If you’re following the rise of player tracking technology, most of what’s being discussed are in-game systems. Whether the system is camera-based, like SportVu in the NBA or Statcast in MLB, or sensor-based, like Zebra’s RFID tracking of NFL players or the Sportvision’s partnership with the NHL, the goal is similar: track how pro athletes in the heat of competition, with the hope of gaining a competitive advantage by the shaving of a fraction of a second here or optimizing a route there.

But there’s another way for teams to use technology to gain an edge: by keeping their best players healthy and in those big games. This requires a separate system, especially on large squads like football teams where it would be impractical to collect and process the amount of optical data needed to capture everyone’s movements across all activities. As a result, systems based on global positioning system (GPS) technology are used in practices and rehab by a wide range of teams across all major sports.

Most of the designs center around a sports-bra looking harness worn by the athlete under his or her shirt. The harness holds a device containing a GPS chip, along with additional components like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, to track how and where an athlete moves. The GPS device is often paired with a heart rate monitor, allowing the system to estimate exertion.

Because the device relies on satellites to track the athletes, most companies that market a GPS system also market a complementary indoor system, typically based off a technology such as RFID that is better suited to the indoor environment. If a basketball or hockey team is working with one of these companies, chances are that they’re using indoor technology.

For now, these devices are predominantly used in practices, as none of the major leagues currently allow on-field wearable sensors for safety reasons. But FIFA just relaxed their ban, following successful runs at the Women’s World Cup and Under-23 World Cup over the summer. National federations are expected to follow suit shortly, and other sports leagues (such as MLB) are drawing up procedures to approve devices for in-game use.

Most readers are familiar with activity trackers like FitBit, which typically include a GPS component. But monitoring companies say that they aren’t designed to provide enough information to accurately track an athlete’s performance during competition or training.

“They offer very little insight into athlete’s performance,” said Richard Byrne, STATSports’s Business Administrator. “FitBit themselves are the first to admit they will show you patterns relating to your fitness levels as oppose to wholly accurate data.”

It might seem surprising to hear that teams are investing in GPS technology as camera-based systems proliferate across pro sports. STATS’ SportVu cameras are positioned in all 30 NBA arenas, and soccer teams have tracked distance traveled with systems like Matrics for years. But GPS companies argue their devices provide more in-depth information than camera-based systems.

“Camera systems essentially turn a match into moving dots on a screen,” said Catapult director of marketing Boden Westover. “You get speed and distance metrics, but they’re a tiny piece of the athlete tracking pie.”

There are a number of companies that offer similar GPS systems. For this introduction, I spoke with representatives from three — Catapult, STATSports, and VX Sport — but others (including GPSports and Zephyr) are also currently being used by pro organizations.

Catapult

With over 440 clients in 40 countries listed on their website, Catapult is the best-known and most prolific GPS company. Based in Australia, their OptimEye S5 (and the goalkeeper-specific G5) use GNSS, a combination of the American GPS system and the Russian GLONASS system. The result, according to Catapult, is a system accurate to within 50 cm; an older system that uses GPS only has a stated accuracy of 100 cm. The OptimEye devices include an inertial measurement analysis (IMA) chip, an accelerometer/gyroscope combination that measures an athlete’s finer movements. For indoor clients, Catapult produces ClearSky, an RFID-based system.

Westover said that Catapult’s distinguishing characteristic was independent validation of the technology published in peer-reviewed journals.

“There are around 100 such articles that have been published on Catapult, which prove that our technology measures what we say it does,” he said. “Other systems out there being used by teams have never been scientifically proven.”

STATSports

Headquartered in Ireland, STATSports’ offering is the Viper Pod, a combination GPS and MARG device with a stated accuracy of at least one meter. The inclusion of accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer components allows the Viper Pod to track accelerations and decelerations, along with athlete direction and turning. The MARG components also contribute to the scrum analysis used by their rugby clients.

Although their current indoor solution works off accelerometry data, STATSports’ upcoming Viper 3 system (due out this year) will incorporate ultra-wideband technology for accuracy up to 10 cm. The new system will also use low-energy Bluetooth to connect to other devices like heart rate monitors.

Business administrator Richard Byrne said that STATSports prides itself on its software platform in addition to accuracy.

“Our customers tell us our software is light years ahead of anything else they have experienced,” Byrne said. “We have a host of innovative metrics which allow coaches who use our system an incredibly in-depth look at their athlete’s performance.”

