June 1 - Champions League final. Meet "Tottenham" and "Liverpool", in a dramatic struggle to defend their right to fight for the most prestigious cup for the clubs. However, we want to talk not so much about football clubs, but about technologies that help win matches and win medals.
The first successful cloud projects in sports
In sports, cloud solutions have been actively introduced for five years. So, in 2014, the NBC Olympics company (part of the NBC Sports Group holding) equipment and cloud software components of the Cisco Videoscape TV service delivery platform for transcoding and content management during the TV broadcast from the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. Cloud solutions have helped create a simple, agile and resilient streaming architecture for live broadcasts and content delivery from the cloud on demand.
At Wimbledon in 2016, they launched the IBM Watson cognitive system, which can analyze user messages on social networks in order to determine their emotions and offer the content that is of interest to them. For broadcasts also used the "cloud". It solved the problem of dynamically allocating resources to distribute the load that had arisen and made it possible to update the results of the tournament faster than on the center court scoreboard. Overview of technology already .
At the Rio Olympics in the same 2016, the most significant moments were broadcast in virtual reality. 85 hours of panoramic video were available to Samsung Gear VR owners and Viasat channel subscribers. Cloud technologies map data from canoe and kayak GPS trackers, allowing fans to compare team tactics and crew speed changes. And the clouds helped. athletes!
What about football?
Football clubs are interested in collecting as much data as possible about the game, the physical and mental state of the players. Both their own and their rivals. In addition to the sports component, you need to remember about the accompanying "kitchen". Clubs need solutions to automate the stadium, plan and control the training process, organize and conduct breeding activities, electronic document management, personnel records, etc.
Why are the clouds here? Automation systems for Russian football clubs have cloud versions that have a number of undeniable advantages. They simplify control over the internal business processes of the club, allow you to save on your own IT infrastructure. In addition, the team coach can access analytics data about anytime and from anywhere with an internet connection.
CSKA and Zenit have implemented cloud technologies to interact more effectively with fans. And, for example, the Academy "Spartak" football them. F.F. Cherenkov IT solutions to optimize the process of transition from the youth team to the main one. The data accumulated during the training period allows you to see the strengths of each novice football player.
Team Germany, Bayern Munich, Manchester Cityβ¦
All these teams use cloud technologies to achieve high sports results. Some experts that it was thanks to the "clouds" that the Germans managed to become world champions in Brazil.
It all started when, in October 2013, the German Football Association (DFB) and SAP working together to develop the Match Insights software system. In March 2014, the solution was implemented and the team's head coach Joachim LΓΆw has been using the software in his work ever since.
Right during the World Cup, the German team analyzed the information transmitted by video cameras around the field. The collected and processed information was sent to the players' tablets and mobile phones, and, if necessary, broadcast on a large screen in the players' rest room. This allowed us to increase the performance of the team and better understand its rivals. Other data collected included speed and distance covered by players, position on the field, and number of ball touches.
The most obvious example of the effectiveness of the decision was the change in the speed of the team's game. In 2010, when Germany reached the semi-finals of the World Cup, the average possession time was 3,4 seconds. After using Match Insights, based on HANA technology, this time was reduced to 1,1 seconds.
Oliver Bierhoff, SAP brand ambassador and Germany national football team manager, Assistant Coach Lowe, said:
βWe had a lot of good data. Jerome Boateng asked to see, for example, how Cristiano Ronaldo moves in attack. And before the game against France, we saw that the French were very concentrated in the middle, but they left places on the flanks because their defenders did not run properly. So we targeted those areas."
Bayern Munich followed the example of their home team, and in 2014 also introduced IT solutions into the club's infrastructure. Using modern technology, the club hoped to gain significant benefits, especially in the field of monitoring the performance of players and their health. Judging by the results of the performance, they succeed.
Another striking example is, which includes the football club Manchester City, New York City, Melbourne City, Yokohama F. Marinos. The company entered into an agreement to supply a solution that could collect and analyze data during the game.
The new Challenger Insights software was introduced in 2017. The coaching staffβused it to prepare for matches to plan the game, in the dressing room to quickly adjust tactics on the field and after the final whistle to strategize future games. Coaches, club analysts and even players on the bench got the opportunity to evaluate from tablets what tactics their opponent uses, what are its strengths and weaknesses, how best to counter it.
At the same time, the software for the 2018-2019 season was being improved. It was used by the men's and women's team of the club. Men became champions. Women are in second place.
Vincent Kompany, then the captain of Manchester City, noted:
βThe application helps me and the team to prepare for the game, to better understand each other and the actions of opponents.β
Sergio Aguero, Manchester City striker, stressed:
βChallenger Insights helps us turn coach instructions into reality. Every time I go on the field, I have a clear plan - how to act, what position each team member is in.
Is it time to run after the clouds?
No, it's too early to run. Not every club will be able to correctly use complex decisions and skillfully manage the information received. However, you need to be prepared for this. Football has long gone beyond the stadium. While the athletes are preparing for the game in the locker room or on the training field, modest analysts sit for hours in front of the monitors, preparing an analysis of the match played or analyzing the tactics of the next opponent. The βvulnerabilityβ they found in the game can bring victory.
Conclusions about how expedient it is to use modern technologies (whether IaaS, or something else) in football, we suggest you do it yourself. But the likelihood that in the near future the next software solution will radically change the usual pattern of preparing for matches seems to us quite high.
Source: habr.com