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Of mice and men: Keeping track of Ronaldo and co
Jan 7, 2021
Cristiano Ronaldo and his Portugal team-mates may be surprised to learn the video and data analysis their coaches use was devised by scientists who used it to track the behaviour of mice, monkeys and human eye movements.
Ruben Saavedra, the Spanish CEO of Metrica Sports, says it is not a stretch to transfer the use of data to track the behaviour of mice and rats to the task of tracking “movement of players on the pitch”.
Saavedra and Argentinian co-founder Bruno Dagnino — who studied the eye movements of monkeys and humans — found they shared more than an interest in science when they were studying for their PhDs in the Netherlands.
“There are lots of nerds in science who do not have other hobbies and so he and I could talk football, which was nice.”
The final part of the puzzle was complete with another Argentinian, Enzo Angilletta, who had a video production company.
Togther they developed a system that integrates data with video analysis, which had been done only manually before. By marrying data and video they created what its developers call a “workflow of football analysts”.
“Presenting graphs and raw data was not enough for clubs,” said Saavedra.
The process is unusual in that it analyses technical skills and positioning during matches, rather than simply measure distance covered.
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