you pass the ball there?’ ‘We had an overload so it’s obvious’. ‘Well done’.

“Some players pass the ball because it’s blue and blue,” he said with a tone of bemusement. “So what’s the point behind it? There’s got to be a purpose when you pass the ball.”

This mentality was installed in Henry when he was an undergraduate at France’s fabled Clarefontaine academy. The teenage Henry was fast but some of his other skills were deemed underdeveloped. “All I had was my speed, so my gift, but I had a coach called Joaquim Francisco Filho, a Brazilian coach, that was giving me tasks when I was young. So he used to tell me before a game: ‘Thierry, today you can not use your speed’ and I looked at him and said ‘are you mad? That’s my thing. Why are you taking my gift away?’ And he said ‘because one day you’re going to meet someone that is as fast as you – how can you beat him?’ I started to think ‘I need to move better’. I was fast but I was never going to be gone; like if you’re fast you’re fast, if you’re tall you’re tall, but he was challenging me and stimulating me. We were also in a special school, I have to say. The way they were thinking was different.

“As a striker, you’re always [with your] back to the goal and the challenge one time was that you cannot pass the ball back. Then how am I supposed to play if I cannot pass the ball back? But suddenly you stand in free quarters and you try to find space so that you can turn; you start to understand space better, running the line better, seeing things better. Speed was always there and if you can now have what we were talking about with Rezzil, to develop and stimulate your brain, after you have people along the way that think about winning. That coach who thought about winning thought about stimulating my brain and developing my brain. It was very important that I took it on board and it never left me since.”

Contactless reps

“As a player, I didn’t want to miss training because I didn’t want to miss the tactical part of it and what we were supposed to work on,” said Henry of memories of his own injuries and periods of rehabilitation.

VR has the potential to enable athletes in rehabilitation to reduce their risk of collisions or impacts. “So suddenly you go out there but you can’t really hit the ball,” he continued. “At one point the ball comes to you and you hit it and you’re like ‘why did you hit it?’ It’s just a reaction, the ball comes and you hit it, so maybe if you stay in the room [a rehabilitation facility at the training ground], they replay the training session to you, and even if the ball comes at one point you know what you have to do the day after, the week after, how long it’s going to be. I think it’s important for you to work tactically without getting injured.”

Similarly, Henry argues that you can learn to head the ball more effectively but without the need for endless physical repetition. “We don’t have a helmet and it does hurt,” said Henry, who was never a great header of the ball. “You can learn about how to head the ball without going too far in the repetition.”

As moderator Karthi Gnanasegaram brought the session to a close, Henry suggested that VR could be used to inculcate tactics at a team level. “You’re the coach and you’re behind them, you’re amongst them and we’re in the room and you tell them on the morning of the game, ‘no, a bit more on the left, a bit more on the right, you go, you squeeze’. instead of doing that on the field you can do that in a big conference room at a hotel. That type of thing can be a great advantage for any coach.”

The pressure of a game scenario may never be adequately recreated, but VR can permit the reps to build familiarity with the situation and the muscle memory to execute the moves in competition. “When you arrive in a situation [in a game], how would you handle it without losing your mind?” asked Henry rhetorically.

“This is why it’s important to see with your mind and not with your eyes.”

By John Portch

Winning is great – but at what cost?

“In Australian sport, we went through a period where we were highly successful, across numerous sports, but there were often implications for athletes’ mental health,” says Ben Robertson, the National Wellbeing Manager at Tennis Australia.

Robertson is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute about the change in thinking that came about in Australian sport.

He says: “The Australian government was looking at this and asking ‘why are we funding this? Winning titles and obtaining individual results are great, but we are potentially leaving these athletes with limited  life skills or other skills for transitioning into a life beyond sport?’ Sport has always wrestled with this, especially as it’s gone professional in the last 30 years or so.”

Robertson is joined by his colleague Nicole Kriz, Tennis Australia’s National Lead of Tours, Camps, College and Wellbeing. The duo are speaking from a camp in France where they have travelled with a group of 13 and 14-year-old players to compete in an international competition.

It is not unknown, Kriz explains, for a 24-hour trip from Melbourne to a European destination to be delayed by 12 hours or more. “And these are young kids,” she says. “Life can throw anything at them, such as travel disruption, and they need coping mechanisms. We’re not even talking about competition yet. If they don’t have the skills to deal with that then they’re really not going to cope once they’re here on the ground, and that has to have a follow-on effect on their enjoyment, being an athlete, their ability to tour, and being able to turn up and compete.”

“If they can’t find a way off-court, they’re not going to find a way on-court,” adds Robertson. To that end, Tennis Australia has committed to proactive, holistic development of its junior players through its Wellbeing and Life Skills Programs.

The latter was born from conversations between Kriz and Robertson at a time when Kriz was working with Australian Pro Tour athletes on tennis’ WTA Tour. These athletes’ performances on court and touring capacity were being affected by issues off-court.

The Life Skills Program consists of eight units: independent living, working and living with others, travel, personal development, education and career, managing money, personal health, living overseas and other cultures. These programs  seek to develop wellbeing-focused skills such as regulation and self-awareness and life skills such as cooking, doing the laundry, or buying a ticket at a railway station.

“We want to develop resilient, capable, independent kids,” says Kriz, “If we do then the parents are going to be more confident about their child’s functioning and touring capabilities as well.”

It is an ethical responsibility that Tennis Australia takes seriously. “We’re taking these kids away from their No 1 support network in their parents, friends and their school environment,” says Robertson. “It’s down to us to develop their off-court skills, and as trivial as some of those may seem, you’re developing the base for them to build on, so that when they are on the tour at 18 or even earlier, by themselves potentially, they have these skills so that it’s not foreign to them when they get there. If they have to do it later in life then the anxiety and the frustration kicks in.

“It seems really basic and a lot of it is, but it’s our responsibility on tours. We’re here to compete, we’d love to win, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of the tour and we try to explain that to the kids and the parents. Winning’s great, it’s part of the process, but you spend so much more time off-court. Of 24 hours a day you probably play for two. You’ve got 22 hours left to sleep, develop relationships; the list goes on. It’s the same for any sport.”

Holistic development

Robertson observes that the narrative in sport is gradually shifting from the idea that holistic development automatically translates into competition to the view that athletes are people who just happen, in this case, to play tennis.

“I think that’s shifted in all sports because we cannot guarantee that we’re going to take a 13-year-old and, a few years later say they are going to be the No 1 in the world. But if we’re taking them away for four, five or six weeks, we’re going to give them the best experience, develop them as a person, and over time, if they go on to be a great player, fantastic.”

Both Robertson and Kriz make the point that their programs are still in their infancy, but these initiatives are indicative of that shift in wider sport, particularly with regards to wellbeing. “The analogy we have with the kids is that they all go to the gym no questions asked. They’ll do prehab; they don’t question that from a physical point of view. What we say is ‘this stuff here is prehab for your mental health and wellbeing, which allows you to perform at your best, whatever that might be’.”

The Wellbeing Program, much like the Life Skills Program, is a focal point for players and coaches who tour with Tennis Australia.

“There’s five pillars within our Wellbeing Program: ‘mindfulness’, ‘learn’, ‘giving back’, inside that is gratitude, ‘physical activity’ and ‘connection’,” says Robertson, who taken the athletes through some box breathing techniques at breakfast that morning. “The theme for this week with the under-13 and 14 girls is mindfulness. We’ve done some deliberate practice whether it be in a classroom setting or outside around ‘what is mindfulness? Why is it important? How does it translate to on-court? Why is it important as a human being? How does it tie to your mental health?’ And then there’s conversation around ‘these things are great but how do you manage it?’ So you’re not always thinking about the future and you’re not holding onto the past. You do that anyway, but how do you then quieten your mind for short periods?”

Direct observation is a useful way of assessing transference. “Some kids will practise during the game; at the change of ends they’ll sit and you’ll observe them. Two nights ago at dinner, I asked a player to name ten emotions. They could give me four and then got stuck. I said ‘right, you’ve got to come back tomorrow and give me the other six’. I asked the player ‘how did you feel?’ We tied it back to on-court; they won the match and had a bit of trouble in the second set. ‘What were you feeling? Let’s name those.’ That’s the ad hoc opportunity to teach them around emotional literacy and language and go ‘you don’t always go to the big ones – there’s little ones in between. And how do you self-regulate? What are the tools?’ They’re just ad hoc conversations but learning is ongoing the whole time.”