VX Sport

VX Sport, a New Zealand-based company, is focusing its efforts on collegiate sports teams. VX Sport’s system combines three satellite systems — GPS, GLONASS, and an analogous Chinese system — but unlike other companies, doesn’t claim that the additional satellites produces increased accuracy. Instead, managing director Richard Snow claimed that the “dark art” of GPS accuracy relied more on high-quality components and intense post-processing.

“It’s a bit like talking about a pro digital camera vs. a consumer model,” Snow said. “If you picked up a pro Nikon from ten years ago, it’s always gonna be better than the 20 megapixel thing that you buy for $75 from an electronics store. And that’s the reality with GPS.”

VX Sport also offers an IMU-based indoor tracking system that caters to volleyball and basketball clients. Incorporating an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, the device can track leg and hip biometrics based on the steps an athlete takes. The system includes software to summarize these biometrics into injury predictors.

Given the gameday motion capture systems currently in place, these GPS-based systems might seem superfluous. But Snow emphasized the importance of his system as a way to quantify players’ effort during the daily grind of training sessions.

“It used to be someone talking with the athletes in the morning, working out how are you feeling, what’s your readiness,” Snow said. “And then at the end of the training, how did you rate that? The only way they’re going to change that is with proper monitoring.”

I personally believe the old saying “all roads lead to Rome” tends to embody “different means to the same end” and in the case of online streaming versus traditional cable subscriptions, money as always, is the bottom line. In regards to the streaming cash flow, once again Rome — okay, all of Italy — is front and center in accomplishing the end of collecting revenue, this time by means of streaming. Today the top league of Italian soccer, Serie A, announced a service that beginning on Saturday, will stream three fixtures per weekend.

The price for viewing access is €3.99 for the weekend or €2.00 per individual match. In addition to the games themselves, each will have both pre- and post-game shows for analysis and news for the matches and around the league. It’s a huge move away from the old school television broadcasts, and for here in the United States, where beIN Sports holds the broadcasting rights. Serie A is the first major European league to offer a service of this kind and this could bring about a huge boost to their fandom abroad.

Via Statista, as of 2013, Serie A held the second highest broadcast revenue, trailing only the English Premier League.

An argument could be made that Italy’s top league isn’t the powerhouse it once was, however the league has posted solid results in UEFA Champions League play, the top continental league in Europe. Even after Serie A lost one of their bids to Germany’s Bundesliga following the 2011-12 season, they’ve posted respectable results. Since being limited to three teams receiving bids to the Champions League, Italian powerhouse Juventus has managed a runner-up finish in the CL last year and both Roma and Milan have made appearances in the Group Stage of the tournament as well. Even with four teams (Juventus, AC Milan, Inter and Napoli) in the top-20 most valuable soccer clubs as of 2015, Serie A has some catching up to do if they’d like to match the brand value of the titans of European soccer.

If this streaming agreement opens up the first of many more casual soccer fans here in the US, all the better. The individual game price is well worth testing the waters of Serie A, but the model of online viewing is the most important part. If other leagues — namely the Premier League, Bundesliga or Ligue One — are able to find a way to offer streamed soccer, it will be another huge win, much like Fox Soccer 2 Go, for cord-cutting soccer fans.

After representing Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films, New Zealand is once again the epicenter for fantasy and hopes sprung to life. Yesterday, YouTube secured broadcasting rights to the Bundesliga and will begin showing its soccer matches on Friday in real time from Germany. Time zone differences will be awfully tough on the Kiwis as a 2:30 Friday afternoon game goes live at 12:30 am in New Zealand. Ruined sleep patterns aside, merely seeing Google take live streaming so seriously could open up a new competition for sports broadcasting rights.

The Latest_Bundesliga Twitter account was among the first to break the cord cutter friendly news:

YouTube wird Partner der #Bundesliga und sichert sich die Rechte zur Live-Übertragung der Freitagsspiele – in Neuseeland.

— Bundesliga Latest (@BL_Latest) August 17, 2015

Sports Business Daily (subscription required) noted YouTube — and by extension Google — is also allowed to show additional games and highlights from the league, but as replays and not live.

YouTube previously streamed the opening match of Bundesliga season here in the United States, a matchup between three-time reigning champ Bayern Munich and Hamburg last Friday. With Fox Soccer owning the broadcast rights here, the game was streamed via their soccer page.

