Football technology: which one to pick? There is a lot going on in football when it comes to new applications and solutions to boost performance. Football professionals want to understand what works best for them. That is why we at Connected.Football are working on an overview of all football technology that is available on the market.

Why use technology in football at all?

Technology elevates the level of understanding and with it the level of competition. That is, if you use the right technologies in an appropriate way. How does this work in football? Football is a continuous process of training, playing, and analysis. Coaches continuously evaluate the performance of their players. What this analytics process looks like in practice is something I will address in another article.

The need for clarity

The football tech industry is booming. With the advancements in video, on-body and football equipment technology, coaches can choose from a myriad of solutions to analyse and improve the performance of their team. With the overwhelming amount of options to choose from, it can be a challenge to pick the right solutions. To many, the digital football marketplace might be a confusing set of companies with potentially overlapping and conflicting roles, each claiming a slice of the pie and adding another layer of complexity. This is where football coaches can get lost. Mismatches between expectations and use in practice are also bad for the industry. Football professionals will be more reluctant to use valuable technologies.

Our aim is to organize the football technology ecosystem across critical categories to provide clarity. It helps football professionals to get a better understanding of the options they can choose from. Football tech companies will be able to explain more clearly what the added value is of their solutions and how their offerings relates to other applications in the ecosystem.

About the football technology overview

Many companies and technologies fit in the space between the (personal) beliefs about football of coaches and their objectives and the performance of their team on the pitch. We created an initial overview in which we display the logos associated with a football technology. This is by no means an exhaustive list of tech companies. It is work in progress and we continuously look for other solutions to be included.

The main criteria we used when creating this overview:

• It is about digital solutions, i.e. there has to be a digital component: this varies from expert knowledge communicated through a dedicated app to measurement equipment;
• It is about available solutions: a solution has to be “ready-to-use”, albeit that it would require an investment;
• One solution per company: the vast majority of companies have a dominant solution that they offer to the market, although some offer additional football technologies. We picked the one that is most prominent in their communications;

Feel free to suggest other solutions and we will look into them. To be continued.