What is it?

In recent years, Performance Analysis has emerged as a best practice in many sports organizations, serving as a critical component of the coaching process to support athletes and optimize their performance. The primary goal of Performance Analysis is to provide coaches, players, and other relevant stakeholders with valid, accurate, and reliable information that enhances their understanding of various aspects of the sport, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

In essence, Performance Analysis is a specialized field that provides athletes and coaches with objective information, which helps them better comprehend their performance. This process relies on systematic observation, which provides detailed and precise insights into the athlete’s performance.

When is it useful?

The process of Performance Analysis involves observing athletes’ performance during training sessions, competitions, and pre/post-match events. This observation is facilitated through various tools such as GPS, video cameras, and wearable devices that capture data on parameters such as exertion, heart rate, acceleration, and speed.

During the game, Performance Analysis is carried out manually using specialised software to collect events and actions from the match. Analysts develop statistical reports and real-time summaries of short video clips of game highlights, which are sent to coaches for further analysis. With the advancement of computer vision technology, real-time positional data can also be obtained, allowing for the extraction of quantitative metrics.

However, post-match analysis offers a more detailed evaluation of performance using more accurate data sources such as video footage, manually collected events, and optical tracking data collected by cameras installed inside the stadium. These data are complex to analyse due to their large quantity, errors, and the need for proper mathematical and statistical techniques. Nevertheless, they provide valuable insights for coaches and players to improve their performance.

To this end, companies like SportAnalytics provide and develop technologies to get the most out of this data, simplifying the initial data processing steps and automatizing data ingestion’s workflow.

We provide the necessary data collection, data manipulation, analytical and video analysis skills to allow clubs to take advantage of the vast amounts of information, to receive those key elements in a clear, timely and concise manner.

At SportAnalytics we deliver innovative data analysis solutions that turn numbers into deep and actionable insights, by applying the cutting-edge Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Performance Analysis enhances the coach’s ability to ‘feed-forward’. It aims to anticipate an opposition’s strengths and weaknesses by performing thorough opposition analysis to produce acquired knowledge that allows exploit their skills or improve their gaps.

Which are its goals?

The objectives of performance analysis in sports include improving athlete performance, developing game strategies, enhancing team performance, identifying talent, and evaluating player and team progress over time.

Let’s delve deeper into the details!

• Tactical Analysis: it is an assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and overall capabilities of a team and its opponent. It can help discover and highlight tendencies, patterns of play, preferred setups by opposing teams. By leveraging the latest video analysis and tracking technologies, it is possible to draw an accurate representation of tactical variances given particular match scenarios and also to simulate and predict the opponent behavior in order to come up with the best strategy.
• Technical Analysis: technical skills refer to specific procedures to move one’s body to perform an action. It is related to the mechanical detail of skills performed by athletes and its effect is strongly related with the quality of the athlete’s gesture. It’s important to monitor progress and identify changes during preparation or even assess rehabilitation from injury. Video analysis combined with tracking technologies are useful to measure accurately the player’s technical ability.
• Fitness Analysis: the goal is to enable the athlete to optimize the physical condition by monitoring their strength, power, endurance, agility, stability and mobility. Injury prevention and injury recovery are fundamental, especially in sports with intense physical contact. GPS and other wearable technologies are combined with video analysis to understand the physical efforts that players go through during training and matches and allow coaches to better manage the workloads.
• Cognitive Analysis:  it refers to the ability of identifying and acquiring environmental information in order to integrate them with existing knowledge. Psychological training is also a key element when it comes to mentally preparing athletes to the pressures of a sport or an event (a very important game).

Virtual and augmented reality can be powerful tools for cognitive training in sports. By using virtual reality headsets, athletes can train their technical-tactical and motor skills in a personalized manner, regardless of time and place, and against chosen opponents or scenarios. This can help isolate and evaluate the pure effect of mental training by minimizing external variables and focusing on the athlete’s decision-making and game vision.

These types of analyses can be applied both at the individual level (for single players) and at the collective level (for teams) to provide coaches with a comprehensive evaluation that considers technical, tactical, athletic, and cognitive aspects of performance. With SportAnalytics solutions coaches can get a more thorough and accurate understanding of their team’s strengths and weaknesses and make more informed decisions to optimize performance.

The field of Performance Analysis is evolving fast. Different sports are at different stages. However, we will write more about some excellent examples in the sport ecosystem. Wealthier and more established clubs have been able to experiment and appreciate the benefits of investing in the skillsets that have allowed them get a competitive advantage. As the field continues to grow in line with technology, we will undoubtably see an exciting evolution in the sport industry. At SportAnalytics we want play an important role to bring innovation to the football industry and we are committed to accelerate data culture and adoption.