Catapult’s OptimEye tracking devices are the most widely worn by professional athletes, with data primarily collected during training for use by sport scientists.
While developing its new wearable aimed at sub-elite soccer players—called PLAYR and released on Wednesday—Catapult flipped the use case, building a tracker with only the athlete in mind. Amateur players typically don’t have the knowledge or resources to make use of advanced information. With PLAYR, the wearer is the sole analyst, and game metrics often will take on greater importance.
“When we engineer or manufacture a product at the elite level, we sell to a team, and our main users are the staff—the strength and conditioning, performance or fitness or medical staff,” said Benoit Simeray, CEO of Catapult Sports‘ consumer division. “We had to put the player at the very center of what that system would be.”
PLAYR’s sleek hardware pod slips into a pouch between the shoulder blades of an accompanying vest where the GPS device records up to 1,200 movements per second at an accuracy within one meter (about 3.3 feet). The app displays heat maps, sprint speeds and distance along with the essential workload metrics of training volume and intensity.
Most importantly for the self-directed athlete who does not have the benefit of a coaching staff to help digest the data, Catapult provides training insights through an artificial intelligence program in the app.
“Very much the hero of PLAYR is the SmartCoach,” Simeray said, “and the SmartCoach is an extension of our sports science knowledge at the professional level for the last 12 years.”
SmartCoach draws on the expertise of elite sport scientists and offers advice tuned to a soccer player’s age, gender, position, and training schedule. The roster of coaches will expand in time, but the first generation of the product includes input from Tony Strudwick, the head of performance for the Football Association of Wales (and formerly in that role at Manchester United); Matt Reeves, the head of fitness and conditioning for Leicester City FC; and Chris Barnes, a soccer performance consultant with more than 20 years of experience in the English Premier League.
Barnes’ work with Catapult dates back a dozen years to his tenure at Middlesbrough FC where he imported the Australian company’s first 20 devices used in the U.K. He said PLAYR is designed to mirror the framework of data to which elite players would be exposed—for example, training protocols are scheduled the way they are in European soccer with everything relative to match day.
Mimicking professional norms alone and comparing performance to elite players isn’t enough, Barnes said, adding: “That could be, ‘So what?’ The next level of this is that we’ve set up a structure that enables us to tailor advice—which could be in relation to upcoming training loads, it could be in relation to recovery strategies, it could be in relation to nutrition—that’s exactly the kind of advice we would give to professional players.”
The second pillar of Catapult’s three-tier growth strategy is to reach the prosumer, or sub-elite, category of highly engaged players. Catapult entered that market with its acquisition of PlayerTek in 2016. CEO Joe Powell said last year that his company used that technology “as a sandbox” to build an upgraded iteration, PlayerTek by Catapult. PLAYR, however, was reimagined from a “blank canvas,” Simeray said, although his team applied some lessons on engineering design and supply chain from the earlier solutions.
PLAYR is now available in the U.K. and Ireland for £199 ($265), and Catapult is accepting pre-orders from the U.S. (shipping will commence later this month). Simeray said there are roughly 50 million soccer players registered with FIFA worldwide, of which Catapult is initially targeting the most advanced amateur players (about four million). The eventual addressable market is upwards of 25 million.
Before joining Catapult, Simeray served as vice president of global sales at Jawbone. He said that company’s mistake was stretching itself too broadly. With PLAYR, he wanted to be laser-focused on a specific goal, which is why the product is only available for soccer. (He didn’t rule out an expansion to other sports but said that wouldn’t happen in the near-future.)
Catapult contracted London-based industrial design firm Layer, whose clientele includes BMW, Panasonic, and Samsung, to help develop PLAYR. One of the goals for the device was simplicity. The PLAYR tracker has no on/off switch but is instead magnet-activated upon insertion into the vest. Also, the product charges wirelessly to eliminate the tangling of cords.
“For me, that’s the century we live in: frictionless,” Simeray said. “Why [have] a button if you don’t need a button?”
Simeray recognizes that the hardware is an important part of the experience even if it’s not the main attraction. He hopes that honor belongs to the SmartCoach that will distill elite experience into accessible insights for amateurs.
“Because the info is so bespoke, I’m hoping that every player will have takeaways,” Barnes said, “but the takeaways will actually be directly relevant to who and what they are, and their own experience within the game of soccer.”