Kriz stresses the importance of educating the athletes to help increase their self-awareness in addition to broadening their language and understanding of stress responses. “When you are putting some language and context to it, kids can refer to that quite easily. If they’re unaware and they don’t have the language around the self-awareness, then they’re just going to react and respond and behave without thinking. So if we can put some understanding and some context around it, then they are better at identifying where they are in this and it’s not just ‘situation-respond’.”

Losing streaks stand out as an area where such tools could be useful. “What’s a ‘loss’?” asks Kriz. “We try to change the language around that. We haven’t spoken about results at all on this trip because this is a developmental tour both on and off court. We try to remove that pressure already from results.

“So if they’ve already heard that language and that education at 14, they can refer back to that at 17. It’s not black and white, win and lose or good and bad, it’s about ‘what am I learning here?’ If they’ve got that reference point they’ve got the skills moving forward to deal with it and reframe it and change their perspective on it.”

“The one thing that coaches ask is ‘did you compete?’” says Robertson. “‘Did you compete to the best of your ability? Yes and you lost. OK, you can swallow that, be proud of your efforts. Sometimes you just get beaten by a better player but you’ve got to learn from that. And if you didn’t compete to the best of your ability then why not?’ Then it’s backtracking to ‘I didn’t sleep well’, ‘I had doughnuts for breakfast’, whatever it may be. The conversation is purely around competing. You don’t want to be too content or comfortable with losing but you want to ask ‘did I compete to the best of my ability?’ Why or why not? That’s the conversation that coaches have with them and that’s where the skills come in because if we said to them go and do it all yourself and they’re overawed and they get smashed on court and off court and they say ‘I hate tennis, I’m out’.”

Both Robertson and Kriz state that this can be a challenge because tennis is ranked – a fact not lost on players, coaches or their parents. “We’re trying to change that narrative and make them feel comfortable that it’s about development,” says Robertson. As long as they’ve done the best they can it’s about learning for the next tour and then the next tour and then the next tour. And then it’s the same with the parents because the kids get off the court and they feel accountable and want to ring mum and dad to explain the result. ‘I won or I lost’. We’re still on a learning curve with a lot of our parents that this is about development on and off the court, but we’re seeing growth. By the third week, they’re comfortable with who they are, they’re talking to other international players, they’re self-managing better, so there’s a bit more energy.

“Conversely, you’ll have a player who is up and another who is down, so you’ve now got to go back and tell them ‘we need to get you through the next little bit’ and bring in some self-management tools that we’ve practised. It’s just that reassurance because they have it in their head that they need to be the best player here and then they get all the sponsors, then they go to No 1, and then they start to forecast and some of the parents do too.”

Match videos are also sent to the players’ parents and private coaches, who are mostly back in Australia, within 24 to 36 hours. It is a relatively new practice but it feeds into Tennis Australia’s aims. Kriz says: “They can work through it with their private coach and have a better conversation about what’s going on as well, not just judging it on a win-loss. So we are saying to the parents before you have a conversation with the kids or the coaches, before the private coach is having a conversation with the kid, watch the video and then let’s go through it as opposed to judging straight away on wins and losses.”

Developing life skills

Tennis Australia’s Life Skills Program, which is being mapped to adolescent development and designed alongside the Australian educational framework, combines online theory and activities with practical application in a way that is both fun and interactive.

Kriz cites an example of an online exercise. She says: “We’ve taken a screen shot of a departure board at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and one of the questions will be: ‘if your flight to Stockholm is LU378, tell me what terminal you need to be at, what time you’re departing and what time your gate is’. We’ve then put some quizzes in the back end of that. Then once we actually go to Charles de Gaulle, we’ll go to the departure board and say: ‘OK, you guys learned how to do this this week, now I want you to put it into practice. Find it for us.’”

She returns to the theme of engagement and buy-in from players for life skills. Coaches and parents are starting to view them as a priority too. “Once you have buy-in then the engagement piece becomes better. Once the kids go ‘I need to do it and I want to do it’ it’s then asking where in the schedule on a daily basis we can do it. Once you have that there’s a huge appetite from the kids because they feel better equipped and more confident about travelling and there’s a certain amount of pride they take.” On another occasion, the players were taken to a railway station and shown how to buy tickets under supervision. The group later returned to that station to check their learning. “The next time, they were very excited to know they could do it. They were the ones going ‘we’ll buy the tickets too because we know how to do it’. That’s what you want. That’s the win. Once you have those little wins it becomes easier. It might be that you say ‘that took half an hour, we missed three trains, we watched three trains go by that we could have been on’ but then the next time it’s all worthwhile once you see them really excited about it. You know if that’s in two years’ time with their family or five or ten years’ time with their partner then they’re going to be able to do it.”

All of these skills are built incrementally and developed in line with their individual assessment and tour needs. “Each week we build upon what we’re asking of them in independence. Whether it’s ‘OK kids, this week we’re going to show you how to do the laundry. Next week you’re going to find the laundry, Google it, and you’re going to show us how to do it’. We do the same thing with restaurants or meals. Then, ‘we’re going to show you how to book courts, talk to the tournament director, introduce yourself, book transport, buy balls and fill up your water – you guys are going to do that.’ Once they feel comfortable and we’re confident they can deal with it, then we continually load them up. So by the third week we’ll have them calling up and booking the courts, as opposed to us doing it for them. When they’re confident and capable of managing it, a lot of confidence comes from knowing you can do it.”

Tennis Australia’s holistic approach requires a new definition of ‘success’, because it cannot be measured solely in professional tennis careers, trophies or prize money. “If the kid has a great professional career, whatever that may be; if they are retired at 22 because of a severe injury or they didn’t quite make it and they come back in, they go to college, and they come back in as a lawyer at TA or in the media team – that’s success to us,” says Kriz. “We have a responsibility there and success can’t just be performance, we have to move beyond what success means in our sport. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re No 1 in the world – your career will stop at some point. When they are in our care we need to provide them and assist them with those developmental skills to move beyond sport.”

Robertson refers to former player Ash Barty in making his point. “She was the No 1 player in the world, won three grand slams, and left the sport at 25. That’s a success because she’s achieved what she wants and she’s left the game on her own terms and in a really good place – but that’s just one athlete. How do all players get to leave on their own terms and ready for the next chapters of life?”

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By Joe Lemire

Ali Krieger has starred for the US women’s national team for most of the past 15 years. She was a member of two World Cup-winning squads, starting every match as a defender during its 2011 runner-up finish and 2015 title run and made three appearances during the 2019 tournament. In all, Krieger has 108 caps and was named to CONCACAF’s Women’s Team of the Decade for 2011–2020.

A two-time All-American at Penn State in 2005 and ‘06, Krieger then began her long professional career. In addition to playing five seasons in Germany, Krieger has been with the NWSL since its inception, spending time with the Washington Spirit, Orlando Pride and now Gotham FC. She and her wife, fellow USWNT veteran Ashlyn Harris, were acquired in the offseason by Gotham, whose general manager, Yael Averbuch West, is a former teammate.

Krieger recently partnered with social sports platform Strava, which launched a new “Strive for More” campaign. The accompanying pledge seeks to garner support and visibility around equitable sport for female athletes and teams. Strava is contributing $1 million over the next three years toward the cause.

On joining Strava’s ‘Strive for More’ campaign . . .

Strava reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to come on board and be an ambassador as a professional female athlete to help spread the word about ‘Strive for More’ and the pledge and their campaign that they’re leading—which has been really incredible for females, for allies, for supporters, fans, friends and family all over the world. As you know, Strava can connect globally and not just within our country, which is incredible, and we all need the support.

I immediately wanted to help and get on board with the pledge and the whole sporting community to pledge their support for more equity in women’s sports. This cross-promotion of me being a footballer and talking about ‘Strive for More’ in other female sports and with other athletes has been pretty incredible.

On her goals for the pledge . . .

I want to see more people wanting to watch women’s sports, supporting women’s sports, putting money where their mouth is and really giving women what they deserve because they endure just as much emotional, physical, mental energy as our male counterparts. We deserve to be seen and be heard and get what we deserve.

On the example of the USWNT’s equal pay fight . . .

It was a great foundation for other sports to get involved and other companies—for example, Strava—to support female athletes and their fight for equity and equality and respect. That was just a great foundation for us to want to help women in general. It wasn’t just about us as a soccer team and our sport specifically and within our country; it was fighting for women in general, across all industries, all sports.

