The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup is just around the corner but the UK’s Football Association (FA) is already planning its strategy for 2023 and beyond.
The organisation is teaming up with Google Cloud to put data and analytics at the core of the England’s football teams in order to improve performance for the men’s, women’s and youth games.
The FA hopes to solve big challenges such as improving the success of the teams through smart analytics tools, double female participation in the game and make football more inclusive and welcoming.
First up in the partnership is the FA using G Suite applications and programs such as Google Hangouts in order to facilitate collaboration between the coaches of the 28 different national teams. Craig Donald, the association’s CIO, says this will allow coaches and team managers to work together and improve productivity.
The FA is building a new tool on Google Cloud called the Player Profile System (PPS). This will bring together all the different data points about a player’s individual performance which will then be used to analyse their movements in order to improve their fitness, training, and form for the big games.
The tool will also automate near real-time data analysis, making it easier for coaches to see how individual players are working and make necessary changes during a match.
Speaking about the new partnership, Dave Reddin, the FA’s head of team strategy and performance, said: ‘We believe technology is a key area of potential competitive advantage for our 28 teams and everything we do at St George’s Park. We have progressively built a systematic approach to developing winning England teams and through the support of Google Cloud technology we wish to accelerate our ability to translate insight and learning into performance improvements.”
The two organisations are in the final stages of bringing together all the data sets for PPS with hopes that the system will start to have an impact on games being played this summer and beyond.
There are also hopes that the FA can use Google Cloud’s insights to improve the societal impact of football in the wider community, including doubling female participation in football. Baroness Sue Campbell, FA director of Women’s Football, said: “The FA’s mission is to develop the game for all. I am looking forward to partnering with Google Cloud to see how technology can tackle some of these societal challenges.”
At the moment, female participation in football usually drops for girls around the age of 12. The FA hopes that by gathering data on who is dropping, when and why in order to make decisions to prevent this from happening.
As well as focusing on younger players, the FA will also look at the data of the elite women’s players to see if they can match characteristics with the next generation, to enable better selection decisions and uncover players who may have previously been rejected.
England’s Lionesses did exceptionally well at the last World Cup in 2015, reaching the semi-finals and finishing in third place. The hope is that by using data analytics to improve training and performance, as well as to help discover the next generation of footballers, England will eventually steal the crown from the US.
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