It’s hard to imagine YouTube not being interesting in the broadcast world, as they’ve been in the live streaming business for some time now, really kicking things off with their stream of the 2012 London Olympics. With events ranging from traditional sports to extreme and esports, as well as general content creators also getting in on the live broadcast game, YouTube already has a massive user base, huge infrastructure behind it, as well as name recognition and familiarity.

Further emphasis has been placed on YT’s trend of embracing esports as they streamed Dota 2’s largest yearly tournament, The International 5. At TI5, 16 qualified teams from around the world competed for a prize pool of over $18.4 million, with more than $6.6 million going to the winning team. Factor in the soon to be released YouTube Gaming platform, an aptly named area specifically for the broadcast of esports, speed runs, Let’s plays and more, clearly Google has taken a keen interest in bringing live content to people. Google securing the rights in New Zealand with their ~5 million residents could be a guinea pig or stepping stone of sorts for bigger things on the horizon here in the US. According to their second quarter 2015 report, Google increased revenue to $17.7 billion and revenue growth of 11 percent year-over-year. Ruth Porat, Google CFO commented on the revenue, specifically noting YouTube, said:

Our strong Q2 results reflect continued growth across the breadth of our products, most notably core search, where mobile stood out, as well as YouTube and programmatic advertising. We are focused every day on developing big new opportunities across a wide range of businesses. We will do so with great care regarding resource allocation.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to distinctly separate YouTube’s revenue stream from Google’s numerous other ventures, however it isn’t hard to imagine YouTube comparing similarly to traditional networks. Given that other broadcasting network reports don’t separate their revenue streams channel by channel, these numbers for sports networks should be taken with a grain of salt. CBS’s Q2 2015 report disclosed a $3.2 billion, increasing 1 percent compared to last year. Disney, owners of sports giants ESPN and ABC amongst other channels, reported Q2 earnings at $2.1 billion this season. Time Warner, controllers of TNT, and TBS et al. posted $7.3 billion, up 8 percent compared to 2014.

With plenty of money, a desired market for more streamed sports and clear goals moving towards streaming live broadcasts, Google and YouTube could once again transform the way the every person consumes their favorite sports, news and other media.

The United States women’s national team won their third World Cup title this summer in Canada. That same Women’s World Cup, along with this summer’s Under 20 World Cup in New Zealand, marked the first time FIFA allowed players to wear tracking devices during game action. The success of the devices during these events led FIFA to greenlight the use of wearables in future competitions, subject to the approval of individual leagues.

Part of the team’s success was the players’ dedication to the training plans developed by strength and fitness coach Dawn Scott.

“I think it’s a testament to the players that they trusted us and stuck to the program, and did what they needed to even when they had their commitments with their [club] teams,” Scott said in a previous interview.

An earlier Wired article discussed the USWNT’s relationship with Polar Global devices. When reached for comment, Polar Global’s Josh Simonsen confirmed that the players were wearing the H7 heart rate monitor on the pitch, and using M400 GPS watches in training sessions. Simonsen, the company’s national training resource specialist for the U.S., said the Finnish company had worked with Scott and the USWNT since 2010.

“What that gave Dawn was the ability to track speed, distance, and activity of the athlete while they’re away,” Simonsen said. “And they were able to send it her in a much easier environment than the previous models.”

The H7, the heart rate monitor worn during the games, consists of a strap worn across the chest and a small transmitter a few inches wide. The strap contains an electrode that collects the ECG signal from the athlete; after some basic processing, the transmitter then sends out a Bluetooth signal. The system reports heart rate on a per-second basis, using only basic peak-to-peak measurements, which are less susceptible to the kind of movement artifacts you would expect with an athlete wearing the device during competitions.

Polar’s top-of-the-line system, the Team Pro, also includes a GPS and IMU sensor. Switching to Bluetooth Smart also allows the transmitters to communicate directly with a tablet. But Simonsen said the USWNT was still using the older Team2 solution this summer.

“They didn’t want to transition prior to the World Cup,” he said.

The company has a long history with heart rate sensors, having built the first monitor for an athlete in 1977. But it was not until the early 2000s that Polar began developing systems for whole teams, rather than for individuals.

“Essentially the coach would log into the software and each player would have their own page, but they really weren’t able to compare the team as a whole,” Simonsen said. “We couldn’t look at the big picture.”

This functionality would not become available until Polar’s Team2 system was introduced in 2009. Unlike their previous offerings, Team2 allowed coaches to collect and analyze data in much less time. The addition of Bluetooth transmitters also allowed coaches to monitor their players in real time.