I think we really started this massive wave of female athletes wanting more for themselves and being more confident in those types of discussions. To fight for more equity and money and sponsorships and all the things within their contracts with their employers, but also with their agencies and their teams or clubs or organizations. It wasn’t just a fight selfishly for us, as soccer players and a team. It was a fight for all women, across all industries, to really amp up everyone’s confidence in fighting for what they deserve for doing the same amount of work as anyone else and just getting the resources that individuals need to perform their best no matter what they’re doing.

On how standards are evolving in the NWSL . . .

Slowly. The work will never be done. Most importantly, we have to constantly fight for what we deserve and what the standard is. We actually hold a high standard, both on and off the field, and I think a lot of female athletes do or else they wouldn’t be in the position that they’re in, at the levels that they’re at. Now it’s really focusing on the club level. For the NWSL, it has been 10 years, and it still somewhat feels like we’re behind. So, we do have to continue within our own organizations at each club in the NWSL—there are 12 clubs—and then within our teams and then get our younger players to jump on board and say, you need to have a voice, you need to continue to carry this baton to fight for your generation in order to get more.

I think the club level is definitely still at a level where it could be a lot better, so the standard yet isn’t as high. We’re continuing to do that as a collective group, which you saw in 2020 and last year, as well—coming together as a group in fighting for each other and the conditions that we have and that we have to deal with day in and day out within the organizations and the cities that we play in. Once again, along with the ‘Strive for More’ campaign and being an ambassador for Strava and their strong message; even at the club levels, this will help the equity, the inclusion and the demand to give women more for what work they’re putting it.

On playing for former USWNT teammate Yael Averbuch West at Gotham FC . . .

I feel like it’s so beneficial when you have an athlete that has been through the trenches and has been through the grind and can now be in a position of power to fight for us, to have a better understanding of what we need to, one, keep us happy and, two, to perform our best every single day. And then, on game day, perform in order to get three points and win. So that’s what is needed: former players and people who have been through that experience because some people don’t really understand unless you’ve really been through it. She’s in such a great position for us.

She’s actually a good friend of Ashlyn and I. So I want her to succeed in the position that she’s in. We have a really great relationship in kind of telling her, ‘Hey, things could be this way, maybe we can put this on the list of how we can make this better.’ We’re kind of her eyes and ears as well, and I really enjoy that.

We want to see her succeed and the club succeed, not only ourselves as individuals, the team, but we want to continue to fight. So it’s not just at the national team level that we’re using our voice. It’s now within the organizations that we’re playing at the club level.

On her use of training tech . . .

We all have a GPS tracker, and then we have a heart rate monitor that we wear every day so that they can see the numbers and [see] if you’re maybe running a little too much or a little too hard a few days before the game where you have to be 100% fit. So they’re constantly watching. They have an iPad out there. They watch your numbers constantly throughout the training sessions. So if you need to do more, you stay and you do a little more after practice.

But it’s really beneficial for us, especially after games [when] you see where your heat map was on the field and then the energy that you’ve obviously played in, to be able to mark like, ‘Okay, how many days do you need rest in order to continue to keep that standard just as high for the next match?’ And then they actually have numbers to go off of when we say, ‘Hey, I’m feeling actually really good today, or I’m actually super tired.’ They can check the numbers to see how much you’ve run that past game or training session to make sure that everybody is fully set and injury-free going into every season.

On the importance of recovery . . .

Our job is a 24-hour job because recovery is huge. People say, ‘Well you only work two or three hours a day.’ I’m like, ‘No, I work 24 hours a day because you have to spend that extra time making sure you recovered so that you’re able to be 100% the next session.’ I do have a Whoop to keep track of all that information, which was good because I had sleep [data] on there, too. It was good to compare it with some of your friends or teammates.

On her use of Strava . . .

I downloaded the app right away when they reached out, and I’ve been a participant so far. Because of Whoop, we have our Fit for 90 app, and we have all these other apps that we use for soccer that definitely will be a go-to for me when I’m done playing and I don’t have to report on our NWSL soccer app. And we also have an app for the national team. So there’s a lot of apps, and they know exactly what we do all day. So [Strava] will be on my phone and very accessible for once I’m done playing and retired in the next year or so. And I can use the Strava app to stay active and to stay motivated and to stay supporting women and female athletes all over the world.

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece, the conclusion to our soccer series, looks at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts. You can read Part 1 on the growth of digital video here and Part 2 on how access to physical data has improved here.

Playermaker’s very first client in the United Kingdom was Fulham FC. This was a big get: Fulham had recently earned promotion to the Premier League for the 2018-19 season.

But there was a problem. Just two weeks after implementing the shoe-worn sensors, Fulham called Playermaker and said, “Your data is not reliable. It’s bad data.”

Someone from Playermaker’s team paid the club a visit where the Fulham coaches conceded that the day was “generally okay but look at this player: it’s abnormal. There’s no way he has so many touches and that he’s dribbling like this.”

“We’re looking at this, and the data is legit,” recalls CEO Guy Aharon of 16-year-old Harvey Elliott’s preternatural ball handling. “And he became the youngest player ever to play a Premier League game.”

Harvey Elliott’s impressive data from Playermaker’s shoe-worn sensors was initially thought to be a glitch.

The world of soccer data is evolving rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital video, the growing accessibility of physical data inputs and now the introduction new devices and datapoints. Sensors such as Playermaker—which proffer physical data and, in a first, also metrics evaluating technical skills—are gaining a foothold in the scouting process, even if there’s a requisite learning curve to make sense of this new information.

Other new areas of information gathering include analysis of biomechanics using only smartphone cameras from AiScout and JuniStat, the democratized collection of physical data from SkillCorner and Track160, and the application of advanced algorithms to assess a player’s fit in varying tactical styles from SmarterScout and StatsBomb. Even the evaluation of the evaluators is being considered by thoughtful organizations such as 360 Scouting.

Players are getting more control of and context from their data from apps like BreakAway Data, which seeks to help prospects gain commensurate scouting interest for their talent. Presenting more true markers of talent helps minimize the need for multimedia skills in crafting highlight reels in hopes it reaches the right evaluator.

“Contrasting those is a very manual process, and making yourself stand out is based on selecting some good clips and being lucky if the right person looks at it,” says Ben Smith, Chelsea Football Club’s Head of Research and Innovation who also heads BreakAway’s international business. “But data has the ability to genuinely actually contrast you to people in a way that gives you, I think, a much higher percentage opportunity of actually being seen because it’s a marker of talent, rather than creativity in how you put together a CV or a visualization of who you are.”

Global soccer already suffers from the chasm between the haves and have-nots financially, but the gulf between clubs using advanced methods of scouting will contribute to the talent gap. The existence of scouting innovation doesn’t necessarily mean widespread adoption.

“People would be shocked if they saw the behind the scenes of Europe in terms of the way these clubs are run, not just from an operational standpoint, but from a sophistication,” says Jordan Gardner, Co-Owner and Managing Partner of Denmark’s FC Helsingør as well as an investor in England’s Swansea City and Ireland’s Dundalk FC. “So many decisions on recruitment are still made like, ‘I’m gonna go call my buddy, who’s an agent.’”

* * * * *

Data paired with video leads to visibility

Every year, the Reliance Foundation Young Champs, a five-star residential soccer academy in Navi Mumbai, scours India for the best 12 year-old players, offering them five-year scholarships to live and train at the academy. It’s a multi-pronged process of scouting trials all culminating in what’s a life-changing opportunity. Nine of the 10 players in its first graduating class two years ago received contracts to play professionally in the Indian Super League.

When the pandemic struck, however, RFYC had no ability to go see any young players in action. It sought help from a small London-based startup, AiScout, which uses Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking computer vision technology to assess the physical movements of players.

From May to December, RFYC invited youth players to complete drills through the AiScout app. That helped whittle down the player pool to 400 who were invited to a regional trial. Eventually, the academy signed 19 players; AiScout was not the sole factor, of course, but 16 had participated in the virtual trials.

AiSCOUT is an AI-based platform that pro clubs are using to scout and develop amateur players based on uploaded data.

“Reliance Foundation actually found four players that weren’t even playing organized football,” says Richard Felton-Thomas, AiScout’s COO and Director of Sport Science. “They were just in rural areas, so scouts wouldn’t naturally find those anyways. That was a great test for the mobile phone as a system.”

