Wide receiver Nate Burleson had played 11 years in the NFL but, at age 33, sought one more opportunity with the Cleveland Browns in 2014. Determined to finish his career on a high note after a pair of disappointing seasons with the Detroit Lions, he was curious about the new options for wearable technology — up until the moment that ignoring the data hastened the end of his career.
During the second week of training camp, Burleson was having, by his own recollection, “a great practice,” the type of session that could secure his spot on the Week 1 roster. All of a sudden, wide receivers coach Mike McDaniel tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Nate, you’re done.”
McDaniel was relaying the recommendation from the Catapult Sports wearable on his receiver’s back saying Burleson had reached his maximum workload for the day. Burleson protested, wanting to assure another season in the league.
“I go back out there and run one more route — I tear my hamstring,” Burleson said, adding: “That was one of the main reasons that Cleveland released me because I wasn’t going to be healthy for [the start of] the season. Being released because of my hamstring was so frustrating that I never attempted to go back and play football.”
While this, admittedly, is the optimal use-case scenario that could grace Catapult’s promotional brochures one day, the anecdote is instructive for its glimpse into wearable technology’s potential — a field seemingly synonymous with Catapult, a Melbourne, Australia company that controls a majority of the market share.
The company supplies its devices (primarily the OptimEye GPS trackers and the ClearSky ultra wideband system) to 1,638 teams in 35 sports across 61 countries. That base includes such storied and successful franchises as the NBA’s Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors, college football’s Alabama and Florida State, the NFL’s Denver Broncos and New York Giants, the NHL’s Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens, MLB’s St. Louis Cardinals and European soccer’s Chelsea, Leicester City, Liverpool, A.C. Milan, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich. Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was a key early investor and adopter of the wearable tech for his NBA team.
On the heels of several key acquisitions — leading sports video provider XOS Digital; sub-elite targeted GPS tracking company PlayerTek; and a connected data platform, Athlete Management System — Catapult is now in the midst of a pivot to a broader, more comprehensive penetration of the sports technology market. Catapult’s growth plan relies on a strategy centered around three pillars: 1. Continued development of the elite market; 2. Growth in the prosumer, or sub-elite, category; and 3. Commercialization of elite wearable and video data.
Joe Powell, who took over as Catapult Group’s CEO last April, talks about “leveraging the position we have” as the dominant wearable tech at the elite level down the consumer hierarchy — the so-called halo effect.
“We come from a great place at Catapult in terms of sport science being part of our heritage,” Powell said. “It’s right in our DNA, so that’s our starting point.”
The Australian Securities Exchange-traded public company has had a volatile couple years, oscillating up and down on the stock market including a dip earlier this month to a 52-week low price per share. Igor Ries, a senior analyst at Australian wealth management firm Morgans, is among those to remain bullish on Catapult, recently positing an “add” recommendation, though with a “high risk” assessment.
The CEO of Catapult’s Americas division, Matt Bairos, is blunt about the company’s aspirations.
“Catapult isn’t a wearable company. It has wearable products, but it’s a platform,” said Bairos, who was CEO at XOS Digital prior to the acquisition. “Our mission is to own the technology performance stack for all teams. On the planet.
“That means wearables, it means video, it means anything that directly ties back to player performance, and that’s either through organically developed products, potential acquisitions and good partnerships.”
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Florida State football coach Jimbo Fisher has said the players’ daily workload report generated by their Catapult devices is on his desk first thing every morning. He attributed an 88-percent decline in soft-tissue injuries to its use. He even credited Catapult’s sport science as a key factor in FSU’s national championship for the 2013 season. “I live by that thing,” he said.
Nick Saban, who has won five national championships as Alabama’s football coach, has spoken about Catapult giving him “a scientific picture” of his players’ status, saying the monitoring information has led to an overhaul of practice structure to keep the team “more physically fresh.” Michigan basketball coach John Beilein recently said, “This whole Catapult system is changing our world.”