“[Team2] was like a 50 percent cut in time that it took to do everything,” Simonsen said. “Everything was exponentially faster.”

The Team2 system is currently used by “about 450 teams” in the U.S., and Simonsen said new coaches are typically surprised by the feedback provided by the data.

“A lot of the time they’re just blown away at how long things were or how hard things truly are,” he said. “Or that their easy day really wasn’t that easy, or that their hard day was a lot harder than they really thought it was.”

Simonsen argues that this experience in the field is what separates Polar Global from the plethora of other companies offering heart rate monitors.

“We created heart rate,” Simonsen said. “And with us using HR from the beginning, accuracy is always our number one thing.”

Things are on the rise in the top German soccer league, the Bundesliga. Not just the level of play, but the depth of teams as well as popularity have been trending upwards for several years now. The Union of European Football Association (UEFA) noticed the league’s rising talent as well, increasing their bids to the UEFA Champions League — the highest level of international club play in Europe — to three automatic slots plus one playoff bid.

With local fans already showing up to more Bundesliga games in person more than any other sport save for the NFL in the world, it’s hard to understate the league’s current impact and potential growth. Via Statista, the graph below displays the 2013-14 average game attendance for the 11 top ranking leagues.

Not even the English Premier League juggernauts of Manchester United, Arsenal Man City or Liverpool nor Spanish La Liga one-two punch of Barcelona and Real Madrid could draw more fans than the Bundesliga’s top draw in the 2013-14 season. Somewhat surprising, Borussia (there is a typo in the table below) leads all soccer clubs in Europe for attendance.

Beyond local fans and UEFA, Fox Soccer has also taken note of the German league. The broadcasting network already streamed some Bundesliga fixtures on the Fox Soccer 2Go platform, but never all 306 matches. In addition to streaming every single league match, Fox has doubled down on the league by adding televised games as well. A total of 58 matches will be shown on TV on the Fox Sports 1, 60 on Fox Sports 2 and the final 188 games being shown on Fox Sports Plus.

The United States Men’s National Team (USMNT) has also seen an increased presence in Germany as six active members are currently on Bundesliga squads, with three more US players currently on clubs rating in Germany’s second tier. The German league is has the most US players in foreign leagues, barely edging out the Championship, England’s second tier, and trailing only Mexico’s Liga MX that boasts seven US capped players.

According to the Fox Soccer schedule, the opening match will be three time reigning champion Bayern Munich against the near-relegated Hamburg side. The match is set to be broadcasted on Fox Sports 2 at 2:30 pm eastern on Friday, August 14. While up-and-coming 20-year-old USMNT member Julian Green is under contract with Bayern until 2017, it’s possible, albeit unlikely, he could make an appearances and further boost the Bundesliga’s profile in the United States. If you happen to be busy on that Friday, tune in the next day as Werder Bremen just signed USMNT striker Aron Johannssen. Werder is set to kick off at 9:30 eastern on Saturday the 15th. While causation does not determine correlation, the United States has seen the the profile of the national men’s team rise in recent years, possibly due to Tim Howard, Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan all crossing the ocean to play in the Premier League. Hopefully a similar level of fan interest will happen with the Bundesliga.

(Header image via Wikipedia)

The United States women’s national team went into the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup with a chip on their shoulder, trying to avenge a heartbreaking finals loss in 2011. But eagle-eyed viewers might have also noticed the chips the women wore under their shirts as well, as Will Carroll pointed out on Twitter.

Alex Morgan is wearing some sort of monitor on her chest. Think some if not all are but clearest shot I've seen. pic.twitter.com/qOkqffYZNZ

— Will Carroll (@injuryexpert) June 30, 2015

The objects were Polar Global’s H7 heart rate sensors as suggested by this Wired article and confirmed by Polar Global. The USWNT is also listed as a client of Catapult, an Australian-based company that combines GPS and inertial measurement units (IMU) into a single sensor.

Strength and fitness coach Dawn Scott confirmed that her team uses heart rate sensors and GPS systems to monitor player performance. However, because the team does not have a formal relationship with either company, she could not discuss the specific devices she uses in detail. Nevertheless, she was still happy to answer general questions about how she and the rest of the American coaching staff used the devices.

The GPS system and heart rate monitor produce a wide range of metrics. Head coach Jill Ellis and her staff were mostly interested in measures of intensity, rather than total distance covered. Scott specifically discussed the percentage of high-speed running (running faster than 11 mph) and distance covered during high-speed running.