The genesis of the app can be traced to the experience of Founder and CEO Darren Peries. After his son was cut from Tottenham’s academy, scouts from other clubs began calling him for more information. Peries had nothing to share outside a few mobile phone videos of varying quality.

“It just baffled him: here was a multi-billion pound industry,” Felton-Thomas says. “How can we sign a player for 100 million at 21 years old when, if they’re 18 or less, we’ve got almost next to nothing on them?”

Digital video was growing more available, but its analysis can be hindered when there’s limited information about the opponent and the level of competition. AiScout, a member of FIFA’s innovation program, entered as a source of objective data by tracking 21 points on the body, benchmarking the abilities of players at every level and every league and computing a National Rating Score.

Amateur players can upload videos and data to trial for a Premier League club.

Two Premier League Clubs, Burnley and Chelsea, have been involved as early partners. Just as Tonsser began assembling showcase teams based on user-submitted videos, AiScout used its data to select 24 players to compete against Burnley’s U18 academy team; the game ended in a 2-2 draw. An additional four players were deemed exceptional and invited for weeklong trials at Burnley. Across the entire soccer ecosystem, more than 20,000 users have submitted information to AiScout with 64 players who have been trialed, signed or recruited.

“The nature of talent development can be a bit random,” says Chelsea’s Smith. “So if we can have a technology to work at scale across vast areas, then that our scope and our reach is potentially very substantial.”

JuniStat is a Russian-founded app now based in the US and Chile that seeks to do the same, with a user base of 40,000 users, mostly from Eastern Europe and Latin America with a strong growth market in Africa. Co-founder Gleb Shaportov says there are now 21 pro clubs using the app with most of the players between the ages of 10 and 15.

Shaportov says JuniStat validated its technology with the Russian Football Union and has started the process of doing the same with Fifa this fall. “Directly from the smartphone, we can detect the skeleton of the player, and based on thousands of kids of the same age in our database, we are immediately tracking their performance. We get complex raw data from them, we analyze it and then we present the results to the user in an easy to understand and usable way.”

AiScout is working to create a mobile performance lab with additional technologies to gather physical data and is working with Chelsea as an R&D partner on cognitive testing and psychometric awareness. “Attention, spatial awareness, vision, or speed of processing—these types of things that you can, let’s say, ‘footballize,’” Felton-Thomas says.

The AiScout app is free for players, while scouts and clubs subscribe for access. Felton-Thomas says the mission is to create “an access-for-all, objective approach to talent identification,” no matter one’s hometown or finances. Results in the app can help secure a tryout or invitation to a showcase. “You’re going to have to prove yourself from there,” he says, “but we can get that visibility.”

* * * * *

Playing style metrics key tool for teams

Thiago Almada began playing for a local soccer club in his native Argentina at age four. He made his professional debut at age 16. By the time he was 18, in March 2020, and starting for Vélez Sarsfield, an AI-powered service called SmarterScout had flagged his Premier League potential, noting his skills in retaining the ball, winning ground duels and scoring.

Interest from major European powers in the Premier League, LaLiga and Ligue 1 all followed, with Manchester United and Manchester City among those reportedly in hottest pursuit. Almada instead opted for Atlanta United, signing for an MLS-record $16 million transfer fee.

A similar trajectory followed Almada’s countryman Julián Álvarez, whose performance at River Plate drew attention from the SmarterScout platform and later preceded a move to Man City. His data drew a “pretty stunning” resemblance to that of superstar Kevin de Bruyne and, the analysis concludes, “why Alvarez may be a better fit in the Premier League—and especially at Manchester City—than his physical attributes might suggest.”

SmarterScout is the work of Daniel Altman, a Harvard-educated economist who has been a soccer analytics consultant for Premier League and MLS clubs. The fully-automated platform ingests event data from 60 global leagues, enriches them algorithmically and then evaluates how well a player would fit in another league.

This type of data application is showing dividends at all levels of the sport. Popular analytics provider StatsBomb has more than 150 client clubs from the Champions League on down to the fifth division of English soccer—but it has fewer clients at the lower level than before.

Last season, three of the four clubs in England’s fourth division, League Two, to achieve promotion to League One were all clients of StatsBomb. A fourth team reached the playoffs but narrowly failed to advance.

“We were told at some point that that would never happen: it’s too far down, they won’t want to spend budget on that,” StatsBomb Founder Ted Knutson says. “And obviously I’m a CEO and I’m a salesperson of this stuff, but the fact is, that surprised me.”

From those clubs on up to the Champions League clients, everyone receives the same data. “They get offered the same stuff,” Knutson says. “It’s a bit of a democratization of data science.” StatsBomb’s platform helps to make bespoke additions to a roster, helping avoid what Knutson has described as clubs building a “Frankenstein monster of a squad.”

He adds, “It’s not just counting numbers of how many tackles did this person make: ‘Are they positionally correct on a regular basis? Are they used to playing in a high line because we need guys that are comfortable in our tactical system that we’re definitely not going to change? We have this manager for another three years—we really like him—so we want a center back that fits in with him, as opposed to us going out and finding what we thought is the best center back in the market.’”

Firms like SmarterScout and StatsBomb are building on top of event data, a record of key moments in the match that are typically relegated to what happens around the ball: shots, passes, tackles and so forth. The tracking data that encompasses player speeds and distances is much harder to come by, which is where SkillCorner has found a niche extracting that dataset from broadcast.

“We’re still very much at the top end at the moment, but we have a lot of interest coming from academies,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “The challenge when you get to that part of the market is the way that the video is filmed, the way it’s captured, the way it’s shot, is inconsistent compared to the professional level. Once you get into the academy structure, the position of the cameras, the vertical height, the horizontal distance from the field, the type of the cameras—is it manual operator or is it going to be smart cameras, Pixellot or Veo or Spiideo? And it’s just so much variation.”

SkillCorner is working on adapting its algorithms to meet that need while also teasing an evolution in analysis that will eclipse that information. Neilson says his team is developing its own set of next-level analytics to quantify defensive pressure on the ball, field awareness, the ability to find open space and more.

“To be honest, this is more important than physical data, because this is really about gaining intelligence and decision making,” Neilson says. “It’s not just the legs and how much they run. It’s the brain behind the athlete as well. And I think this potentially is the next big breakthrough for scouting and recruitment.”

* * * * *

Using video and data to scout the scouts

A decade ago, Marco van der Heide was an attacking midfielder for Cambuur, which at the time competed in Netherlands’ second division. Over parts of two seasons, van der Heide scored four goals in 16 matches, but a bad concussion prematurely ended his professional career.

When he had recovered, Cambuur hired van der Heide as a video scout, specializing in opposition analysis. The head coach then joined the staff at AZ Alkmaar—best known in the US as the club Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane has advised and invested in—and brought his former player with him.

On the side, van der Heide began collaborating with Sander IJtsma, a surgeon by day and proprietor of data-driven soccer analysis site 11tegen11 by night. Their video and data skills were a good combination but, noting the demands of IJtsma’s occupation and his interest in growing more quickly, van der Heide started his own video scouting company, 360 Scouting. And he set out to change the way the industry hires its evaluators.

“A lot of clubs still, very strangely, select scouts for their club because most of the times they are players who used to play at the club,” van der Heide says. “This is how I came in at Cambuur as a video analyst, but after that, I also showed that I had the required quality. But I wouldn’t have had this opportunity if I wouldn’t have played the club—which is good for me, but actually kind of weird because they should be selecting just on quality.”

To build out his startup—which currently has two clients, Cambuur and a Champions League participant he’s unable to divulge—van der Heide developed an application that explicitly told candidates that there was no need to send a résumé or cover letter. All that mattered was completing a video assessment. Initially, 350 applied, which got trimmed to 50 for a second assessment.

“Then there was the moment to ask them who they are, which age they are, et cetera,” van der Heide says. Among the six he eventually hired after eliminating the noise and bias of the process were a 41-year-old teacher and father of two and an 18-year-old student.

360 Scouting is now beginning to pivot from consultancy to platform. Van der Heide has continued his hiring practices to find local scouts who can do video and live scouting in four leagues this season: Poland, 2.Bundesliga, LaLiga 2 and the Eerste Divisie, the second division in the Netherlands. He hopes to grow to 50 leagues within three years using a network of quality, local scouts even if many are hobbyists.

