Tim Gabbett, a sports scientist who regularly works with elite performers such as Barcelona Football Club and Cirque du Soleil, calls these moments “worst-case scenarios”. Training players for the most vital moments of a football match – when players have to sprint repeatedly with only a few seconds of recovery time in between – is particularly important. Guilherme Ramos, a physiologist at the Brazilian Football Confederation, says that he explains to these players exactly how much effort they will need to put in during the World Cup so that “whenever they play against a smaller team, they know that they still have to play with the same intensity as they would be if they were playing for Brazil.” Computer says stop Steven Gerrard during a game for Liverpool For example, a few members of the Brazilian team still play in their domestic league, where matches are played at a slower pace than international football. Since GPS devices are now used both in training sessions and matches, by domestic clubs and national teams, the data allow fitness coaches not only to quantify the specific physiological demands of each game but also to ensure that the players are being trained to meet them. Wearable GPS devices record measurements hundreds of times each second, dissecting and quantifying the physical dimension of sport into its various components: from the total distance covered to the number of accelerations, from heart rate to the force of impacts from tackles.
The result, in theory, is that more players will spend longer playing at the top of their game. It will be especially useful in determining who to take off for the fourth substitute now allowed in extra time. In theory, this should lead to less chaotic and error-strewn periods of extra time, when players’ decision-making falls away as they get tired. Coaches will also be informed quickly of a player’s declining intensity.
“You will see unprecedented fitness levels in players,” says Barry McNeill, a senior executive at Catapult. In March 2018 FIFA announced that team analysts were now also allowed to transmit data and communicate with coaches during the match itself.įor the first time, the information gathered has the potential to influence the course of a game. In February 2015 the International Football Association Board approved the use of electronic tracking in official fixtures, just in time for that year’s Women’s World Cup, hosted by Canada. We had to tape it to the athletes with elastic bandage straps.” Today, Catapult is used by more than 100 football teams worldwide, 19 American football teams, 18 basketball franchises, including the Golden State Warriors, the reigning world champions from California, as well as high-performance institutes that support Olympic teams in over 25 countries.Īlthough wearable GPS devices have been a common sight on training grounds for a while, they have been deployed in competitive matches only recently. “Of course, by current standards, it was huge. “We thought it was amazing we could get that sort of information from something so small,” says Allan Hahn, one of the scientists involved in the project. Catapult Sports, a sports-technology company, developed its first prototype in 2000: a 3-inch tube.
In the past 20 years the use of GPS wearables in sport has grown dramatically. The device also contains an embedded processor that synthesises the raw data and computes, in real time, performance metrics such as distance covered and number of sprints completed. These include GPS to track position, accelerometers to gauge pace, gyroscopes to measure orientation in three dimensions and magnetometers to record the direction of travel. Called Apex, this tiny black computer, made by STATSports, contains an array of sensors. Underneath, each player will also wear a black compression vest with a tracking device slotted into a pouch between the shoulder blades. The team will be dressed in its distinctive canary-yellow strip. On June 17th Neymar, one of the world’s greatest footballers, will step out with his Brazilian teammates onto the turf at the Rostov Arena in Russia to face Switzerland in their first game of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
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