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.
A British company helping teams prepare for this reality is Soccernomics, which advises clubs on the smartest picks and undervalued players.
"We're introducing biomechanical and neuromechanical pre-season tests to help with injury detection and to tell when players should be dropped or rested," says Soccernomics general manager Ben Lyttleton.
"That's another way clubs lose huge money, say, when a striker is injured and for the time he's out they're paying his wages of up to £100,000 (A$164,60) a week and he's not benefiting the team."
Lyttleton says the company uses data to analyse when players are being rushed back too quickly or come back too slowly.
"They say they need six weeks to get match fitness whereas specialised training systems can be set up to replace the explosive elements after injury. They need that explosiveness to be at the top of their game and we have biomechanical sports scientists that can set up a bespoke training system to restore that."
Soccernomics' maths whizzes use tools such as regression analysis to wade through the data such as that captured by British software company Prozone to identify trends overlooked by the clubs.
"It's not necessarily the team that runs the most kilometres that wins the most games. Clubs are just starting to get the gist of [using] stats correctly.
"But there's lots of ways where [statistics are] not always used correctly and that's what we're trying to eliminate. Instead of the stat where the most kilometres are run is analysed, the number of sprints run in the final third of the games is the stat that's more important."
Soccernomics data analysis is strengthening rosters off the field, too, by cutting down on unnecessary transfers of players. For instance, Tottenham Hotspurs sold three players in a short time only to buy them back again recently under different management.
"That smacks of short-term planning and one man being in control of the transfer strategy. It shouldn't happen because they're wasting money on agents' fees and perhaps these players shouldn't have been sold in the first place," Lyttleton says.
He says an error that recruiters and armchair experts make is often looking at the wrong performance indicators in a transfer candidate.
"One of the biggest mistakes a club makes in the transfer market is buying a player based on their last three top results. Because a player scored a hat trick in a World Cup game doesn't mean he'll score a hat trick in every game," says Lyttleton.
Goal scoring is dependant on variables such as the state of the pitch and time of the season, for instance. Embarrassingly, he says, clubs such as Newcastle United bought players by looking at Youtube videos, which was "substandard scouting", he says.
Competitive analysis is another area ripe for exploitation: knowing your opponent's tendencies is essential in a competition that is won by fractions of degrees and hundredths of a second.
One of Soccernomics first engagements was helping Chelsea improve its penalty kick performance. It called in London School of Economics professor Ignacio Palasios-Huerta before the 2008 final to do a game theory analysis, identifying patterns and preferences of Manchester United's goal keeper in penalty shootouts.
Using data from Dutch goalie Edwin Van der Sar's past 10 years showed he dived 80 percent of the time to the kicker's natural side. The Chelsea players tried to throw him off balance by kicking to the opposite side, Lyttleton says.
"We're not saying this will win you the World Cup or every penalty shootout but it can give you a huge advantage to know what the opposition's preferences are," he says.
"When trophies are handed out on the shootout it makes the tiny advantage that could make the difference."
Ocean racing is another area where small, incremental changes have profound effects. Maxi YouZuu skipper Ludde Ingvall says that tacking a fraction of a degree one way, even if it's a longer route, to capture a favourable current or avoid a squall is the difference between winning the Sydney to Hobart and coming second.
And in the high-profile sport of maxi yacht racing, such tactical advantages play directly into the PR battle to get money for the next race, he says.
Ingvall's first brush with IT as a professional yachtsman was in the ‘80s when Steve Jobs of Apple Computer donated an Apple II to help the skipper race from South Africa to South America.
Back then, applications which optimised the ship's course were held on floppies because hard drives couldn't sustain the G-forces of the open seas.
About 10 years ago the team shifted to Dell hardware, which it uses in its Sydney to Hobart campaign, he says.
"We now have come to the point where computers like Dell's ruggedised computer, particularly using SSDs, allows us to use the machines very efficiently with no failures on board," Ingvall says.
The computers are used for route optimisation, velocity prediction and communications.
"And they all interact," Ingvall says. Data is downloaded during the course of the race using Next G wireless networks at up to 3Mbps, 40 nautical miles out to sea.
"We use that to communicate with the media so we can keep contact with press and sponsors, which is crucial for us so we can get money," says Ingvall. The data links failover to satellite when outside this zone.
The communications software feeds weather forecasts, grid files and other data to systems on board. "It allows you to get a picture of how the winds are going to change in the defined area hour by hour over seven days. And that is a very, very important tactical and strategic tool. That is one of the key inputs to my route-optimisation program."
He contrasts route optimisation to walking over mountains: "You just sit down and say you want to avoid climbing but everything is static; nothing is static at sea.
"One of the key ingredients is to know how weather will change over time. In the old days, we would get weather faxes with isobars and draw in our own wind bars and in a seat-of-the-pants way we would decide how to take advantage of a wind shift - now we get it as a 3D file in time and space."
The professional sailor is torn between following his head and gut and keeping close enough to the competition "in case you are wrong, but you want to position yourself on the most beneficial side of your competition".
"It's made (sailing) more interesting because we get to a higher level of decision making."
Even before Ingvall and his 20 crew stepped on board YuuZoo, number-crunching computers were behind its construction. The radical datacentric philosophy that saw another professional sailor wrench the America's Cup from the New York Yacht Club in 1983 is now the norm in world racing of all stripes.
YuuZoo was designed in velocity-prediction software to determine how it would theoretically react during expected weather conditions taking into account wind and wave patterns.
Once he had his boat, Ingvall took it out to test those assumptions.
"The first stage in sea trials will be a verification stage to test the boat in angles and strengths and see if you are on the mark. Then create a velocity-prediction database that verifies or disputes theoretical data. Then you can start testing whether one sail is better than another when you need to decrease power and so on.
"When you have a reasonable performance-based database you can sit down with designers again and fine tune the boat to achieve the desired objective."
Data capture and delivery has again revolutionised the experience for stay-at-home skippers sailing their fantasy yachts from the comfort of their sofas. Rather like Max from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are - if he had a notebook or iPhone.
"Telemetry has a very big impact because it gives people more immediacy and the feeling they are part of the adventure," Ingvall says.
Next page: Reseller opportunities
Getting in the game: opportunities for resellers
Most IT and AV companies have global alliances with major sports events and teams, such as Sony with the World Cup, Dell with maxi yacht YuuZoo, IBM with the Australian Open and so on.
In these cases, resellers might enquire how they can profit from this involvement?
Closer to home, the increasing use of audiovisual gear in clubrooms, players' homes and the coaching box opens an avenue for resellers to sell flat-screen TVs, DVD players media centres, networks and management.
Some are finding opportunities supporting sports stars with their telecommunications needs especially when they travel outside the country for months on tour.
Systems that marry data and video are the way of the future and so high-definition cameras will become more important.
Ruggedised notebooks that coaches can take on the field and players throw in their kit bags alongside the boots and sweats may also become more attractive as sports data insinuates itself into match preparation.
PDAs and smartphones such as the iPhone will also become favoured for catching up on match debriefs. Suppliers of sports data software are talking about having such applications ready to go presently.
And networking, especially 802.11n, is becoming more important to reticulate data and video at venues and in coaches' and players' homes and club houses.
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