“If clubs are finding people to scout players, then they’re also looking for undervalued talent,” van der Heide says. “So why wouldn’t they apply the same intention to finding the scouts themselves?”

* * * * *

Evolving data requires patience

Even when a club is willing to invest in data, it needs requisite patience in the process, too. Gardner, the owner of FC Helsingør in the Danish second division, says the minimum timeline for seeing improvement is two to three years. That was especially true at the club he purchased, which he described as having “basically no scouting infrastructure at all.”

“What’s interesting in the European soccer space is, with the promotion and relegation system, you can have an organization that is like a Single A baseball or even a summer league baseball team, and you have a couple of good years, and all of a sudden you’re in the majors,” Gardner says. “The infrastructure and the way the club runs is doesn’t catch up fast enough.”

Making the use of data more accessible could ease that prospect. For now, data analysts are still typically required to mine spreadsheets to find value. Bringing it within the realm of a coach’s expertise is an essential next step.

“Data, certainly across football, is making an interesting transition where it’s getting closer to performance and so performance practitioners rather than data specialists are starting to take more meaning from it,” says Smith of Chelsea and BreakAway Data.

Playermaker’s data captures a player’s foot-to-ball interactions including ball touches.

The earliest adopter of PlayerMaker in the US was the University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer program. Coach Randy Waldrum says he understood it would take a few years to develop proper context for the metrics. Incidentally, the overall quality of the program has improved considerably, so the baselines keep evolving, too. The shoe-worn sensor, which provides physical and technical data, helps solidify what he’s seeing and, at times, can serve as a tiebreaker between two players.

“We now have a pretty good system in place and a pretty good file on what the average distance is players should be covering per position, the kind of touches that are required,” Waldrum says. “We can even get into some of the positions, whether it’s more right foot or left footed—those kinds of things.”

When PlayerMaker launched, it sold only to professional clubs and college teams, but when the pandemic struck in March 2020, several clients asked about obtaining individual units that its disparate players could use for training. Aharon, the CEO, told those clubs, “Yes, sure, we can.” Shaking his head, he hung up and called his COO, “Hey, this is something I just committed to that we need to deliver.”

“For us as a company and as an industry,” Aharon says of the pandemic, “it shortened what could happen in three, four or five years from now and it happened in a few months.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores how access to physical data has improved in soccer scouting. The next article will look at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts.

Two days after Arsenal routed Everton in its final fixture of the 2021-2022 Premier League season in May, the pitch at Emirates Stadium was back in action. Arsenal’s first team players had scattered for the summer break, but 22 unsigned teenagers—17 boys, 5 girls—gathered for drills and scrimmages in front of the club’s academy coaches.

Each of these young players had been invited for the tryout based on data collected by a small sensor suspended between the shoulder blades in a black compression harness. This GPS device from STATSports carried Arsenal branding and enabled anyone who bought the device, which retails for $350, to vie for a spot in this showcase.

Players were judged on the data collected by the Fifa-approved wearable carrying the GPS transmitter, accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. They produce 16 metrics including a bespoke Pro Score, all of which are shared with Arsenal staff and can be compared in the accompanying app to anonymized data of current Arsenal academy players. This provides an incentive for users to train and exposes a Premier League club to potential talent that may have been overlooked.

While the ease of access to digital video has aided scouts in making subjective evaluations of prospects’ playing ability and style, the growth of GPS devices in the consumer and youth markets is helping objective physical data be incorporated into that process—not as the sole determine factor, of course, but as another vetting tool.

“Just to make clear, obviously, the ability to play football is the most important aspect of any player who plays for Arsenal Football Club or any football club in the world,” says Barry Watters, the head of sports science at STATSports. “Even if they’re technically and tactically very good, are they physically capable of performing at the top level?”

This marked a major evolution in scouting standards. Sport scientist Chris Barnes currently consults with Catapult and Uefa but previously worked with several clubs, building what some consider the first sport science department in the Premier League when he took on that role with Middlesbrough in 1997. He notes a clear rise in the adoption of objective data in scouting and recruiting over the past 15 years, which was not the standard practice for decades before that.

“The way that traditionally recruitment was performed, certainly in the UK, is you would have a troupe of middle-aged or elderly men in oversized coats who would stand on the side of a field and make some paper notes on players,” Barnes says. “And if they created sufficient interest in the coaching staff, eventually one of the more senior people would go, and it would be done so subjectively.”

The leading GPS brands have made entreaties in the consumer market. STATSports makes its Apex Athlete Series wearable—with and without Arsenal branding—and Catapult tried first with its PLAYR device in 2018 and then with Catapult One in 2021. Other smaller brands, like Sports Performance Tracking, FieldWiz and SoccerBee are also available.

The Catapult GPS device is used in academies to measure a player’s performance across load, speed, endurance and position.

At the upper levels of the sport, league-wide data-sharing agreements are common. What’s collected by optical tracking systems Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU, Hawk-Eye and the like are disseminated freely within the clubs of the top leagues. There’s less cutthroat competition at the academy level, so Barnes says there’s some degree of informal data sharing.

But getting one’s hands on that physical data has been “very difficult, historically,” says AS Monaco Technical Director Laurence Stewart. “I’m a big believer that some information is better than no information, as long as we understand the right context around it. [It’s] definitely more difficult the younger you get, and there’s less coverage and sort of openly available information on the younger players.”

* * * * *

Chris Barnes had never stepped foot in Nigeria until he reported for his first day of work in December 2020 as Sports Science Director at Vandrezzer FC in the second division. There, he introduced Catapult’s PlayerTek device, with Vandrezzer touting itself as the first club in the country to use a GPS tracker and to have a sports science department. It also added Veo’s AI-powered cameras. All of the national teams in the African federation, CAF, have been using GPS for a few years—first FieldWiz and now PlayerTek—piquing the interest of the professional clubs on the continent.

Vandrezzer had a pair of precocious talents, defenders Felix Oloye and Samuel Edoho, that began attracting outside interest from clubs in Denmark and Poland. The longstanding challenge of scouting across countries and leagues has been finding a way to compare contexts of league quality and physicality. That’s where the PlayerTek GPS devices played a role: both players exceeded the physical requirements of the European clubs, although the transfers ultimately fell through for other reasons.

“They wanted the training data that we’ve got on these two young players before they make a decision as to whether they’d take them on trial. So it really was at the center of the recruitment process,” Barnes says. “What the Danish and the Polish teams were interested in was essentially tempo or intensity. So, within the games themselves, they’re looking at what we would call a relative data—can they can they maintain high-intensity actions, accelerations, decelerations, sprints, and repeat them consistently over a period of time?”

The enterprise optical tracking systems such as Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU and Hawk-Eye have been available in top leagues for several years with data-sharing agreements so that each member club had access to everyone else’s match data.

Increasingly, such systems are trickling down to smaller leagues. Second Spectrum, for instance, reached a deal with the Danish League in October 2021 to install its solution not only in the first-tier Superliga immediately but also in the country’s second division in the near future. Similarly, the recent MLS deal with IMG Arena includes a provision for tracking to extend down to MLS Next Pro next year. And companies like Track160 have entered the market to offer more affordable alternatives.

In the absence of in-venue cameras, companies such as SkillCorner are generating similar datasets of physical performance using only broadcast video. Liverpool was its first customer, and now it culls footage from 50 global leagues to retroactively produce tracking data, which clubs can then import to existing systems such as Catapult’s SBG MatchTracker and Hudl’s Sportscode.

“If you’re looking at a player in Uruguay, historically there was no way to get data on that player,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “Well, guess what, now we’ve got SkillCorner tracking data, bring it into SBG and you can really understand that player and the decisions they make, their movement profile, how they respond to different triggers, different situations, how aware are they of their teammates and X, Y and Z.”

To date, SkillCorner primarily works at the top end, informing clubs’ decisions in the transfer market, but it is working to adapt the product for different video sources to accommodate lower tiers, such as academies. Compatibility across systems so that video and physical data can be reviewed in tandem is important, too.

“We see a very similar thing happening in human performance as we did in recruitment a few years ago when we acquired Wyscout, which was more and more match analysts were moving from just analyzing games to recruiting players, and they were using the same tool sets,” Hudl SVP of elite sports Sam Lloyd says of acquiring Wimu, the wearable tracker used by FC Barcelona, the Spanish national team and all of Liga MX. “So it just made total sense for us to have both tool sets under the same umbrella and make them easier to use.”

