From the pitch to the gridiron, football fans around the world enjoy the game in a wide array of ways. Whether its live production on multiple TVs at home, or huge dvLED displays at the stadium, bringing replays and graphics to the gameday experience, technology is a large reason fans enjoy the game.
But what about behind the scenes? Skarpi Hedinsson, CTO, Los Angeles Rams and Danny Karbassiyoon, head of football platforms, Arsenal FC, joined Heather Karatz, founder, investor Shake/Angel City FC on the C Space stage at CES 2024 to talk about technology in football, specifically, the data behind player development.
Hedinsson was the mastermind behind the technology implemented in the Rams’ new SoFi Stadium. And while one of the NFL’s newest stadiums is a technological marvel that already hosted a Super Bowl, executives in the front office are using new data to analyze players.
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“The overwhelming thing that we are paying attention to is the sheer amount of data that is being generated around the sport,” Hedinsson said. “The players are instrumented and we get data off the equipment in the weight room and the training ground. That is not going to slow down any time soon. For clubs and organizations, it is about managing that data, gleaning the insights, and understanding what you can ignore and what is critical.”
Karbassiyoon, a former player for Arsenal FC from 2003-05, was originally a scout before starting his own startup where he built products from the ground up, giving him an understanding how to hone in on this data. He now uses data for a scouting platform and performance platform for the club which is key because recruiting is tough in soccer with the breadth of players globally as one of the world’s largest sports.
Neither the Rams nor Arsenal are technology companies, so identifying the right data technology that is valuable is imperative. In the last 10-15 years, the explosion of data has been helped by better tools to process it, in three areas in particular.
Recruiting. One of the problem sets in recruiting is identifying talent through draft and free agency. The Rams don’t simply need to know if the player can catch and run, but does he fit how they play football. Hedinsson pointed to wide receiver Puka Nakua, a fifth rounder that flew under the radar and became a record-breaking rookie. Successfully navigating the correct data helped discover Nakua.
While Karbassiyoon admits nothing can replace live scouting, there has been a big shift in the past 10-12 years where data is a big player in recruiting. It helps flag and identify the right players and limit the scope of which scouts have to travel. It can’t do it alone, but data helps eliminate some of the risk.
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Performance: The Rams, like all NFL teams want players to be bigger, faster, and stronger, but now data is helping in a more important area: recovery. A lot of data goes into what kind of strain players are under and how that affects the playing staff and position groups. It helps greatly with load management and practice structure to hopefully keep athletes healthier.
None of the performance tracking technology was around when Karbassiyoon played for Arsenal. Now, his players wear a harness that has a GPS to track accelerations, decelerations, distances run, and other metrics to manage a player’s workload. However, both Karbassiyoon and Hedinsson constantly drove home an important point: You can have all the information and data in the world, but if you are not actioning it correctly, it’s useless. Arsenal is using data to help see what the athlete should look like on gameday, after the match, and two days later.
Tactical matches. Here’s where AI comes into play. There is now technology available to help identify what the Rams think the opposition is going to do and how to set up for success. The NFL provides data on every single player and every single game and players are sometimes instrumented 20 times a second and the ball is instrumented 40 times a second. There are billions of rows of data. Again, the challenge is how to turn all that into something actionable… which is still a work in progress.
One of the largest challenges ahead for both Karbassiyoon and Hedinsson is building an infrastructure to see data in an elegant way and present it to shareholders so it makes sense. Visualizing all the data is imperative so its not just a spreadsheet with numbers. As Karbassiyoon concluded, it’s a challenge, but an exciting one.