“For me they’re the main factors that then show how much a player’s involved in the high-intensity activities,” Scott said. “[That means] overlapping for your midfield player, making high-intensity runs into the box. For defenders, [it means] having to recover.”

But not every position calls for such high-intensity bursts. For those players, the coaching staff relies on meterage — a player’s average speed in meters per minute.

“So say a Lauren Holiday, who isn’t necessarily doing a lot of sprints when she’s in a holding midfield position, but she’s one of the ones who does the highest meterage, so for her, that is more of a marker of her work rate,” Scott said. “In one of the games where she was pushed into the attacking midfield role, she suddenly had a lot of max sprints.”

The games presented an additional set of challenges. Although this tournament marked the first time FIFA allowed players to wear monitoring devices on the pitch, FIFA retained the regulations prohibiting the use of technology on the sidelines. This prevented the coaching staff from using these systems to guide their in-game decision making.

“I don’t always see the purpose of real time [monitoring],” Scott said. “Sometimes in training we’ll take out the real time system, but for me that’s only if we want to get a certain physical output from a fitness point of view.”

Making matters more difficult, several of the stadiums in this summer’s World Cup were domed (like Montreal’s Olympic Stadium) or had large roofs overhanging the field (like Vancouver’s BC Place). This meant the team’s GPS-based systems were much less accurate during games.

“The interpretation of that data is crucial, especially when you’re giving that back to players and the coaches who are interested in that feedback,” Scott said.

Scott doesn’t rely on a single number to judge player performance, instead adjusting her expectations and the numbers she looks at based on the game plan for that particular match.

“It’s knowing your team, your opposition, it’s knowing your own players, and what their physical capabilities are as well,” Scott said. “Carli Lloyd’s numbers were very different in the first three games from the final three games when her role was very different.”

But unlike a coach for a club team, who can monitor their players’ workouts year round, Scott had the added challenge of making things as simple as possible for her players after their training session ended. That meant shelving the more complicated GPS monitors and giving each player a wrist-worn heart rate sensor to wear during training. To their credit, though, the players diligently stuck to the team’s training plan — and just as diligently sent the data back to Scott.

“The players were very good at giving us updates in terms of their heart rate loads,” Scott said. “And they also logged into an online training diary or physical monitoring system, where every single day they would log in, answer five questions about how they feel physically, and so I can then log in and see where a player’s physical state is.”

Scott traveled across the country, working with coaches for every National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team to come up with a plan that kept the national squad healthy without hindering their club’s chances of winning. Scott was quick to praise her NWSL counterparts for their cooperation.

“The clubs were given guidelines in terms of when we want to train, when we want the players to have a day off, and also ideally how long the training session should be with the player,” Scott said “And to be fair to the clubs, in that crucial period in the leadup to the World Cup, they stuck to the programs we sent.”

Off the field, Scott is working towards a doctorate from the University of Western Sydney. Unsurprisingly, Scott’s research focuses on the physical demands and training loads of elite female athletes, with a focus on soccer players. Scott’s research relies on the hundreds of hours of game data she has collected from USWNT athletes since 2012.

“The main focus is going to be to develop a training model, so looking at what are the physical demands of women’s football,” Scott said. “And then with that, we look at what is the training intervention is to prepare the players physically for those demands,” Scott said.

But not all Scott’s methods are quite so high-tech. During March’s Algarve Cup in Portugal, players complained about stiff necks and poor sleep. So before this summer’s Women’s World Cup, each player was given an allowance to buy their own pillow to take on the road with them. The result, Scott said, the team was better rest and improved performance.

“When I first suggested it, people looked at me like I’d gone mad,” Scott said. “But the players appreciated it, because it just meant something they had at every single hotel.”

(Header image via GoToVan)

Brentford FC has been making waves in the ocean of soccer nerds over the past several seasons, most notably due to their owner — Matthew Benham — being a leading advocate for mathematical modeling in soccer. Benham is a nerd after my own heart, a man who studied at Oxford and eventually created his own betting company, Smartodds. Prior to Benham’s purchasing the team after the 2011-12 season, Brentford had been a third tier league, finishing in the middle of the pack of League One, two levels of competition below the English Premier League.