Youth soccer players were given the same tech as the pros, and if their stats were high enough, their data could get them recruited to academies.

StatsBomb is an analytics provider that has devised its own proprietary metrics, combining computer vision techniques with some manual input. It serves more than 150 team customers while ingesting data from more than 90 leagues, helping create those league benchmarks.

“Part of it is baselining the whole league and how physical something is, so that you know, ‘Where can we recruit from?’” says StatsBomb CEO Ted Knutson. “That’s something that scouts always talk about, ‘Oh, that’s a physical league, so they’ll do fine here.’ And you get proxies for it. But you won’t need proxies anymore.”

Before Track160’s entry into the US market, the Israeli company held a number of focus groups, using its system to track players and then sharing that data. Many of the young players immediately started getting competitive, comparing top speeds and other metrics. The parents were all eager to garner more exposure for their children and, in time, they’ll be able to make relevant comparisons and projections.

“They’ll be able to benchmark players between the same age group, same gender, compare it to other regions,” says Track160 CEO Eyal Ben-Ari. “They could even tell the player, ‘Look, if you want to play in the Bundesliga 3, that’s the level that you’d have to get to. And if you want to be recruited to Division I in the US, that’s the threshold.’ Eventually, we’ll see more of that, but that will require some time to collect historic data.”

Barnes used to work at West Bromwich Albion of the Premier League when they used event data from sources such as Opta that quantified matches based on granular detail of shots, passes and touches. Barnes and the WBA data scientists created models based on their own clubs’ wearable data and the event data to find, say, the best fit at right-side midfield for their tactics. It would share percentage matches and also, crucially, compute financial value of the players to guide the targeting of realistic options for a smaller club. But that had limitations.

“The biggest challenge you’ve got as much as anything else, though, is probably 90% of the meaningful event data is when you’ve got possession of the ball, and that’s probably great when you’re trying to recruit midfield and attacking players,” Barnes says. “But of course, a little bit more difficult when you try to recruit defensive or strong defensive midfield players. But here’s where, if you can access the wearable data—and it’s becoming increasingly possible with league-wide deals because then it’s shared—you can actually build timestamped and time coded pictures, which will give you information related to events.”

* * * * *

The largest undertaking in elite development soccer is beginning this fall. US Youth Soccer, a nonprofit affiliated with the national federation, announced plans for its new Elite 64 league, which will include 64 boys teams and 64 girls teams at each of six age groups for teenage players. Assuming 23 players per roster, that’s roughly 17,500 soccer prospects from Bangor to Burbank, all competing for national trophies and recognition.

Each participant will receive both qualitative and quantitative data, from USYS partners ProScore and STATSports. ProScore uses its own evaluation metrics to assess key moments of the match while STATSports will be providing the same GPS technology that the Arsenal invitees used. In this case, instead of being tethered to just one pro club, the users can share their data with any college coaches or pro scouts.

“That’s where we can see the consumer product overall going as well—the ability of the individual user themselves to be able to share that data with whatever third parties they want, be that scouts or coaches so that they can see what they’re physically capable of,” says Watters, the STATSports sport scientist. “They share everything else already. They share video reels, they share anything. There’s a lot of data.”

This remains a largely new frontier for wearables in the US, so building appropriate benchmarks will take time for each MLS academy and college program to gain an appreciation of what they’re looking for and what physical output is appropriate. “So that we can see what good looks like, but it all must be put in the context of the type of team they play for,” says Watters, adding that eventually the STATSports app can use those recommendations to serve as a “virtual coach” for players without access to top club programs.

“Most actual high schools don’t have the budgets to do that, [but] lot of the youth clubs do,” University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer coach Randy Waldrum says of GPS device. “It’s not where it needs to be yet, but we’ve certainly—over the last five, six years—seen it start to grow.”

US Soccer signed its own major partnership with STATSports back in 2018 to incorporate the devices through the federation, including the youth national teams. The US Soccer High Performance Director at the time, James Bunce, previously held that role with the Premier League and was a proponent of bio-banding, a concept of grouping players on teams based on physical maturity and age rather than sorting strictly by birth year.

GPS devices can help play a role in determining those selections, along with other inputs of physical data. US men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says that his pool of players are receiving regular assessments from his own staff and their respective club staffs to formulate a holistic view of each athlete.

“Everything. Body screens, motion screens. The breadth of data that we’re collecting on these players is pretty impressive,” Berhalter says. “Not only that, we’re working together with their clubs to import data from what they’re doing at their club level into our system. So we can piece together where a player is at physically when he comes into camp.”

Over in the UK, STATSports outfits Rising Ballers FC, a youth club for unsigned players. Several of its alumni have gone on to sign with pro clubs and academies where there’s greater maturity of physical data. That’s where the Premier League and other overseas circuits are ahead, Barnes says, because the academies have been “running in a structured way for 15-plus years.”

New avenues of entry remain possible, such as through Arsenal’s partnership with STATSports. Of the first 22 players to trial at Emirates, none has yet signed, although one of the female players continues to be closely scouted and the Arsenal staff says it saw “flashes of brilliance” from the prospects.

“For us, the golden ticket obviously is if someone does get picked up,” Watters says, “but I think even the ability to allow these end users to be able to get in front of these people was absolutely brilliant and all the kids and everything loved it.

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores the growth of digital video in soccer scouting. The next article will look at how access to physical data has improved.

Grêmio, a soccer club that plays deep in southern Brazil, is annually competitive in the country’s top division, but it struggled through its 2021 season. Playing in front of paltry Covid-capped crowds, Grêmio finished in 17th place, allowing its most goals in a decade and suffering relegation to the second division.

Those top-line results, however, obscured a hidden talent. A hemisphere away, French Ligue 1 side AS Monaco received a midseason alert about a young Grêmio defender. A one-named wunderkind named Vanderson, who plays right back, was starting and logging significant minutes at the age of 19, while contributing tackles, pass interceptions and goals on some brilliant free kicks. Such production triggered an alert within Wyscout, the Hudl-owned scouting service widely used in pro soccer.

AS Monaco employs a scout in Brazil, but it’s a massive country that was still contending with Covid travel restrictions. The scout couldn’t get there right away, but the club had access to plentiful data and video resources to some preliminary vetting before the AS Monaco scout—and, subsequently, Technical Director Laurence Stewart—got on a plane to see Vanderson play in Porto Alegrense.

“That’s an example of a player that it would be a lot more difficult for us to sign if we’ve not been able to do a lot of that prior work [before we travel] and see them play in different contexts and in different scenarios,” Stewart says. “So we have quite a diligent process that we have to go through, in a way to tick as many of the boxes as possible before we look to recruit a player.”

Monaco ultimately completed a $12.1 million [£10.4 million] transfer for Vanderson in January and, by February, while still four months shy of his 21st birthday, he became a regular starter on a club that finished third in Ligue 1.

The recruitment of Vanderson is a perfect case study of modern digital scouting in soccer: a quick, data-infused process to sign a young talent.

“What is becoming more prevalent after the pandemic, after Covid, we’ve seen that a lot of organizations are shifting their demographic of players that they recruit, so the average age of players recruited is dropped,” Stewart says. “What that does is brings a pressure around there being a time sensitivity to the way that you work.”

The global pandemic gave clubs a rare respite long enough to step back and re-evaluate processes, all while cutting into revenues from diminished match revenue. One trend that accelerated as a result was the speculation on younger players. Stewart says the window to evaluate prospects has shrunk, on average, from two seasons to one and now, at times, only half a season.

Getting players younger allows a mid-sized club to reap the benefits of a few productive seasons before, as the player reaches his prime, transferring him on to a mega club for an increased profit. Prospecting earlier also lessens the financial risk. It’s little surprise that one of the other rumored suitors of Vanderson was Brentford, well known for its hearty embrace of analytics.

“We have to be agile and ready to know our assessment and know our profiles in a shorter period of time,” Stewart says, “so that’s where we need technology to help us be more intensive in that process.”

The pandemic forced teams to embrace online scouting

Victoire Cogevina, a former player agent and now the Founder/CEO of Gloria, began the company a half-dozen years ago with an intention of using the app to aid scouting. She’d partner with leagues who would subscribe to gain access to new recruits. The idea, she says, was that the players matter most, so if you build a product they want to use, the clubs and leagues will follow.

