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“I experienced it first-hand as a practitioner,” Rich Buchanan tells the Leaders Performance Institute, having previously worked behind the scenes at Swansea City FC, the Wales FA, and other organizations. “The people tasked with making sense out of assorted data are under immense pressure to interpret information every single day for every single player throughout an entire season. The weight of delivering ROI lies in their hands.”
Buchanan, who has also worked for organizations in the US and continental Europe, is now the Performance Director at Zone7. The company’s artificial intelligence [AI] system is being used by a growing number of top-tier sports outfits as they look to convert data collection into actionable insights for higher levels of athlete performance and availability.
“If you have one person undertaking manual analysis and interpretation, it is difficult, if not impossible, to do that consistently well over the course of a campaign,” he continues. “Just as we’ve seen in other industries, I believe AI will play an increasingly important role in helping professionals identify complex risk patterns from an athlete’s data that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye.”
How does data fatigue manifest? “Typically, sports scientists or fitness coaches are the ones tasked with monitoring players using data-generating tools, like GPS or biometric wearables,” says Buchanan. “Many of these professionals, however, are not data specialists by trade. They are generally sports practitioners whose expertise is better served in athlete-facing environments – on a pitch, in a gym, etc. – where they work directly with athletes in a practical manner.”
“Right now, the conventional norm for making sense of athlete performance data in sport requires significant time commitment to examine large datasets. It is a laborious manual analysis and interpretation process, one which often runs counter to why these professionals embarked on a career in sport in the first place. As a result, disenchantment becomes quickly apparent and you see signs of data fatigue setting in as they’re pressured to deliver meaningful insights that can then be practically applied.
“Even now, as many organizations employ data science personnel, it’s not humanly possible to do this kind of manual analysis and interpretation effectively and consistently for multiple athletes over the course of a season. Combined with the frequency and complexity of new datasets becoming available, the manual approach often results in flawed insights that reduce the value that organizations receive from investments in data collection tools.”
Buchanan works closely with Tal Brown, CEO and Co-Founder of Zone7, whose extensive background in creating and deploying AI technology with the likes of Salesforce and Oracle has allowed him to witness data fatigue first-hand.
“The need to find accurate solutions for harmonizing, analyzing, and interpreting such large volumes of data has never been clearer,” says Brown. “I’ve spent much of my career creating intelligent tools that minimize data fatigue while creating more efficient data analysis processes. This is now becoming a significant challenge for decision makers in sport, especially as they’re tasked with validating and correctly interpreting data from a growing array of different sources. It’s not just game and competition data, we’re also seeing increased amounts of medical, strength & conditioning, sleep and general wellbeing data generated by wearable technologies.”
The scenario of data fatigue described by Buchanan is not uncommon and Zone7 is aware of the vital need to adopt a ‘practitioner’s lens,’ continues Brown. “Tech innovation and evolution is driven by the need to answer harder questions in more efficient and reliable ways. You need to collaborate with practitioners and ultimately provide the insights that add value in their specific environments.”
One such practitioner is Javier Vidal, a Performance Coach with Spanish La Liga club Valencia CF. Vidal has used Zone7 in a number of different team environments. “Zone7 is a tool I’ve used for several years,” said Vidal. “Its AI has allowed me to adapt my day-to-day routine and get more value of out new data generating technologies that are arising all the time.
Zone7 has been deployed and operated real time by Vidal at Valencia CF since the start of the 21/22 season and the number of confirmed injuries has dropped by 52% compared to the previous season. This closely resembles results during his tenure in Getafe another La Liga team, where Vidal saw a drop of 70%, with a 65% reduction in days that first-team players were lost due to injury. “It would be the work of many people analyzing data all day to gain such useful information, but with Zone7 I get accurate, usable information within minutes that I can immediately put into practice.”
Buchanan adds that, in the case of forecasting injury risk, AI can also take a complex, multifaceted problem and present it in an easy-to-understand way. “At the top line, Zone7 presents ‘athletes at high, medium, or low risk. On top of that, it presents potential actionable solutions, such as, ‘do more or less in this specific area than you originally intended.”
Multifaceted problems also create greater risk of blind spots emerging in athlete monitoring. In this case, the relationship between classic sports performance data streams such as external workload, strength and internal workload, and ‘next gen’ of data points such as heartrate variability [HRV] and biomarkers monitoring stress, sleep or diet presents a margin for error. “We can create visibility into how those nodes interact in the day-to-day environment,” says Brown. “More data allows us to calibrate tools that can understand those relationships. Traditional spreadsheet-like tools just don’t offer that functionality.”
One of the missions driving Zone7 is to give practitioners a sense of security at moments when they are under significant pressure to deliver. “One of the hardest parts of a coach, analyst, or performance specialist’s job is giving definitive advice on decisions made around athletes,” says Buchanan. “The number of times these professionals are tasked with doing this under pressure from all directions, with only their own subjective opinion to draw upon, is concerning. Equipping medical, fitness or coaching professionals with the objectivity that AI provides, driven by complex computations, creates more certainty and a stronger case for the advice they provide in that scenario.”
“Humans, by nature, already have in-built biases,” Buchanan continues. “We already have opinions about certain athletes; who’s robust and who’s not robust, who’s likely to report muscle tightness, etc. Now, if Zone7 corroborates those opinions, it assures the user. If what Zone7 suggests turns out to be true, then the trust builds. When we suggest something that’s counterintuitive, people may find that uncomfortable because it’s challenging preconceived beliefs. But I would say, in a way, that’s the true value-add that Zone7 brings, highlighting those blind spots. We’re there to make sure those players, and the opportunities to pre-emptively intervene, don’t slip through the net.”