Since taking over ownership duties, Benham has influenced the club’s overall philosophy with his statistical stylings, including publicly acknowledging a head coaching change was partly due to philosophical differences. The coach in question, Mark Warburton, was at the helm as the club ascended from the third tier to the second tier of competition. Despite the success, Warburton found his contract was not to be renewed after the 2014-15 season. With Benham influencing the decision making process and Warburton handling the field level duties of a manager, Brentford managed to escape the third tier after being there for five seasons (2009-10 through 2013-14). The Bees broke through to the Championship, England’s second tier behind the EPL. More success followed in the 2014-15 season as Brentford finished fifth in the Championship and thus found themselves in the playoffs for the right to join the big clubs in arguably the best league in the world. While their playoff run ended earlier than The Bees would have liked, their overall success is not to be discounted.

Though the Bees fell short in the playoffs, their rapid ascent has made people take note, including their fans. Benham made time for a Q&A session last year on the Griffin Park Grapevine fan forum, and some of his answers were on point. In order to read the entire session you’ll have to register a free account on GPG, however below are just a few snippets of the Q&A (click to embiggen each picture).

As one would suspect, Benham is reluctant to give any details about the models and math at work, however his pasta preference is certainly concerning given penne reigns supreme.

Benham again doesn’t give away anything telling, but he quick to give traditional scouting and reports respect.

The context behind this answer is quite interesting given the history between Benham and Comolli. Damien Comolli came up as a scout with Arsenal, then worked his way up to director of football for Tottenham, in a similar way a baseball scout would climb the front office ladder. Comolli was dismissed after being at Tottenham for three seasons, landing as sporting director at Saint-Étienne. By the time he was relieved of duties there, Liverpool beckoned and he was appointed director of football strategy in November of 2010. After catching criticism regarding his negotiating abilities more than his scouting talents, Comolli and The Reds parted ways with the club near the end of 2011-12 season. The story, as written in Calvin’s book, is that Benham met with Comolli and was not impressed by any of the numbers Comolli showed him. Benham was also shocked at how Comolli asserted that his numbers and nothing else could be correct. Disagreements among analysts is nothing new, just look at the Red Sox and Mike Gimbel. He served as a specialist and consultant to then general manager Dan Duquette before Gimbel was, in his own words, used as a whipping boy.

Benham has generated his wealth using the best tools available to create the model in order to most accurately project outcomes. The best publicly available stats still leave much to be desired, however given Benham’s background, perhaps he and his team of analysts at Smarodds have broken down some of the walls surrounding statistics in soccer. While not a general manager or coach, as owner of a second-tier English soccer team, he certainly could be a pivotal character in the soccer realm. Just as Billy Beane came under fire for a number of his decisions, Benham has also been a target of the media. As the line near the end of Moneyball states, the first guy through the wall always gets bloodied. Always.

(Header image via Wikipedia)

E3 – the gaming industry’s biggest yearly conference, kicked off today, and as usual, a lot of big announcements were made. While sports games weren’t at the forefront of the biggest proclamations today, they are most certainly being worked on and updated. EA was kind enough to spill the beans on how the [INSERT SPORTS LEAGUE] 16 games would look and feel.

EA’s biggest franchise, Madden, gets updates every year — some more impressive than others. For Madden 16, elements of fantasy football have been brought into the fold. Gamers will have an option to tweak their chosen team using rounds of fantasy-based drafts. These super teams can then be used to compete against each other or an AI opponent.

As senior EA producer Sean Graddy told Polygon:

“We limit the number of picks that you have so that those decisions are hard […] You’re not going to fill every position on your team. How do we create this draft experience, but take it one step further? With fantasy football you pick a team and you passively watch it. In our game you pick a team and you can play with it on the field. It makes it a bit more special.”

Changes to passing and receiving are also coming, with quarterbacks getting options regarding speed and height of passes, and receivers will be given options to attempt fancy, stylish catches or more traditional ones. These should be nice updates to a game that everyone is going to buy anyway. It comes out August 25th.

Making the logical segue from football to golf, the return of an EA golf video game is imminent. Due to a mixture of personal issues and general ineffectiveness on the course, Tiger Woods has become a persona non grata at EA. Rory McIlroy is the new face of the series, and with him come some other major changes. EA didn’t release a golf game last year, as they worked on revamping the series.

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is EA’s first sports game that will utilize its Frostbite engine — the same engine that powers games like Battlefield and Dragon Inquisition. The inclusion of the engine allows the game to load an entire course at startup, rather than just one hole at a time. This should drastically cut down on total game time, a welcome addition. I mean, do they really expect us to take a whole hour to play a round of golf?!

