When the Geelong Cats' Gary Ablett strode on to the field for the first match of the season, he sported the same trademark blue and white colours as his father did when he laced up his boots for the AFL side in 1984.
However, Ablett Junior's outfit included an invisible element that wasn't even a concept 16 years ago - sensors and video cameras to track his on-field performance 300 times a second.
Geelong is not alone: most sporting codes have turned to information technology, data analysis and sports science in an arms race to gain an edge on the field and on their balance sheets.
Most footy fans are familiar with the publicly available statistics such as how many handballs were passed in a game, the number of goals or behinds (in Ablett's 2010 season debut that was 24, two and two according to afl.com.au).
The league websites encourage this obsession with stats for each team and player at the end of the round. But clubs are turning to a deeper analysis of the statistics to hone their players' performance. For that they're turning to ever more specialised experts and consultants.
Ask anyone in the burgeoning sports data field and they all point to the 2003 book Moneyball as the catalyst for professional teams' love affair with data and the IT that supports it.
The emerging science was largely dismissed until Michael Lewis wrote about the financially struggling Oakland Athletics baseball team that rose to compete with Major League teams such as the New York Yankees which had five times the player budget.
Today, most codes rely on technologies provided by the likes of SportsData, one of the companies headed by Andrew Moufriage, to sharpen the players, tactics and financial positions of the best clubs. He points to Geelong, the Australian Socceroos and Manly in the NRL as top teams exploiting data analysis technology in Australia.
"If you don't use technology in sport you won't make the final eight, you won't even come close," Moufriage says. "The last three World Cups were won using our technology.
"The big difference to the games in the past seven years is now everything is tracked in training and in the game. The players have sensors that measure speed, deceleration, acceleration, direction, G-forces, workload and heart rate [for instance] that updates 300 times a second.
"The coaches are receiving the data live once a second and the data after the game [at a higher resolution]."
The coaches have an intimate knowledge of what is happening to their players' bodies, often before even the players acknowledge it. And it explains why armchair coaches often have a hard time understanding certain calls in the game - they don't have all the information.
"It now captures all your footsteps and heart rate. What happens to the player's heart rate when the umpire calls a penalty and when someone hits you with a massive tackle?
One of the big things you see is the interchanges - there's now more than 100 interchanges a match [up from an average of 30 a decade ago] because you can see when players need to be changed before their body language betrays them."
Moufriage says it has "completely changed how games are played and covered".
"Channel 7 puts team data on TV now but it will become more common in the next five years to show data such as passes, runs, kicks, and in the last two minutes how far the player has gone."
Australia is a leader in the marriage of data to video, Moufriage says. Time codes stamped on the video merge it with the data as it is collected in lockstep. He says it's why relatively small countries such as ours and New Zealand are competing with far bigger rivals overseas in sports such as soccer.
Our thirst for data on all our devices is behind unprecedented demand for content distribution networks such as the global Akamai service.
The Master's golf tournament on April 9 that saw Tiger Woods return to the links in Augusta, Georgia, recorded a traffic peak of 3.45 terabits a second of web data - equal to downloading the US Library of Congress in less than a minute. It was the highest peak demand Akamai had recorded in its 12 years of business as it received more than 12 million requests a second for data - equal to serving the population of Australia and New Zealand every two seconds.
And although the data that's gathered at sports events nowhere approaches this welter, there's so much data sitting in databases that Moufriage sees an emerging demand to trawl this statistical mother lode for as yet hidden insights.
"We now break a game down to 10,000 stats a game but we gather a million stats from tracking the players.
There's potentially a mine of data sitting there and clubs could use a team of sports scientists and supercomputers to improve training.
"The teams found the big things about how to get fitter, the correct number of kilometres to run, the number of impacts and so on but they don't have the time and there's so much data [to analyse]."
Inspired by Moneyball, the potential exists for rival teams or even whole leagues to spring up to challenge the status quo. It may be this added level of analysis that's behind the push to lure Ablett Jnr to the fresh-faced Gold Coast AFL football club.
Moufriage says it's possible to buy a second-division team in any code for, say, $10 million and "turn them into a billion-dollar team".
And that's where what happens on the field becomes an asset to drive investment in the board room and in the market. "The balance sheet of the club changes because you don't go out stupidly and buy players. You turn into a system where you develop players and create an asset.
"It also lifts the level of the league up against other sports," says Moufriage. AFL and NRL, as early adopters, will come to "dominate TV dollars even more than they did before", he says.
And, as with many technologies that filter down from the enterprise, universities and high school and even individuals will have these tools in the next five years to lift their performance - once they have the smarts to make sense of the data.
"A lot of tracking products will filter down," he says. "It will be like Google Maps - every oval will be cameraed up, everyone will be filmed and everyone will use it for their training."
An insight gained from analysing ball movements is how old-fashioned traditional player positions are, he says: "Positions are irrelevant, what's important is where the ball is.
"Positions date back 100 years and people have been coached and trained for a long time and no one has looked at positions until recently. We gridded the field up into corridors to show the best way up the field to score against Hawthorn," says Moufriage.
SportsData produces heat maps of where the ball spends its time and shows players' "sperm trails" to identify their motion on the field to identify the best places to shape up and get to the ball.
That analysis showed that the most efficient path to the goal square were corridors that criss-crossed the oval.
Moufriage says an "athlete is like a Ferrari" in Formula One: "If you race in the first race of the year you don't then go in the next race without fixing it. You strip the car, replace the parts and then send it out with the pit crew monitoring them."
And he says a future like in Gattaca, where people were selected for jobs according to their DNA makeup, is here. Players' DNA and blood is already routinely sampled.
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