The SportTechie Awards highlight the teams, executives, sports technologies, venues, investors and leaders that most deserve recognition for their work in pushing our industry forward. To view all the 2018 categories and nominees, click here.
At a time when teams around the world are relying on technology to gain a competitive edge, FC Barcelona stands out as an organization for not only using technology to its own advantage, but also as a means of elevating the entire sport of soccer, and perhaps sports in general, too.
Barça encompasses pro teams within a range of sports spanning soccer, basketball, roller hockey, futsal, and handball. It has more than 2,000 athletes across its senior teams and youth academies, and can leverage that sample population to test new technologies.
In one such effort between FC Barcelona’s La Liga soccer team and Gatorade, players were outfitted with smart bottles and Band-Aid-like sensor chips to actively track their hydration and nutrition. Barça and Gatorade are planning a joint conference on nutrition and recovery in 2019 where they’ll invite professionals across the soccer industry to discuss some of the findings from the data they collected.
One of the standout initiatives of the club is its Barça Innovation Hub, a two-year-old project focused on sharing technological and analytical knowhow. FC Barcelona’s innovation hub works with startups to develop products for its sports teams, which are sometimes then used to enhance the success of the first team.
The innovation center also runs an online platform for the continued education of sports industry professionals outside of FC Barcelona, hosting in-person conferences (such as its recent Sports Technology Symposium) that are open to representatives from rival clubs.
“What we’re envisioning here is going to the professionals of sports and looking [past] the emotional and the passionate side of it,” said Albert Mundet, head of knowledge at the Barça Innovation Hub. “If Real Madrid comes here and wants to understand how we train our athletes, we want to share that. If you ask me the week before we [play] Real Madrid, I’d say probably not, no. But we’re working on things that would have an effect years down the road.”
The BIHub additionally hopes to open up the analysis of soccer. It has worked with FIFA this year to develop a standard format that will govern the storage and transfer of match and practice data to allow clubs and suppliers to more easily exchange and compare information. Barça’s recent Football Coach Analytics Summit gathered together analytics professionals from across professional soccer.
FC Barcelona is also relying on a number of new digital strategies and infrastructure projects to better engage with its global fanbase, estimated to number well above 300 million. The organization is currently renovating its soccer stadium, with a focus on luring people to Camp Nou even when there aren’t live events. The club’s tech-centric museum is already the second-most visited museum in Spain, and it’s expected to take on an even more prominent role as the Camp Nou renovations near completion.
Recently, the club launched an interactive “Barça Experience” in China, where FC Barcelona is working to expand its presence in one of the world’s largest consumer markets. Fans visiting the Chinese island of Hainan, one of Asia’s leading tourist destinations, can interact with the Barça brand in a 43,000 square-foot museum and 6,500 square-foot megastore.
The Barça digital team is expanding internationally, adding staffers in Hong Kong and New York City, and is exploring using new storytelling tools to engage fans around the world. The Hainan project features a virtual reality zone that transports visitors to the Camp Nou Stadium, and in 2018 the club added an augmented reality experience that works through the Viber messaging app and that takes fans through the same Camp Nou tunnel the first team uses to walk onto the field.
For FC Barcelona’s expansive mission to drive sports forward through open collaboration, its use of digital media, and its significant success on the field—the club’s headlining La Liga team is the reigning La Liga, Copa del Rey, and Supercopa de España champion—we have selected FC Barcelona as SportTechie’s Outstanding Sports Team for 2018.