GPS tracking opens another sports frontier
Sports teams have been using GPS-based devices to measure the activity of their players for a few years now, which means it has been a few years since players first started to cheat the system.
Richard Byrne, the head of business development at STATSports, a company that makes such GPS devices and is based in Northern Ireland, tells a story of an Irish rugby team that started using the wearables a few seasons ago.
In addition to using the products — basically a vest with the key electronic parts in a pocket between the shoulder blades — to measure performance in practice and game situations, teams can deploy them to monitor the daily activity of their athletes. How much are they moving around? How much of that is high intensity? How much sleep are they getting?
So, back to this rugby player. Not thrilled with the prospect of his team knowing exactly how much he was exercising, he put the vest on his dog.
And that dog? “He covered a hell of a lot of ground,” Byrne says with a chuckle.
Just like there is skepticism about the value of any sort of advanced statistic, there are stories about the growing pains experienced at the advent of wearable technology.
A member of an NBA front office once described how the team’s sports-science staff was baffled by the movements of one of their players until he eventually admitted that he had stuck the device in his wife’s purse.
A former NFL player explained that, when his fellow linemen discovered that coaches would complain if the data showed that they didn’t move around a lot during practice. So they figured out that the best course of action was to walk around in circles during breaks in play. Linemen: big, but clever.
But as much as there will be players who blanch at the invasiveness of the potential for 24/7 monitoring of their lives, it’s also true that the use of GPS by more and more teams will help the athletes as much as it will hurt them. And the adoption of such systems — for use other than as a virtual babysitter — is a trend that won’t soon slow.
Byrne, who joined STATSports four years ago when it was a company of about eight people, has seen it grow to more than 100 employees. It works with dozens of soccer and rugby teams in Europe, as well as NFL, NBA and MLS teams, and recently signed a deal with the U.S. soccer federation. Its executives were also just in Canada as part of a Northern Ireland trade mission.
The reason for the growth is simple: any team that is not using GPS technology as part of its strength and condition regimen by this point is either being excessively cheap or woefully ignorant. The devices measure not just the distance covered by a player during training or a game, but the type of movement they are performing: speed, acceleration, intensity. That means team doctors can get an early-warning signal when a player starts to flag during practice or they can tell if a player is, for example, trying to return too fast from an injury. Someone who is only running at 85 per cent of his previous top speed would be a solid indication of that.
Byrne gives another example of the kind of insight that GPS data can unlock. Soccer has long measured the distance travelled by players during games; it’s not uncommon to see a graphic that shows Player X has run 10 kilometres while you have been sitting on the couch eating popcorn. But not all running is equal. A left back could travel 12 kilometres during a game while a central midfielder moves closer to eight kilometres. Byrne notes that GPS data often shows, though, that the midfielder is doing much more highintensity work: acceleration, deceleration, bursts of speed and changes of direction. That left back, meanwhile, could basically be cruising up and down the wing. A longer run, to be sure, but more of a canter than a gallop.
A staff with access to that kind of information “will find that the midfielder is more tired, and has exerted much more energy,” Byrne says. He’s the guy who should get more recovery time in training, not the guy who has covered more ground. “These devices are definitely helping to inform those kinds of decisions,” Byrne says.
The next frontier will be using GPS for tracking player movement in a tactical manner on the field of play: seeing who is plugging passing lanes, who is better at finding open space, that kind of thing. The prospects in that area are tantalizing for those who study tactics, although it is still in its relative infancy. For now, most teams still just use GPS in a training setting, but the devices are FIFA-approved for game play. So far in the Premier League, Wolverhampton and Cardiff City use STATSsports vests during regular game action.
The more such devices are used in a game setting, the more coaches and managers will get a definitive answer as to who is trying their hardest on the pitch, and who is trying to get them fired. It could even be the end of the eye test.