Soccer Embraces Big Data to Quantify the Beautiful Game | Augusta ...

Portland Timbers? Andrew Jean-Baptiste vies for the ball with New England Revolution?s Blake Brettschneider (23) during a Major League Soccer game in March. Jean-Baptiste is among the players who have used the Adidas miCoach data tracker the league is adopting. Photo: Mary Schwalm/AP

In early January, on the type of sun-splashed day that draws northerners to Florida each winter, some of the nation?s best collegiate soccer players gathered in Fort Lauderdale for a shot at the pros. They ran through a series of scrimmages as part of Major League Soccer?s pre-draft combine, standout players trying to justify their position atop various teams? boards, and those with something to prove hoping to cash in on a good showing.

It was like any sport?s amateur selection process, save for one prominent detail: A handful of the 52 college seniors on the pitch wore Adidas miCoach data trackers. The gadget, about the size of your thumb, offers real-time performance metrics like heart rate, top speed and distance run via biometric readings and GPS. It?s far flashier than such antiquities as a timed 40, but not much different in that the athletic attributes it measures have little to do with sport-specific skills like, say, passing the ball.

Still, proper dribbling technique is more easily taught than absurd acceleration through a defensive alignment, which is why University of Connecticut defender Andrew Jean-Baptiste started turning so many heads.

Jean-Baptiste was among those participating in the miCoach trial ahead of a league-wide rollout next season. As four Adidas reps roamed the sideline holding iPads displaying real-time readings from the field, coaches and team officials filtered by with raised eyebrows and the occasional question. Everything was proceeding as expected until Jean-Baptiste took off on a sprint across the pitch and his measurements exploded.

?Ten to 12 teams? staff people crowded around me at once,? said Jan Mueller, a manager for the miCoach line. ?They were watching intently, and then began asking a lot of questions.?

?You could see by looking at him that Jean-Baptiste was a physical specimen, but the numbers on miCoach showed that this guy was a freak of nature as far as the physical stuff was concerned,? said Sean Rubio, video coordinator for the San Jose Earthquakes, who handles much of the team?s statistical analysis. ?Eyes up and down the sideline were popping at those numbers.?

This is the kind of thing miCoach is made for. It will provide coaches with data to improve performance, the league with accessible stats to spark new levels of interest, and fans with a degree of access never before known. The question is whether it will work as envisioned, because this is soccer, after all ? a sport that has forever been more about nuance than numbers.

From a training standpoint, miCoach will allow teams to closely monitor a player?s precise physical exertion during practice or games. Coaches will be able to identify who needs extra rest, or extra work. Fluctuating readings well below a player?s baseline can allow for easy identification of injury, perhaps even before the player knows something is wrong. The device also will allow coaches to track their players simultaneously, and analyze on-the-fly which of them physically offers the best chance at victory.

?Say we?re involved in an intense game, a dogfight, and you?re trying to figure out who still has something left in the tank to make it through extra time,? said John Hackworth, interim manager of the Philadelphia Union. ?That becomes an invaluable tool. Rather than coaches estimating that a guy looks a little fatigued, this gives you a metric to actually measure it.?

Everything to this point may be revolutionary, but there is nonetheless a significantly bigger fish to be caught in this particular pond. Improvements in training methods are nice, but we?re talking about soccer ? and not just soccer, but American soccer ? the sport that 40 years ago was said to be on the cusp of taking over the domestic sporting landscape and in some ways has regressed from there.

One reason for this is its numbers. Reading a baseball box score has been an American pastime for 100 years. Football?s statistics have been key in building the juggernaut fantasy sports industry. Basketball?s per-game stats can explain precisely what happened during the course of a game.

Soccer is not made that way. Much of the sport?s vitality happens in the spaces between statistics. Due to the sport?s reliance on flow and nuance, the bulk of what takes place is difficult to classify, let alone quantify.

?Dribble, tackle, pass ? aside from shots, those are the main components of a game,? Rubio said. ?But even there, you?ll have 10 different people with 10 different opinions about what counts as a dribble, what counts as pass or what counts as a tackle.?

Not that the MLS isn?t trying. The league has enlisted stat-keepers Opta Sports in an aggressive pursuit of a statistical set that rivals anything offered by its big-three competitors. Having stats, however, doesn?t make them easily navigable.

For an example, look no further than the wondrous online feature MLS rolled out last year to help fans deconstruct a game. Searchable by player and area of the field, users can track shots, passes, set pieces (things like free kicks and corner kicks) and defensive sets. If this sounds simple, it?s not.

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Source: http://augustaga.com/blog/soccer-embraces-big-data-to-quantify-the-beautiful-game/

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