Brown and Buchanan are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for data science in professional sports, whether that be 360-degree support for any interaction a player has related to performance, the possibility for longitudinal injury risk profiling, or the ability to support practitioner across a variety of different sports, each with their own cadences. The latter is already underway, with Zone7 being actively applied across American football, basketball, baseball, and rugby, in addition to extensive work in soccer.
Zone7 will also continue to challenge accepted wisdoms. “Regardless of the value individual practitioners and sports organizations place on data to manage athletes/players, the industry has been heavily reliant on simplistic data analysis and interpretation for a number of years and, quite simply, there’s now a more refined way of doing it,” says Buchanan. “Using AI to simulate different training load scenarios with the aim of physically peaking on certain days on the training cycle is just around the corner. “This is where people can get very precise on how they prepare their players or athletes for future events, rather than best guess periodization models.”
“Ultimately, future sporting success belongs to those who leverage their data in the most efficient, effective and accurate manner. We’re here, primed and ready to help practitioners in sport do just that.”
To connect with Zone7 directly, please email [email protected]
“There could be something in a group chat that was buried under half a dozen different birthday messages,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.
That missing information could be the details of a pitch the team is training on, the details of a medical appointment or a sponsor engagement.
Trimble, a former rugby player with 229 caps for Ulster and 70 caps for Ireland, explains that teams across all sports struggle with communication channels. “There are teams with 10-15 WhatsApp groups or – just as bad – they have one group for every single topic and there are numerous threads being discussed; and no one can understand everything,” he continues.
It sounds confusing. “Then there’s numerous screen grabs of whiteboards, which are obviously non-live. In some instances, an athlete has to walk into the medical room, pick up a marker and book an appointment that way, which is very strange in this day and age.”
Trimble, who retired from playing in 2018, heads up the Belfast-based Kairos, who have created a unified digital planning platform that enables better communication within sports organisations, from operations and management to coaching and performance. The platform was designed to be not only sport agnostic, but has tools to support every level from first team down through academies.
Kairos – a Greek term meaning ‘the decisive moment’ – enables teams, through their app and desktop-based platform, to solve problems by eradicating the distractions caused by multi-channel approaches. Trimble and Kairos Chief Operating Officer Gareth Quinn, who developed the first iteration of their platform in the mid-2010s, soon realised there was no suitable tool on the market. “We received strong validation that this is a problem that’s really worth solving,” says Trimble, who explains that Kairos is compatible with third party calendars such as Outlook and Google. “With our platform, it’s all very clear, there’s no clutter, all the athletes know where they need to be and there’s greater levels of accountability.”
Their platform is currently used by teams in the English Premier League, United Rugby Championship, Premiership Rugby and a series of teams across North America and South East Asia. Trimble points out that these teams may not just be suffering from a problem of unclear communication. “From a staff member’s perspective, it could be getting assurance that if you send something important to an athlete that it’s going to be delivered, received and understood and engaged with correctly,” he says.
“If it’s one place, then it doesn’t take up any cognitive load for the athlete. They can spend 100 per cent of their time thinking about performance. If that’s compromised in any way, if they have to scroll through their screen grabs or pictures of a PDF, and they have to scroll through their email for something else and look through their WhatsApp group to find a thread, then all of that is a distraction and all of that impacts on performance. Equally, if multiple departments are speaking different languages then you’re asking an athlete to be a goalkeeper with ten different goals to defend.
Trimble delves further into the issues that can exist within a single team. “Even within one department you can have three or four different behaviours,” he says. “Take a medical department. One medic may create a block of availability that allows athletes to book appointments, another medic may book that same slot of availability but then allocate slots to athletes, there may then be another medic who bypasses all availability and pushes bespoke events or appointments to players.
Kairos helps to solve such problems. “Athletes and staff get the assurance that everything is on the platform and they can see it. It’s all live. Any department that wants to communicate with the athlete will use the one platform. Ultimately, they’ve got one goal to defend and, if anything changes, they can see notifications, reminders or updates on their notification channel; it’s very clear and very easy for them to know where they have to be, what they have to do, what the requirements are, and then how to get the best out of themselves.”
The platform can also be adapted to the prevailing culture at a team. “There’s ownership on one end and management on the other, and every team lies somewhere on that spectrum, but it’s important that we can support everybody, whatever that team culture is or environment or what the expectation of the players is; either to tell them where to be or what to do, or to allow them to manage all that themselves. We’ve got tools to capture both behaviours.
“There’s a number of different ways that you can use our software and it’s important that we can work with a team and find a way that works best for them and gets them the best results and, ultimately, gets their athletes performing the best.”
On that note, Trimble says that Kairos is continually reiterating its platform. “Every conversation for us is about discovery, finding where the club is at, and deciding what their unique issues are and, nine times out of ten, we will have encountered something similar before and there will be a mechanism in place to be able to provide a solution in the software,” he says. “We can take them through that, but often there can be something unique and there’s learnings in that for us too. That could even just be a coach with a new way of thinking about the game, a new way of communicating, or a new operational procedure. We have to capture that development.”
This attitude points the way forward for the next 12 months. “The next phase we’re going to be working on is the integration with third parties, be that GPS providers, sleep data, or nutrition and diet.”
The feedback from Kairos’ ever-growing client base has been positive too. “They say it is unthinkable that they’d be able to go back to the way it was before,” says Trimble. “Professional athletes require a platform that treats them like they’re a valued professional and communicate in a way that gives them back time and takes away distractions.”