Tour will include three different modes of play — Arcade, Classic, and Tour — which each offer their own set of advantages. A new course map feature seems pretty slick, as it gives the player multiple distances to different spots of the course, much like those little booklets you see caddies carrying around. The game drops July 14th.

NHL 16  is not only bringing back many of the online features it cut from this year’s version, but is also making a small change that could make a huge difference. In the past, any time a player wanted to accept a pass, the skater glided until he had possession of the puck. This isn’t how hockey works however. Players take passes while skating the other way, in a complete stop, or in a full sprint. NHL 16 is reportedly adding the ability to accept passes this way. This should enhance the gameplay, which is already very smooth.

Updates to the Be a Pro and Be a GM features are also coming, with wannabe GMs having to deal with things like player morale and clubhouse chemistry. If you play the Be a Pro mode, expect to get more and better feedback from coaches as you sweat and bleed your way to Lord Stanley’s Cup. Look for this game in September.

Soccer is also a sport and FIFA 16 is also a video game. One of the more important updates — the addition of women’s soccer — was already announced. But EA is also mentioning smarter AI defense, more realistic slide tackling, and some more dribbling fanciness.

Passing is also getting an overhaul. Per Polygon:

Perhaps of even more significance is that players are given more control over the pace of their passes. Previously, long passes (hold down the button) were a matter of telling the game to move the ball a long way. Now, they simply say, “kick it hard.” This means that players can ping short, hard passes to one another, a useful antidote to the defense’s greater alertness. Or they can drift long passes across the park with a greater degree of control.

For a long time, sports games have relied on graphics to try and make them seem more realistic. Now, with more advanced hardware and software at their disposal, developers are working to make the games look and play more like the real thing. This is a welcome change and will ensure the line between real and digital will become more imperceptible each year. Where some sports series seem to be a little stagnate (cough, MLB the Show, cough), EA is making strides keep their offerings fresh. Whether it pans out or not remains to be seen. We’ll have to hang our hope on promises for now.

(Header image via Pop Culture Geek)

It’s the return of the News Roundup. Here are some of the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

ESPN is issuing its first magazine cover featuring eSports. In fairness, it also features running back Marshawn Lynch, as he’s had his likeness added to the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops III. We’re not quite to the point where League of Legends players are gracing the front cover, but it’s a start.

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating look into how the people of Cuba are watching their favorite American television. Basketball, baseball, even HBO — it’s all broadcast not by satellite, but by sneaker.

As a dedicated lazy person and as a golfer that spends a lot of his time criss-crossing the fairways, the GolfBoard might be right in my wheelhouse.

You know all that cool 3D/interactive/holographic stuff that teams and facilities are installing? Soon, all that tech might come from part incubator, part tax write-off known as the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology. Say what you will about the man, but sports and technology seem to be two of his stronger suits.

This is technically from last week, but if you didn’t get a chance to see American Pharoah race Secretariat, you should. It’s amazing what a little archival footage and some video syncing can do.

For some reason, people think it’s fun to mock pitcher Alex Torres for wanting to protect his melon. Strides are being taken to maintain protection while making hats look a little less puffy, and perhaps a similar product being adopted by a prominent soccer player will help people wanting to avoid head injuries seem a little more commonplace.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend. Be excellent to each other.

Sports analytics has moved on from the days when an ambitious amateur could fire up Excel or a relational database and make earth-shattering discoveries. Modern front offices must incorporate not only on-field performance but also medical histories, training results, biomechanics data, and a host of other sources into their decision making. To help teams better manage and access that mountain of data, Dublin-based Kitman Labs has developed the Profiler, a system that combines disparate data sources into analytics describing player health and injury risk.

Chief product officer Stephen Smith described Kitman Labs’ offering as “the operating system for sports teams.” The strength of the system is in its ability to combine data from multiple areas — including medical, biomechanical, and on-field sources — to produce more holistic analytics that can better inform team decision making regardingl athlete training and injury prevention. Smith said he was first inspired to create the system while working as an athletic trainer for Leinster, an Irish rugby team.

“One of the biggest challenges I had as a practitioner was that all the fitness data was held in one area, all the medical data was held in one area, and all the performance analytics were held in another area,” Smith said. “That just made it very hard to understand what any of the information actually meant.”