Before the pandemic, the foothold data analytics had gained in the tactical decisions of many elite clubs has been well documented, but that embrace lagged behind in scouting, which largely remained a bastion of older, more subjective methods. (Gloria has since pivoted to a larger purpose, serving more as a social and community-drive app centered around the beautiful game with grand plans to become titular sponsor of the new women’s league in Spain.)

“The pandemic was this kind of a slap in the face for clubs understanding that a vital piece of their business, which was finding new talent, and also a vital piece of their revenue share [from transfers] was something that they can do in a much more efficient way than they had done,” she says. “And they were so closed off because, by the way, in 2018 when I was speaking to clubs, they thought I was an alien.

“I remember having conversations with clubs that were forefront, big brands—obviously smart in their decisions—and they were very much against the idea of online scouting. And when you told them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be just a few years when you’re going to change your business dramatically. They were like, ‘No.’ They had a ton of excuses around it. So when the pandemic happened, immediately I got a ton of phone calls from all of those clubs that I had once been in their boardrooms and offices and, ‘Hey, remember what you pitched me? What are you doing now?’”

For a national federation like US Soccer, whose remit is to monitor professionals across the world and millions of youth players across a sprawling country, the centralized collection of video and data at its headquarters in Chicago has become essential. Men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says he can keep tabs on his player pool—collecting video and performance data—for every match they play, no matter the league or country. Much of that infrastructure helps scout the players.

“Very similar,” Berhalter says. “We’re able to watch our youth teams through the platforms that were created that houses video, but also youth scouting, sharing methodology—all that stuff, technology makes it a lot easier.”

Some clubs shifted toward digital scouting more organically than as a result of the pandemic. Two years after Monaco won its first Ligue 1 championship in 2017, the club finished 17th, staving off relegation by a mere two points, and churned through managers like a tipsy tourist burns through chips at the Monte Carlo poker tables. In 2020, Monaco modernized, investing in data, a new training facility and key hires, such as Stewart, Sporting Director Paul Mitchell, and two key US Soccer Federation personnel, Performance Director James Bunce and technology guru Tyler Heaps. The club is now significantly younger and more fit.

Monaco has been a fairly prolific spender since a new ownership group took over a decade ago, but the trend lines toward data, video and youth can be seen throughout the sport. Hudl SVP of Elite Sports Sam Lloyd says that, historically, recruitment was the product of scouts and agents. But now a “golden triangle” has emerged, and “data is as important as scouts and agents,” he says, noting that the Wyscout usage skyrocketed during the pandemic.

Wyscout provides data regarding performance, patterns of play and tactical strategies for coaches, teams and players to analyze.

“The biggest change that’s happened because of Covid is it’s mobilized the much smaller organizations to become literate with data and data scouting,” adds Lloyd, noting that the bigger clubs were already investing significant resources in the practice. Tools like Wyscout narrow the funnel of players for more targeted scouting trips. “The rest of the football pyramid,” he says, “it’s opened up ways in which they can scout not just from where they can drive to in a single day.”

Tonsser gives scouts access to larger pool of players

Four years ago, a group of teenage strangers gathered in Paris. Each was summoned on the merits of the videos and stats he had uploaded to a Danish soccer app called Tonsser, borrowing the local nickname for a gritty, high-effort player who maybe succeeds in spite of some technical deficiency. This group—from disparate backgrounds and no experience as teammates— played a Paris FC youth team to a 2-2 draw.

That result was “very motivating for us,” recalls Tonsser Co-Founder and CEO Peter Holm. It led to a more formal showcase program called Tonsser United, an ever-changing roster of previously overlooked players who would gather and compete in tournaments against organized club teams.

“That started actually as an experiment, maybe to challenge ourselves bit,” Holm says. “It was more like a question, ‘Can players from outside the academies, found through an app, compete with established academies?’”

With a user base now of 1.4 million players, mostly aged 13 to 19 and living in Europe, Tonsser subsequently entered a squad in the Vinci Cup, an under-15 tournament later that year. A photo advertising the event shows the logos of all 16 participants, including the storied crests of European powers like Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, FC Porto—and a turquoise circle with a soccer ball centered the middle, a logo looking like it had been hastily selected from a clip art catalog.

Tonsser United acquitted themselves well, winning or tying its first several matches and drawing distinction for its surprise performance in the tournament recap, noting how the players all met each other on Thursday before playing four matches together on Saturday.

The concept of the club has continued, with a new roster each time, and Holm reports that 40% of its alumni have gone on to sign with professional academies through this alternate route, at least in part because of this new exposure.

“That helped us incubate the idea of how can you create a concept of a football club that is born out of values, born out of a vision, rather than born out of geography,” Holm says. “Because football clubs today, they have a stadium, a physical presence, and usually you have fans out of legacy, because where you are born or you fall in love with it from afar. What we wanted to create was a more of a concept of a football club that anybody can support because they want to support the underdog.”

A product like Tonsser helps players at the beginning of their scouting journey. While the use of Wyscout and other tools are used to identify a match with a single pro prospect like Vanderson, Tonsser works in the reciprocal: select a whole roster of players higher up the talent funnel and make it easier for scouts to see a larger pool. It integrates with national federations to ensure player identities and data quality, but an integral part of its methodology is to seek the “wisdom of the crowd” in which peers vote for those who turn in the best performances, Holm says.

“That’s really the trenchant analogy that we use for football,” he adds. “So instead of asking the coach or experts in football, we flip it to the community to help them generate data points.”

The app has been in the market long enough that some professional stars used it in their youth, most notably Erling Haaland, Manchester City’s newly acquired prized striker. Holm quickly notes that “we can take no credit” for helping the upward trajectory of his career, though “it’s just fun and inspiring that he’s used the app,” but there are a few case studies where Tonsser seems to have played a role.

Frankfurt’s Jesper Lindstrøm was a heavy user as a teen. In four years, he went from Tonsser’s Player of the Season to Bundesliga Rookie of the Year. After a friend played a match with the Tonsser United showcase team, a young French player named Alexis Kabamba downloaded the app and fared well in a friendly. That led to a contract with Ligue 1 club Stade de Reims and subsequent appearances with France’s U17 national team.

“My experience is that so many players that we don’t know just fall off the edge of the cliff, for one reason or another, because they don’t have the opportunities, they lose motivation, think they’re not good enough,” Holm says. “They don’t have the right environment to bloom. And that really what we’re trying to provide with Tonsser United. There’s always a second chance.”

Affordable video opens more global opportunities

Some aren’t afforded a first chance. Africa has been underscouted, but the proliferation of quality, affordable video—and the platforms for distribution—is granting the continent’s players more exposure. Lloyd says Hudl has begun contracting more frequently to record tournaments and then upload the footage to Wyscout.

Hudl’s focus camera was installed at Rio Tinto Stadium, home to the Real Salt Lake soccer club.

After Hudl shared video from a tournament in Cameroon, for instance, and club scouts were able to compare the analysis with the benchmarks of players already in their academies. Several then flew to Cameroon to recruit those young players. The same was true for some matches in Zambia, which led to interest from elite clubs like Villarreal and Porto.

“There’s more justification for the travel expense, whereas sending a scout on a whim to Zambia—it seems crazy, doesn’t it? Who’s going to do that?” Lloyd says. “But if you’ve watched him five times, you’ve got the data to verify he’s above and beyond what you currently have. That becomes an easy trip, doesn’t it? Because now it’s, ‘Let’s get him before these other teams work it out,’ rather than, ‘I hope to go and find a good 15 year old in Zambia.’ That’s not a good trend.”

Chelsea FC star midfielder Kevin de Bruyne, a recent Premier League Player of the Year honoree, sponsors his own youth tournament, the KDB Cup, in his native Belgium. The event already invites many of best U15 players, gathering them for elite competition—and easy scouting. But whether it’s due to Covid or budget concerns, travel still isn’t easy for everyone, so the KDB Cup began a two-year partnership with automated camera company Veo to provide coaches and players match analysis and broadcast the matches for free to 104 countries.

There are several AI-powered camera systems in use—Veo, Hudl Focus, Pixellot, Spiideo, PlaySight, Trace and more—but more manual efforts remain the norm.

“Some of it is automated capture, but the vast majority is still one guy standing on a scaffold with a video camera,” Lloyd says. “Times haven’t changed that much, unfortunately, but the automated capture is definitely making it more easy and more available.”

Wyscout users can view related videos for a team, player or game as well as download clips and make their own analysis.

