A few hundreds yards from the practice field of FC Barcelona’s first team sits a nondescript, medium-sized office. Inside, executives are trying to craft the future of soccer, building on an innovation strategy they hope will impact not just Barça, but the entire sport.
The Barça Innovation Hub, founded two years ago, is an ambitious branch of the giant FC Barcelona. While the parent club is best known for its namesake La Liga soccer team, it also encompasses youth soccer teams and four other professional sports: roller hockey, futsal, handball, and EuroLeague basketball. Barça itself is a not-for-profit organization, and, sharing similar philosophies, the BIHub innovation center has the unorthodox strategy of sharing its knowledge with the entire soccer industry, hoping to spur further innovation.
Led by Albert Mundet, the Barça Innovation Hub has a multi-prong strategy that includes taking part in extensive research alongside universities, testing and co-developing new products through partnership opportunities with third-party companies, and creating an online university that aims to elevate analytical and technological knowhow across the sport.
Barça’s open-source strategy is uncommon for one of the world’s most recognized soccer brands. In a sport where teams are notoriously secretive and competitive, the BIHub stands out as being unusually open.
Operating under the premise that a rising tide lifts all boats, the Barça Innovation Hub invites representatives from the world’s most successful soccer leagues and teams to convene to discuss pertinent topics. In addition to its online university, Barça Universitas, the center hosts an expanding suite of conferences spanning innovation (the Sports Technology Symposium) to coaching (the Football Coach Analytics Summit) and nutrition (the Barça Sports Nutrition Conference).
“We want to create a worldwide sports research and innovation center. And it’s going to be really, really open in terms of integrating third parties from research centers and universities to startups and partners at other clubs,” Mundet, who holds the title of “Head of Knowledge” at the Barça Innovation Center, said. “Under an open innovation framework, we want to create a space where people can come in, in many different verticals, to develop many different projects.”
The open ecosystem of knowledge sharing that Barça is focused on building includes even the first team’s biggest La Liga rivals, Real Madrid. During a recent interview at FC Barcelona’s Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper training complex (known as Sports City), and one floor up from the residences of the club’s youth academy players, Mundet said he’d be open to hosting representatives from Real.
“Sports is a really passionate business and that has a lot of pros and cons. What we’re envisioning here is going to the professionals of sports and looking over the emotional and the passionate side of it,” Mundet said. “I want Real Madrid to come here. 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 aim is to have the Barça Innovation Hub stand on its own so that it can remain operational without siphoning funds from the broader organization. To become self-sustainable, the BIHub is exploring the potential of a subscription-based platform for sports professionals seeking continued education. The idea is that they would pay to receive ongoing education while gaining access to related conferences, workshops and webinars. The Hub would then invest that money into R&D efforts, fueling the development of products that can be tested among Barça’s teams and eventually shared with the industry.
“My main goal in five years from now is that it’s not anymore a Barça Innovation Hub, it’s a platform for the whole industry that will bring value to experts who are willing to get updated constantly with the best content to update their skill set,” Mundet said. “We are creating a professional update center. It’s about all the internal seminars that are happening here in Sports City with the physical trainers, doctors, analysts, and coaches. Everything is going to be put online. In a way, our vision is that if we’re able to bring in other clubs and other institutions that are willing to do the same we’ll create a place where all of this knowledge can be scaled up.”
A few interesting technologies and partnerships have already emerged from the hub. For example, Gatorade works directly with the FC Barcelona first team to improve nutrition and hydration using a smart bottle and Band Aid-like microchip that are individually linked to players and can measure a range of metrics from sodium and sweat production to electrolyte deficiency. In 2019, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute and Barça will co-host a nutrition conference focused on recovery nutrition for soccer players, revealing some of the findings from real-time tests with Barça players.
Great to have @Gatorade joining powers with @FCBarcelona and @BarcaInnoHub, showcasing Hydration Optimisation through personalisation. True to their moto of being the evolution of sports fuel. #BarçaNutrition #GX pic.twitter.com/h67vcDUxvK
— Barça Universitas (@BarcaUni) October 11, 2018
The Barça Innovation Hub also assisted in the early development and testing of Spain-based RealTrackSystems, a FIFA-licensed and certified EPTS (electronic performance tracking system). Barça offered its 2,000 athletes up as a way for the company to test and improve upon its wearable during early-stage development, though the two no longer work together. Access to a large test pool—FC Barcelona’s first team and hundreds of athletes across its other sports and academies—encompasses what the Barça Innovation Hub refers to as its “lab” services. This is the what it can offer to third-party startups and companies looking to collaborate with the center on the development of new and existing technologies.
Earlier this year, RealTrackSystems inked a deal with the Mexican Football Federation to provide tracking services via its WIMU Pro device across the the entire Mexican soccer ecosystem, including the 18 teams that play in Liga MX. That is something those at the BIHub view as a success: the expansion of a technology that the center helped tweak and perfect before being unleashed across the industry.
Barça’s initiative is having a greater impact in soccer than just the development of a few new products. The Mexican Football Federation launched its own innovation hub in June. This is a part of Mundet’s expressed vision, because now the two are able to expand their relationship and engage in knowledge sharing that propels soccer innovation even further. And if they partner on a co-development project, they’ll have access to a sample size of thousands of athletes across their combined organizations.
The idea behind all of this is that soccer innovation centers are able to better communicate to companies the needs of athletes, coaches, teams, and leagues. That enables those companies to develop products that better meet demand, rather than developing new technologies and pitching them to soccer clubs in hopes of a fit.
“Until now, we were seeing there was a gap in between how the industry was moving forward and the needs of the clubs. And that’s probably because on the performance side, for privacy issues, teams were really closed and the market didn’t get exactly what was needed internally,” Mundet said. “We felt we should bridge this gap and create a new scenario where we could co-develop with startups, products and services that have valuable products but still need to adapt to the real needs of the teams on the performance side and the corporate side.”
If Mundet and Barça’s ambitious plans succeed, the global soccer industry might be gain access to unprecedented, scalable innovation. Two weeks ago, FIFA and the Barça Innovation Hub issued a standard format that will govern the storage and transfer of soccer match and practice data generated by teams so that clubs and suppliers can more easily exchange and compare information in order to optimize tech development.
“We want to have an impact internally, but mainly we want to also share it with others,” Mundet said. “We want these guys to co-develop with us but at the same time go to other clubs, go to other institutions, and leverage the fact that they can integrate Barça’s knowhow.”