Device for mice tracks Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo and his Portugal teammates may be surprised to learn the video and data analysis their coaches use was devised by scientists who used it to track the behaviour of mice, monkeys and human eye movements.

Ruben Saavedra, the Spanish chief executive of Metrica Sports, says it is not a stretch to transfer the use of data to track the behaviour of mice and rats to the task of tracking “movement of players on the pitch”.

Saavedra and Argentinian cofounder Bruno Dagnino – who studied the eye movements of monkeys and humans – found they shared more than an interest in science when they were studying for their PhDs in the Netherlands.

“We had two things in common: as Barcelona and Argentina fans, Lionel Messi was an easy link and we were the only people on our courses who loved football,” Saavedra told AFP.

“There are lots of nerds in science who do not have other hobbies and so he and I could talk football, which was nice.”

The final part of the puzzle was complete with another Argentinian, Enzo Angilletta, who had a video production company.

Together they developed a system that integrates data with video analysis, which had been done only manually before. By marrying data and video they created what its developers call a “workflow of football analysts”.

“Presenting graphs and raw data was not enough for clubs,” said Saavedra.

The process is unusual in that it analyses technical skills and positioning during matches, rather than simply measure distance covered.

Thus, the national teams of Portugal and Paraguay and clubs as far afield as Melbourne Victory and Santos in Brazil have benefited from the video and data analysis product, with the top clubs paying more $122 000 (about R1.8 million) a year.

Thanks to that level of income, Metrica have been able to produce a free plan, Play Basic, a version of the analysis tool which is available to download for free to anybody.

It has already attracted a diverse clientele from academies in Africa to amateur players and coaches from rugby union, cricket and ice hockey. “A few years ago, we had to have cameras in stadia but it has evolved,” he said. “Now we can track any game on any video with our new technology.

“We are working to automate the manual work in acquiring the data so it will be affordable for some clubs, who now can only dream of having it.”

Saavedra likes to think of Metrica Sports as a “mini-Tesla”, the electric car company, beginning with a high-end expensive product which can then by used to channel funds into the development and launch of a more affordable one.