Longtime UConn men’s soccer Coach Ray Reid, who won a national championship in 2000, used to employ video and scouting services such as InStat and Wyscout was the beneficiary of several impact recruits from Europe he otherwise never would have recruited. Kai Griese and Bjorn Nikolajewski arrived from Germany, and Mateo Leveque matriculated from France. Reid calls Leveque—the 2021 Big East Freshman of the Year—“one of the best guys we’ve ever recruited.”

“It helps you figure out if you want to go there, if you want to fly to France to see a young man,” says Reid, who recently retired from coaching and became a Senior Strategic Advisor for optical tracking company Track160. “It’s a good first step.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Andrew Cohen

Impact-monitoring mouthguard developer Prevent Biometrics has collected data on more than one million head impacts over the past couple of years, spanning “tens of thousands” of players that have worn its mouthguard across contact sports such as football, rugby, hockey, lacrosse and soccer. The company believes its data creates a more accurate depiction of the head impact risks associated with youth sports.

“We have really begun to restate what’s the correct amount and magnitude of head impacts in sports are [and] at young sports it shows they’re pretty safe,” Prevent Biometrics CEO Mike Shogren tells SportTechie. “We’ve shown that less than 1% of all impacts are over 50 gs [g-force] and 50g is big.”

Prevent’s mouthguards measure the g-force of each hit though its built-in accelerometers that collect data such as linear acceleration, rotational acceleration, location on head, direction of impact and total number of impacts.

Prevent’s mouthguard’s tight-coupling to the skull is a newer (and possibly more accurate) method to measure head impacts.

“10g is what you do when you sit in a chair, you can stop really hard, and you’ll get five to 10g” Shogren explains. “Ten to 20g are a bump, you might not even know what happened to you, you might not contend you got hit the head, but you had some contact. 20-30g you realize you were hit, that’s a head to the facemask, a small trip and you bump your head. 40g is when you definitely know you got hit, and 50g is bad. And above 50 is we’ve almost shown all of them to be reflective of a person acting in ways you would typically remove someone from a game.”

Minnesota-based Prevent Biometrics is involved in several ongoing studies, including working with Indiana University to equip 160 high school football players with its mouthguards and another study with a suburban Minneapolis youth tackle football organization that equipped 400 players with Prevent’s mouthguard. The University of Nevada is entering year three of a study in which 50 players on the school’s D1 college football team have worn the mouthguard and has thus far collected data on 20,000 head impacts over the past two seasons.

“We’re seeing around an average of six impacts per player. And about 80% of those impacts are below 20g and 90% are below about 25g consistently in the schools that we look at. So less impacts that are smaller is the first finding in almost everything we do,” Shogren says.

Shogren is critical of past methods predominantly used in football to measure head impacts, such as the Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS) developed by Simbex that leading helmet manufacturer Riddell began adding to their helmets around the mid-2000s. That system saw accelerometers placed inside the helmet, but its impact data is less accurate than Prevent’s mouthguard because the helmet sensor system is more susceptible to moving out of place on each impact, effecting the measure of force.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill equipped its football players with Riddel’s HITS-embedded helmet during practices and games from the 2004 to 2006 college football seasons. UNC released a study on the impact data in 2007 that found “In football, a hit can easily jerk the head, for milliseconds, at 50g, and hits above 100g are common,” adding that one player experienced a 168g hit.

“All of the football data you’ve ever seen about how dangerous football is, is about five times too many impacts and way too big. And it’s because the helmets systems they use move,” Shogren says. “All the way up to college and professional levels, we’ve showed that these games are nowhere near as dangerous as the studies have reported in the past. Hits equal to car accidents, this stuff is just not usually true.”

Prevent’s data can be accessed in real time and allows for multiple team users to monitor athletes.

Among the other support of Prevent Biometrics is Dr. Joseph Maroon, who is the Team Neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers and medical director for the WWE. The NFL recognized Prevent Biometrics as a finalist at the league’s first and future pitch competition in 2017. Last year, the NFL expanded its impact-sensing mouthguard program from NFL teams to also include players on four college football programs, though that mouthguard device was developed with Virginia-based engineering firm Biocore.

“The data from the HITS system indicated there were 1,000s of hits and huge forces. And it was all erroneous, most of it was erroneous,” Maroon says. “The Prevent [Biometrics] system with fixing the mouthpiece to the upper teeth has been shown to be very accurate.”

Shogren says Prevent sells its mouthguard predominantly to teams with the price now around $300 to outfit an entire team in which each player gets their own device. The company’s biggest partnership to date has been with World Rugby, which began in 2021 with more than 700 youth players in New Zealand outfitted with Prevent’s mouthguards. The deal is now expanding to equip roughly 3,000 rugby players across the world, including players in the women’s Rugby World Cup.

Last month, World Rugby announced that it was extending its return-to-play window for players who got diagnosed with a concession to 12 days, meaning they likely would be forced to miss their next match after being diagnosed. Prevent is also working with World Rugby to establish a score of g-force that would signal when a player has reached an accumulation of impacts that would require evaluation for possible concussion.

“At some point in time, small impacts add up to a dangerous thing. We’re working with World Rugby now on with what we call a load calculation,” Shogren says. So figuring out this number where there will be some threshold where you would also say, ‘Hey, this guy in a football game, took 10 hits that added up to a number and that’s the threshold we want to assess him.’”

World Rugby’s collaboration with Prevent has also found that girl athletes at the youth level tend to sustain bigger head impacts than boys.

“We have seen differences in women, where we think because they start later in certain sports, they end up having more head to ground contacts and bigger impacts because they just don’t seem to go to the ground as well as boys,” Shogren says. We’ve confirmed that’s true that girls can have larger head impacts when they hit the ground, and it looks like it’s something to do with how they fall. So it’s immediately led to World Rugby developing some drills at the younger age for how you take a tackle and go to the ground.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

By Luke Whitworth

The field of coach development has continued to grow in importance across high performance environments in recent years, perhaps enhanced further by the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, where support structures for coaches were just as important as those for athletes. For coach developers specifically, there remains a focus on how performance environments are evolving and what that means for coaching practice.

A recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable on ‘coaching the coaches’ brought together coaches, coach developers and other discipline leads who were keen to learn more about current focuses associated with coach developments. Together we sought to explore best practices and practical ideas around how to support coaches and, here, the Leaders Performance Institute identifies three practices to consider with your teams.

1. Learning networks

Coaching at the elite level in particular can be a lonely existence. To provide coaches with more support, organisations are beginning to ask coaches, as part of their development journeys, to review and design specific learning networks. This creates an awareness of who they speak to the most and who and where do they go to for new knowledge around a particular section of performance.

Coach developers are seeking to map what these networks look like and subsequently align them to personal development plans. As a coach developer, ask yourself: are there any gaps and how do we plug them? A nice term highlighted on the call was that we want to encourage a ‘seascape of learning’. As a coach you navigate your own journey, as opposed to just being told what you need to do. People are there to support you navigate the journey but not there to be directive. The role of the coach developer is to raise awareness of different things they want to look at themselves, or potential blind spots.

2. Creating transparency around development focuses

We often talk about the importance of multidisciplinary teams having clarity and understanding of the individual development plans of athletes – what about extending this further to creating transparency around the development plans or coaches and other high performance staff? For coaches in particular, it’s important to show vulnerability and invite feedback from athletes.

A couple of examples were shared on the call where coaches have put their individual development plans up on the wall next to the athletes, allowing for the athletes to also input on what the focuses of the coaches are. If we want to create a culture of genuine feedback on coaching create space for the athletes to understand what the focuses are, make it a two-way process so that the development plans aren’t sitting separately.

3. Coaching cells

The notion of coaching cells is not a new phenomenon for a number of organisations, but they can be an impactful and productive way of creating opportunities and space for coaches to converge in both a formal and informal way. Coaching cells are small groups of coaches who get together and take it in turns within the group to present either a coaching challenge, a topic of interest or opportunity they see.

The purpose of the cell is to create a cross-pollination of ideas and space to share ideas and solutions. Aside from the opportunity to have impactful and important discussions around coaching practice, coaching cells are a powerful intervention in developing relationships between coaches.

There are some organisations across high performance sport who have taken the notion of coaching cells a step further, placing more emphasis on the concept of interdisciplinarity in sharing best practice and insight across disciplines. Cells have been designed to include a coach, nutritionist, sports scientist, athletic performance specialist and psychologist – this intervention aids the knowledge development and appreciation of how different disciplines influence and can support one another.