In early January, on the type of sun-splashed day that draws northerners to Florida each winter, some of the nation’s best collegiate soccer players gathered in Fort Lauderdale for a shot at the pros. They ran through a series of scrimmages as part of Major League Soccer’s pre-draft combine, standout players trying to justify their position atop various teams’ boards, and those with something to prove hoping to cash in on a good showing.
It was like any sport’s amateur selection process, save for one prominent detail: A handful of the 52 college seniors on the pitch wore Adidas miCoach data trackers. The gadget, about the size of your thumb, offers real-time performance metrics like heart rate, top speed and distance run via biometric readings and GPS. It’s far flashier than such antiquities as a timed 40, but not much different in that the athletic attributes it measures have little to do with sport-specific skills like, say, passing the ball.
Still, proper dribbling technique is more easily taught than absurd acceleration through a defensive alignment, which is why University of Connecticut defender Andrew Jean-Baptiste started turning so many heads.
Jean-Baptiste was among those participating in the miCoach trial ahead of a league-wide rollout next season. As four Adidas reps roamed the sideline holding iPads displaying real-time readings from the field, coaches and team officials filtered by with raised eyebrows and the occasional question. Everything was proceeding as expected until Jean-Baptiste took off on a sprint across the pitch and his measurements exploded.
“Ten to 12 teams’ staff people crowded around me at once,” said Jan Mueller, a manager for the miCoach line. “They were watching intently, and then began asking a lot of questions.”
“You could see by looking at him that Jean-Baptiste was a physical specimen, but the numbers on miCoach showed that this guy was a freak of nature as far as the physical stuff was concerned,” said Sean Rubio, video coordinator for the San Jose Earthquakes, who handles much of the team’s statistical analysis. “Eyes up and down the sideline were popping at those numbers.”
This is the kind of thing miCoach is made for. It will provide coaches with data to improve performance, the league with accessible stats to spark new levels of interest, and fans with a degree of access never before known. The question is whether it will work as envisioned, because this is soccer, after all — a sport that has forever been more about nuance than numbers.
From a training standpoint, miCoach will allow teams to closely monitor a player’s precise physical exertion during practice or games. Coaches will be able to identify who needs extra rest, or extra work. Fluctuating readings well below a player’s baseline can allow for easy identification of injury, perhaps even before the player knows something is wrong. The device also will allow coaches to track their players simultaneously, and analyze on-the-fly which of them physically offers the best chance at victory.
“Say we’re involved in an intense game, a dogfight, and you’re trying to figure out who still has something left in the tank to make it through extra time,” said John Hackworth, interim manager of the Philadelphia Union. “That becomes an invaluable tool. Rather than coaches estimating that a guy looks a little fatigued, this gives you a metric to actually measure it.”
Everything to this point may be revolutionary, but there is nonetheless a significantly bigger fish to be caught in this particular pond. Improvements in training methods are nice, but we’re talking about soccer — and not just soccer, but American soccer — the sport that 40 years ago was said to be on the cusp of taking over the domestic sporting landscape and in some ways has regressed from there.
One reason for this is its numbers. Reading a baseball box score has been an American pastime for 100 years. Football’s statistics have been key in building the juggernaut fantasy sports industry. Basketball’s per-game stats can explain precisely what happened during the course of a game.
Soccer is not made that way. Much of the sport’s vitality happens in the spaces between statistics. Due to the sport’s reliance on flow and nuance, the bulk of what takes place is difficult to classify, let alone quantify.
“Dribble, tackle, pass — aside from shots, those are the main components of a game,” Rubio said. “But even there, you’ll have 10 different people with 10 different opinions about what counts as a dribble, what counts as pass or what counts as a tackle.”
Not that the MLS isn’t trying. The league has enlisted stat-keepers Opta Sports in an aggressive pursuit of a statistical set that rivals anything offered by its big-three competitors. Having stats, however, doesn’t make them easily navigable.
For an example, look no further than the wondrous online feature MLS rolled out last year to help fans deconstruct a game. Searchable by player and area of the field, users can track shots, passes, set pieces (things like free kicks and corner kicks) and defensive sets. If this sounds simple, it’s not.
Just the act of distributing the ball is divided into 11 sub-categories: successful and unsuccessful passes, flick ons and crosses; key passes (which lead to scoring opportunities); through balls; headers; assists; and lay offs. Eight more categories comprise defense; set pieces have seven; shots, six; ball possession, five; and there are four each for fouls and goalkeeping.
Add to all this a player’s heat index — a graphical representation of where on the field he was when participating in stat-worthy action — and you have an abundance of numbers that, while voluminous, still don’t fully explain what happened on a soccer pitch.
Enter miCoach. Argue if you will over what constitutes a pass or a chance, but miCoach readings are irrefutable — precise measurements of speed, power and endurance.