On the other hand, Harvard-educated former NFL linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski, also a co-founder of the Sports Innovation Lab, has said “wearable technology has failed to deliver on its outstretched promises.” Others have stated a similar refrain, suggesting that the generation of massive volumes of data is only so helpful as its actionable interpretation.
By Catapult’s estimation, there are about 10,000 elite teams that are targeted customers of wearables products. Catapult, at last count, had about 16-percent market penetration that nevertheless represents a leading share. Wintergreen Research, Inc has estimated that the market size for sports analytics in 2016 was $764.3 million but is expected to grow to $15.5 billion by 2023.
To grow the Catapult brand more fully is this plan to offer a more comprehensive offering that includes not just the wearable device but accompanying video, data management and tactical analytics all synced up in one platform, an endeavor that Powell called “a pretty big focus for us at the moment.” XOS Digital retains a loyal following among North American coaches and now powers the NHL’s iBench video review; some coaches have begun asking to sync up that video with player tracking data, in what could be a lucrative growth space.
“All of this wearable and biometric player tracking information has been under-utilized by coaches in the past,” Bairos said, adding: “It’s, in a sense, an arms race and you don’t want the other guy down the street to have an advantage over you, even a perceived advantage.”
Powell said Catapult is working to integrate all of these components and has some early prototypes, while debating whether to continue building out their tactical analytics team or make another acquisition.
“That’s our wearable strategy — we’re a bit like the telco industry,” said Barry McNeill, Catapult’s CEO for the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions. “It’s not just about the hardware anymore. [For us], it’s about not just the software and the application but also the user experience. That’s probably where our growth is coming, is in the analytics layer.”
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Catapult’s director of business operations for North America, Ryan Warkins, is a former STATS associate vice president helping lead the in-house analytics team, that is starting to wield machine learning in the development of more tailored solutions such as monitoring baseball pitchers. Among the new offerings are ones catered toward offensive linemen and soccer goalkeepers, two positions that are strenuous without entailing a large distance covered.
“That’s a new thing — creating sport-specific implementations — for our device,” Warkins said, “and that’s what all that machine learning comes back to is, we have a whole bunch of raw data on these devices and what can we do from a pattern-recognition standpoint of what the motion looks like from that player and recognize events that are specific to that sport?”
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PlayerTek’s founding principle was the delivery of tracking data to players and teams who lacked the financial resources and sport science support of elite clubs. Motivating the acquisition was that Catapult saw “a sandbox,” Powell said, to test and learn from the design and manufacture of the lower-cost tool. About a year after the acquisition, the company unveiled PlayerTek by Catapult in April 2017, a rebranded prosumer product to bridge the gap until this spring’s full-blown Catapult offering.
Powell defines the prosumer market as advanced, but non-professional, although some lower-tier pro teams are also customers and saw “unmet demand.” He noted how Garmin Edge and Strava have galvanized interest in cycling.
“If you look at what they’ve done for highly engaged amateur athletes in cycling, we think we can be that for team-based sports,” Powell said. “That’s sort of the hypothesis that we had.”
Charged with bringing the Catapult prosumer device to market is CEO for consumer, Benoit Simeray, who has a pedigree in consumer electronics. The initial focus will be soccer players. Catapult estimates there are 270 million players worldwide, of whom the initial target demographic consists of about 3 million.
“Each time you go down the performance ladder, the product gets less granular, easier to use, more simplistic because it’s got to serve a different use,” Simeray said.
Part of the challenge is to help educate a market that’s not as data savvy, as the prosumer market is inherently less equipped to have the staffing for data interpretation. Machine learning processes will help inform the self-coaching element.
“How do we build as much of that sport science into the tech and content that we provide to those prosumers?” Powell said. “It’s got to be really insightful. It’s got to be a terrific user experience. It’s got to be aligned to the particular sporting code that we’re focused on, and we need to make that as easy to use and as interactive as possible. That absolutely is a key part of our challenge to take to market.”
London-based technology research firm CCS Insight projects annual 20 percent growth in the wearables sector over the next five years, reaching a $29 billion market by 2022. PlayerTek sales in the last half-year, Morgans relayed, were up 365 percent, with robust entry into the market of amateur and semi-professional football clubs in the U.K. and Europe. The appeal for college teams and lower-division pro and semipro clubs is clear, but what will be the buy-in of individuals?
