As recently as four years ago, FC Barcelona’s four professional indoor sports were using four different athlete tracking systems. The club’s flagship team—the La Liga soccer powerhouse—was using a fifth product, STATSports’ GPS wearables, running on a completely different technology.
The club’s R&D branch, the Barça Innovation Hub, set to work benchmarking the various tracking systems on accuracy, reliability, and usability. The best-rated wearable was Wimu, a hybrid indoor-outdoor technology built by a startup called RealTrack Systems, whose team consists of former Nokia engineers based in Andalucia, Spain. The BIHub’s head of knowledge, Albert Mundet, said RTS “had a lot of potential with what they were delivering and what, at the same time, they were willing to improve.”
Wimu was first tested with Barcelona’s futsal team but soon displaced the wearables in all five sports because the device can access both GPS and GNSS satellite systems outdoors, and communicate with indoor antennas via ultra-wideband radio frequencies. Mundet said Barça worked with RTS to improve the product design the first year and to enhance the reports and visualizations in the second year.
“Every week, our 25 physical trainers in an internal workshop would [be] discussing in between them about new metrics, about the reliability and usability of the metrics they were already doing and considering if there was something that should be improved,” Mundet said, adding: “The expertise of Real Track has been yet on engineering, and then [we are] building on top of that a KPI report based on Barca’s knowhow.”
Both Catapult and STATSports now have devices combining GPS and radio-based technologies, but Barcelona favors Wimu in part because of the continued collaboration with RealTrack Systems and the applications of its data for tactical analysis.
Mundet said most commercial GPS devices are “a black box,” but RTS shares the raw data with FCB. Barcelona’s sport science team has access to 150 different variables for scientific research, and Mundet said the user interface and visualizations for coaches are improving.
Furthermore, the Innovation Hub views Wimu as an open platform for integration with other devices and use cases by other partners and leagues. Barcelona is working with DuPont and Twinery on a smart garment that incorporates technology to monitor ECG and respiratory rates. Mundet said the BIHub is also piloting a program with Finnish company Myontec and its Mbody EMG technology for gauging muscle activation. He emphasized the importance of using GPS or UWB to know not only the training load endured by an athlete, but also “but how you react to them.”
“On a long-term view, [we are] trying to monitor as much internal load as possible through the [harness] at the same time that we are monitoring external load,” Mundet said. “At the end of the day, we want to correlate as much as possible internal and external load.”
The persistent problem with sports research, he added, is the small athlete population most trainers get to work with. “Research results in sports are more intuition than science because of the n—the sample size,” Mundet said.
To meet that end, RealTrack Systems is now providing its product to the national teams of Spain, Russia, Costa Rica, Latvia, and Mexico as well as all 18 clubs of the Liga MX, the top league in Mexico.
“We want to be the Silicon Valley of Barcelona and sports in general,” said Marta Plana, the FC Barcelona board member who oversees the Innovation Hub. “We’re trying to change the mindset of being inside ourselves to expand ourselves. That’s a change that says a lot. We’re local, but we have a global impact.”
Mundet spoke of opening doors to partners so that “Barça can be a catalyst of pushing the industry forward.” Another BIHub endeavor is the invitation to optical tracking companies to test their systems during training sessions. Until sensors are reliably inserted into the ball, optical tracking is needed to follow the sport’s most important item, and to better understand the context of the game.
“What we’ve tried to create is an ecosystem for fostering knowledge and innovation,” said Plana, a lawyer who has worked in the technology industry throughout her career. “For me, that’s the biggest and most important part of the Innovation Hub. We’re benefitting the club, we’re benefitting society, and the goal of this collaborative model—within the club, within other clubs and with FIFA—is that we’re able to attract companies and entrepreneurs that develop new technology that will make us improve.”