Performance analysis program that helped Germany win the World Cup will soon be available for purchase

An extension of an award-winning measurement program, which is responsible for having helped Team Germany win the World Cup in 2014, will soon be made available for purchase to sports clubs the world over.

SAP, the makers of the award-winning Sport One program, created a sports-specific performance analysis software called “Insights”, which was used by Germany in preparation for the global soccer tournament. The program crunches thousands of pieces of real-time data about players’ training performance, and provides it in digestible chunks of reports to the coaching staff to assist in making decisions about what skills a player should work on, tactical behavior, effort, and more.

Additionally, medical staff can use the program to see if a player is under physical stress, and take action before the athlete suffers an injury. 

Here’s how the program works: video of the players training is recorded by eight cameras that surround the soccer field. Software tracks the players’ movement and Insights’ various algorithms generates reports based on a litany of data gathered, including number of touches, average possession time, distance travelled, movement speeds, and directional changes. Everything is powered by SAP’s relational database management system, which is designed to handle both high transaction rates as well as difficult question processing.  

“In just ten minutes, ten players with three balls can produce over seven million data points,” explains Germany manager, Oliver Bierhoff. “The SAP HANA platform processes this data in real time, enabling our coaches to customize training and prepare for the next game.”

Bierhoff went on to explain that during the German team’s months of training prior to the tournament, the coaching staff would often put up a big screen in the player’s lounge a report with all of the data on it for the team’s review and analysis. 

“Players are used to working with data and video sequences,” he says. “This technology puts together the information in ways that is interesting for the player to look at. The answers they find there help improve their performance.”

One case-in-point in how this program actually made a difference for the German team: at the 2010 World Cup, the German players took about 3.4 seconds to release the ball, which was much longer than some of the other top teams, including Brazil, Italy, and Spain. Joachim Low, the German team’s head coach was convinced this was why his team was eliminated in that tournament as well as the 2012 European Championships. Come 2014, though, following months of prep work based on reports generated by the Insights program, the German players were able to reduce their average time of possession to just 1.1 seconds.

Beyond soccer, Insights is beginning to attract the attention of teams in other sports. The Czech national hockey team has announced they will use an adapted version of the program in preparation for the upcoming World Championships. 

SAP has also begun providing performance analysis software to the Women’s Tennis Association.

Via IEEE