Wearable technologies could soon play a key role in the beautiful game, delivering live player stats for Premier League clubs, an industry expert has suggested.
Colm McMullan, creator of the popular football stats app FourFourTwo Stats Zone believes it’s absolutely possible players in the Premier League could one day use wearable tech to deliver real-time data.
The radical change would most likely be for the benefit of the clubs as opposed to the supporters, as McMullan says future use of the wearable tech would be primarily to help prevent injury.
“One of the biggest things in football is the amount of time players spend injured,” he said speaking with TrustedReviews. “A more initial role that it could play is improving players general conditioning and physical monitoring so they can prevent injuries than having to deal with them.”
McMullan added, “You spend millions of pounds on them [players] and at times they spend weeks or months sitting on the sidelines not involved.
“I know that’s a big area for clubs and that’s what they are targeting with their use of analytics initially.”
Football often criticised for being slow to adopt emerging technologies, and wearables is no exception.
The NFL recently announced that it was going to introduce wearable technology in-game to deliver real-time performance data to supporters in the stands.
McMullan believes there’s one stumbling block for the same to happen for our version of football, and that’s FIFA. Currently the world football governing body does not permit the use of wearables during games.
Clubs are clearly thinking about wearables outside of a game scenario and US soccer side Seattle Sounders announced this week that it is partnering with analytics company Tableau to track players health and movements on and off the training pitch.
Other sports such as rugby already make use of player tracking wearables to monitor individual player excursion during a game.
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