How stats technology helped Ireland navigate way to Euro 2016

As a nation sweated on the fitness of Shane Long and John O’Shea in the build-up to Ireland’s Euro 2016 play-off, Martin O’Neill’s backroom team could pore over a dizzying array of stats assessing his players’ readiness to play against Bosnia-Herzegovina.

And clubs are also kept in the loop on decisions made about their valuable assets.

Statsports — the company behind the technology — is an Irish success story in its own right.

Its ‘Viper Pod’ tracking devices are now worn by most Premier League teams, as well as Barcelona and Juventus.

The company is also celebrating qualification success; all its international football clients — Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Wales and Poland — reached Euro 2016.

The ‘Viper Pod’, which fits discreetly between a player’s shoulders, can log data on speed, distance, accelerations and decelerations up to 100 times per second.

Statsports’ Head of Marketing Richard Byrne explains how the system would have been used at the National Training Centre over the last week.

“We’ve very close relationships with the Ireland and Northern Ireland camps. We have staff on site, who are there as part of the backroom staff.

“Sean McCullagh is with the Republic. The players wear the Pod every day in training. We stream the data live so Sean will be sitting on the sidelines, and he’ll have certain thresholds for a matchday minus one, the Sunday, or a matchday minus two, the Saturday. Something like, Robbie Keane needs to run 5km and do 10 sprints and needs to do five high-intensity bursts.

“Once Robbie hits those thresholds, Sean will say to Martin O’Neill, pull him out five minutes early, or whatever. That will ensure he reaches his peak condition for game day without over-exerting.”

While supporters are accustomed to stats on distance run during games, the Statsports system produces a more sophisticated analysis of workload.

“In the old days, if Seamus Coleman ran 10km in a match and James McCarthy ran five, you’d say, Coleman worked so much harder,” says Byrne. “But we have a metric called High Metabolic Load Distance (HMLD), which scores a player for their high intensity bursts or their accelerations and decelerations and their changes of direction.

“Say you’ve Coleman running up and down the right wing and he works very hard… but you might have Glenn Whelan operating around the centre circle, not covering as much distance, but doing shorter sprints and accelerating and decelerating a lot more. That would put a lot of load and stress on his body.

“We would give a weighted score based on all these factors, and their HMLD would actually be very similar, even though Coleman might have run further.”

Because Statsports work with so many club sides, international teams also get a fuller picture of their players’ physiological capabilities.

“Southampton would send over Shane Long’s data to Ireland and say, this is where he’s at at the moment.

“If a player is returning from injury, you can assess their gold standard. So for Shane Long, the system will have recorded what he does at peak fitness. They can measure his current performance against that and try and reach it in a staged process, rather than sending him out to run 10k and 50 sprints in one day, and then he’s completely knackered come matchday.

“After the camp, Ireland will send back his data to Southampton. So you can’t have really run Long 10-15 km per day, or Southampton will know all about it. It’s good insurance for them.”