An example of the power of Profiler is demonstrated through a software application that allows users to collect markerless, three-dimensional biomechanical data from an off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect. The software can calculate select joint angles from an athlete a few feet away — even during rapid dynamic movements, such as running, kicking, or throwing a pitch. And although Smith insisted that the Kinect software was “probably five percent of what we actually do,” he was enthusiastic about its ability to make motion-capture based analysis more accessible.

“Biomechanical information that you would garner in a normal professional sports environment would take you hours to actually get because the downtime is huge, and the cost of that is pretty difficult, and you just can’t access that day to day because it takes too long,” Smith said. “The software that we’ve created jumps professional sports teams into the next generation of real-time technology.”

When interviewed, Smith refused to name the specific organizations that have partnered with his companies.

“We definitely don’t like to speak about our clients because a lot of the information we’re housing, as you can imagine, is very sensitive data on very high-profile athletes,” he said.

But some of his clients have been less tight-lipped about their relationship. In March, The Los Angeles Dodgers announced that they would be partnering with Kitman Labs in their farm system, declaring themselves “the first American sports team” to sign with the company. Across the pond, Kitman Labs works with British Premier League squad Everton, along with a number of Irish rugby teams. Other organizations, including the San Francisco Giants, have also tested this system.

When Kitman Labs signs a new client, the two first collaborate to determine which data and which metrics are most important to the organization, and what sources of information the organization already collects. Kitman’s sports scientists then work with the coaches and training staff to demonstrate how to use the system and understand the analytics the system produces.

“We have a very experienced team of sport scientists who all understand the individual nature of each sporting discipline that we work with, and the uniqueness of each club, team, and athlete,” Smith said. “Those sports scientists will actually be on the ground with teams for a number of days actually helping them to get up to speed.”

Smith says he understands that his company offers an appealing solution to clubs looking to maximize the return on their sizable investments in player salaries, not to mention strength and conditioning, coaching, and other aspects.

“I presume that [general managers] want tools to ensure that they can get the best value from their athletes,” Smith said. “I think the clubs just love the idea of being able to try and maximize on that by being sure they can keep the athletes on the field.”

But the growth of biomechanics data has led to rumblings in some quarters. Some have expressed concerns that medical data which suggests an injury risk could be used against athletes during negotiations. (An example can be seen in the controversy surrounding the Houston Astros’ dealings with top overall pick Brady Aiken last summer.) Despite this, Smith said he hasn’t seen any pushback from athletes on teams using this product, and insists that the system was designed primarily with athlete wellbeing in mind.

“One of the largest driving forces for us in doing this is that we want to protect athlete welfare, we want to improve the standard of care that is given to athletes worldwide,” Smith said. “It’s there purely for the team to use that information to empower their decision making, and that way they can ensure the athlete makes it onto the field in the best possible shape.”

Kitman Labs was born out of Smith’s postgraduate research into injury risk factors, as well as his professional experience as an athletic trainer. The company was founded in October 2012, with its first product offering coming online in June 2013. By early 2014, Kitman Labs had signed their first partnerships with soccer and rugby teams, and were looking to expand into the American market.

“We kind of expected that the market over here would be pretty far ahead of what was going on in Europe,” Smith said. “But when we came over, we realized that it didn’t look like there was anybody else trying to do something like what we were doing.”

The company opened its first American office in Menlo Park, California, in September 2014. Since the MLB season was just wrapping up, Kitman Labs initially focused on expanding into baseball to coincide with teams’ buying cycles. Kitman Labs is now looking to expand into other sports, developing new applications in both professional and collegiate sports leagues.

“We’ve had early success with baseball in the U.S., but we’re actively working with NBA teams, NFL teams, and we’re actually now branching into the NHL as well,” Jeff Eckenhoff, a member of the Business Development team, said. “We’re pretty sport agnostic.”

And with the expansion into new sports comes an expansion of staff, as Kitman Labs looks to add sports scientists and engineers that can help them adapt their solutions for new clients. Smith said his company is actively looking to fill eight vacancies.

“We need industry experts from basketball, football, and baseball to come and be part our team, and to help us solve the largest problems for each of these sports so that we can truly help these teams to uncover the sources of injuries,” Smith said.

Still, Smith insisted that his company’s expansion would not come at the expense of Kitman’s current offerings.

“We don’t want to be a company that walks into a market and grabs a huge collection of customers and then walks away with their checks in our back pocket,” Smith said. “We want to change the face of sports science and sports medicine and we’re going to do that by incredible focus and by being extremely diligent.”