“I’m skeptical about the size of the opportunity in the ‘prosumer’ segment of sports wearables,” CCS Insight senior analyst for wearables, George Jijiashvili, wrote in an email, citing adidas’ failed ambitions in the category with the miCoach platform, adding that he was “more optimistic” about the higher end of the market where “Catapult is well positioned to maintain the dominance of elite and sub-elite categories.”
“It’s clear that the top-flight teams have seen tangible benefits from using Catapult’s solutions,” Jijiashvili added. “Awareness of these benefits among semi-professional teams and players have also risen. I therefore expect growing number of smaller teams investing in Catapult’s solutions going forward.”
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When a number of major leaguers were asked two years ago about the prospects of wearable technology in baseball, one player active in the union leadership, current Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Curtis Granderson, asked a series of hypothetical questions about how the data might be used, including whether the league might try to broadcast his heart rate when facing a closer in the ninth inning.
The rugby equivalent of that scenario — a conversion kick in the final moments of a match — actually happened on Australian television last June, when Queensland’s Johnathan Thurston lowered his heart rate while lining up and converting the kick in a State of Origin match. That such data was made available owes to a bargained agreement between Catapult, the National Rugby League, the players and Channel Nine.
The cinematic moment was rendered perfectly and — luckily, for advocates of broadcasting this data — early in the timeline since its inception, with ample time to convince naysayers.
“There’s a fan layer that’s coming that I think is going to be quite transformational to the fan experience over the next couple of years,” Catapult executive chairman Dr. Adir Shiffman said at the Sloan Sports Conference.
This third pillar of Catapult’s strategy began by gaining traction in Australia with the governing bodies of rugby league, basketball, Australia Rules Football and cricket.
The athletes in those sports have all seen a corresponding boost to their wages under the terms of each league’s CBA in return for the broadcast of the data, but paying for those rights in bigger money circuits — like the major U.S. sports leagues or elite European soccer divisions — might not be as financially viable.
“It’s a good question, and the quantums are different,” Powell said. “Having spoken to AFL players — both current AFL players and some that have retired recently — they were all a bit scared, too, at least initially. Even having a wearable in training because there was potential they were concerned around what it would show.”
Some protections were implemented: for instance, in the AFL contract, only the top five ranking players in each metric can be displayed, a provision made to ensure no player gets embarrassed. Being clear with the players about how the data will be used and why it would benefit them is important, too.
“Sometimes I think we overestimate player resistance,” McNeill said, adding: “We haven’t done a good job as an industry to help players understand the value that this brings to their athletic performance. And more doesn’t always mean better.”
Domestically, MLB Statcast data and NFL Next Gen Stats are included in game broadcasts, but Statcast is a fully external system that measures outputs like speed, not inputs like workload and heart rate. Next Gen Stats are embedded in player pads but also are bearers of performance measures, not biometric data.
“To the extent that it can tell the story organically and simply, that’s really the sweet spot,” NFL Players Inc. president Ahmad Nassar said at SportTechie’s State of the Industry event. “And that’s why it’s so hard. I don’t think anybody has done that great of a job.”
When the NFLPA negotiated a wearable contract with Whoop, the “central bedrock starting point” was that athletes owned their data, Nassar said, with players explicitly enfranchised to have control over commercialization efforts.
“There’s definitely value from the fan side, but I think there’s definitely skepticism from the athlete side,” former New Orleans Saints receiver Marques Colston, now a tech investor, said. “You can clearly see avenues within fantasy football and sports betting to where it’s beneficial, but really finding that happy medium to where both sides feel really good about the data that’s out there.”
Powell added that broadcasters who spend huge rights fees are going to push for new methods of storytelling to engage fans, as leagues like the NFL and English Premier League had seen ratings drop-offs.
“I’m not sure this will happen any time soon in the U.S.,” Shiffman said, “but it will definitely happen.”