{"id":10017,"date":"2022-06-17T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/?post_type=article&p=10017"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:11:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:11:34","slug":"how-ai-fits-into-liverpools-multidisciplinary-monitoring-model","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/how-ai-fits-into-liverpools-multidisciplinary-monitoring-model\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI Fits into Liverpool\u2019s Multidisciplinary Monitoring Model"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n 17 Jun 2022 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

How AI Fits into Liverpool\u2019s Multidisciplinary Monitoring Model<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Data & Innovation<\/a> <\/div>\n
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https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/how-ai-fits-into-liverpools-multidisciplinary-monitoring-model\/<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n\n\n
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First-Team Fitness Coach Conall Murtagh explains how Zone7 is helping the club\u2019s monitoring model to optimize individual player care.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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An article brought to you by our Partners<\/p>\n

\"sport<\/p>\n

Interview by Sarah Malone<\/h6>\n
Dr Conall Murtagh, the First-Team Fitness Coach at Liverpool FC, will soon be celebrating a decade working with the English Premier League club.<\/h6>\n

Murtagh joined as a sports scientist while studying for his PhD in 2012. He then became the Fitness Coach for the men\u2019s under-18s in 2014, and joined Head Coach J\u00fcrgen Klopp\u2019s staff in early 2016. His tenure with the first team coincides with one of the most successful spells in the club\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you come through the door each day there is a desire and expectation to be world-class,\u201d he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. \u201cWorking under this philosophy is the ultimate motivation for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recipe for success<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liverpool, who won the League Cup and FA Cup this season, have played the maximum number of games possible \u2013 63 in total and the most of all teams in the Premier League \u2013 the first time an English team has competed in every possible match in a single season since Liverpool themselves completed the feat during their FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup-winning 2000-2001 campaign.<\/p>\n

The Reds ended the season with almost a full complement of players thanks to the work of Klopp and his multidisciplinary staff which includes Murtagh, a former footballer himself and UEFA A Licence-qualified coach. It is a demanding environment. Murtagh\u2019s fascination with sports science and physiology began long before his own playing days.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was obsessed with how the human body worked, particularly how it responded to training and games. That led me down the study of physiology and then sport science. When I was playing as a professional, I had no real knowledge of sports science until I started studying and playing semi-professionally. The individual response to training always intrigued me. How the day after the same session, some players would turn up fresh as a daisy, while others arrived feeling sore and stiff. We could also all do the same gym intervention programmes and yet some players\u2019 sprint or jump performance would shoot through the roof, while others\u2019 stayed the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murtagh believes that different players inherently have different capacities for physiological adaptation from physical workload. Therefore, they require a stimulus tailored to their individual needs in real-time; something that is very difficult to provide consistently in a team sport environment. That is the challenge Murtagh embraces, as he and the wider staff strive to keep all squad members in peak condition.<\/p>\n

Zone7 adoption<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liverpool, much like any Premier League club, has an array of player monitoring and intervention tools at their disposal. For the 2021\/22 Premier League season they have also enlisted Zone7<\/a>, a data-driven artificial intelligence risk forecasting system, to support their development of personalised player workload management processes.<\/p>\n

The collaboration, amongst many other important cutting-edge processes adopted at Liverpool, has been a success. Under the watch of club practitioners, Liverpool\u2019s first team \u2013 according to Premier Injuries<\/a> \u2013 have seen a 33% drop in days lost to injury this season compared to last. When narrowed to \u2018substantial\u2019 injuries (long absences marked by 9+ consecutive days lost), this drop increases to 40%. Goalkeeper and illness-related absences are excluded from the breakdown.<\/p>\n

In essence, Zone7 empowers human decision-makers who oversee athlete workloads. These professionals are often tasked with making recommendations in highly pressurised situations. By analysing the extensive, disparate datasets generated and collected in elite sporting environments, Zone7 can detect injury risk patterns that may otherwise be invisible. In some instances, it can go a step further by making proactive recommendations to mitigate the identified injury risk. Importantly, Zone7 will often suggest increasing<\/em> workloads in particular areas to lower risk. Reducing workloads or simply prescribing rest is not always the right solution.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that adaptation for the human body is a dynamic process,\u201d says Murtagh. \u201cEvery time the player performs a training stimulus we must reassess their body\u2019s adaptation balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a multidisciplinary team, we assess every player every day. Zone7\u2019s AI works alongside our extensive internal monitoring processes by effectively identifying more complex data patterns that could indicate whether a player has good rhythm or has deviated from it. If our monitoring system identifies that the player is not in optimal rhythm, we intervene accordingly from a multidisciplinary perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

The productive use of Zone7 requires pragmatism. No credible AI solution will claim it is correct all the time and periodic false flags are a natural consequence. Murtagh, however, is unfazed.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can never say [a Zone7 risk alert] is a false positive when you\u2019re flagging the player,\u201d he says. \u201cSome players do receive flags and we do not detect anything to suggest they are at an elevated risk. There is such a fine line between someone getting injured or not, we try to identify when the player has sub-optimal rhythm and we intervene appropriately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zone7\u2019s data science team has evolved their solution this year by introducing a new \u2018Workload-Simulator\u2019 component, which enables practitioners like Murtagh to input projected workloads and simulate players\u2019 future injury risk in advance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing I like most about Zone7 is that they\u2019re constantly updating the algorithm, constantly evolving, constantly on the front foot in this field,\u201d added Murtagh. \u201cTo have the AI working in our environment to support our internal monitoring system gives us a certain sense of safety around our player management recommendations. The simulator is a brilliant feature, which will be used more and more as the system evolves.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a full season behind them, and tangible success metrics to point to, Liverpool and Zone7 have extended their working engagement by another two years<\/a>, a move that also includes Zone7 adoption across the Liverpool Women\u2019s and Under-23 teams. Rich Buchanan, Zone7 Performance Director, says that \u201cworking with Murtagh and Liverpool FC is hugely important to Zone7. It shows that our technology, in the hands of progressive and experienced practitioners, can exist and evolve, in one of the world\u2019s most elite sporting environments.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n

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