“The information we’ve been working with before now is more qualitative than quantitative, because we just didn’t have enough data to analyze,” said Earthquakes President David Kaval. “Well, we’re about to move into an area where we’re going to have almost too much data. The problem’s going to become how to effectively analyze it and come up with algorithms that can predict performance.”
Wherein likes the downside of miCoach: None of its readings have to do with ball control. Many players don’t have much in the way of speed or power, yet are still successful based on any combination of factors — intuition, vision, technical and tactical skills — that miCoach (let alone any other soccer statistics) cannot touch. That leaves it up to the league’s brightest minds to find causative correlations between old stats and new. For an example of soccer’s struggles to make sense of its statistics, note that even the game’s simplest measure — time of possession — means little in terms of predicting victory; the same can be said for shots on goal.
“There isn’t a determinant variable or algorithm to predict the performance of players — yet,” said Kaval. “That might be because there’s not enough goals scored, or that we don’t really don’t know what we’re solving for. That’s the biggest challenge of soccer, compared to other sports like baseball, which has more data, and specific variables like on-base percentage that are statistically significant and directional, and actually show how to make better decisions. That hasn’t really happened in soccer yet, but maybe the traditional data and this new technology will help ferret that out.”
That possibility makes this an appealing, if complex, problem to solve, but it’s not the only reason for the MLS to be excited. After all, if soccer’s popularity trails that of the big three in part because of less-accessible stats, what might happen once fans are able to grab hold of something genuinely meaty? And make no mistake — from a fan perspective, miCoach readings are about the meatiest thing soccer has seen.
Take the “power” metric. While measurements of things like top speed and distance run are relatively straightforward, Adidas is trumpeting its power reading as especially worthy. It’s a proprietary compendium of heart rate, acceleration, speed and distance that factors in subtleties like changes in direction.
“When you combine them all together and our scientists work their magic, it gives us an estimation of the effort the player needs, as well as their body’s response to it,” said Simon Drabble, director of the miCoach business unit for adidas. “It gives a simplified view of how hard a player is working, and what kind of effort he has to put in to get the results he’s getting.”
Now imagine fans getting their hands on these numbers. Athletic leagues worldwide are desperately seeking ways to maximize the “second-screen,” capitalizing on the increasing numbers of viewers who augment a game’s broadcast or in-stadium experience with one or more devices — tracking stats, communicating with friends, keeping tabs on the rest of the league. If fans could use that supplementary screen to literally watch a player’s exertion levels rise and fall as he sprints across the pitch, it would take the viewing experience to a level never before seen in any sport.
The MLS, of course, is treading carefully here. Coaches aren’t eager to see this kind of information made publicly available, for reasons having to do both with competitive advantage and public scrutiny. As such, MLS brass, while proclaiming big plans for the fan engagement potential of miCoach, have largely kept mum about what that ultimately will look like. It will very likely involve post-match (as opposed to real-time) analytics, a sample of which can be found on the league’s Facebook page that reflects data from the miCoach test run held at this year’s All-Star Game.
What it will likely not include is a stunningly realistic game-tracker, despite the GPS system within each miCoach unit providing the capability for exactly that.
“We’re not focused on making dots move around the page,” said Chris Schosser, the general manager of MLS Digital, harkening back to the second screen. “We’re working on what we feel like is a game-changer in the digital match experience — a whole new way for consumers to experience the game. It’s less about recreating a broadcast than augmenting the game you’re already watching.”
Ultimately, that might be the truest use for a device like this. Even discounting the slow adopters for a technology so new that its final format has yet to be unveiled, there’s still a solid faction of MLS coaching and front-office personnel that, while intrigued, remains less than convinced that miCoach is the cure for what ails it.
“We’ve always had lies, damned lies and statistics,” said Timbers assistant coach Amos Magee. “For example, just because a guy is covering a lot of ground, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s smart running or that he’s in the right place at the right time. That’s a statistic that needs to come with experience. So some of these measurements are going to be useful, but some aren’t. We’ll just have to see which ones fill a void.”
In that capacity, miCoach readings will fit right in with the rest of soccer’s statistics. There’s another school of thought, however, that presents an even warier eye.
“Soccer is so much art, and art is impossible to measure, like music or dance or paintings,” said Hackworth. “The beauty of our sport is that there are so many creative, imaginative and skillful moments, and you’ll never be able to truly quantify that.”
For a point of reference, turn back to January’s combine. As coaches crowded around the sideline iPads, marveling at the numbers put up by Andrew Jean-Baptiste, at least one faction paid not a lick of attention. Magee and the rest of the Timbers coaching staff were too busy watching the games. Portland brass had done its due diligence on players the old-fashioned way — scouting their college games, measuring their results in fitness and agility drills, and now, gauging their performance in scrimmages. Nobody saw a miCoach reading. Nobody knew the statistical side of what Jean-Baptiste had just done.
The Timbers selected him with the eighth pick overall, and didn’t look back.
