If US Soccer’s Wearables Deal Is Worth $1.5 billion+, What Is Arda Worth?
In August 2018, the biggest elite sports wearables market deal to date was signed between STATsports and US soccer, providing four million registered soccer players in the US with STATSports’s monitoring devices*. The deal was aimed at creating the world’s largest player data monitoring program and was a first step towards outfitting youth and amateur soccer players with performance technology similar to that used by professional soccer players around the world. The data analytics available from the devices is below.
How does Performance Lab’s IP for Arda stack up?
As I was explaining to a colleague, here is the difference between Performance Lab’s IP and that of STATsports.
All those STATsports metrics above are about a single player’s physical actions rather than their strategies and behaviors during a game. But it’s the players’ behaviors that really interest coaches, scouts, TV commentators and fantasy betting.
These people aren’t betting on who will do the most sprints or have the lowest heart rate (as per the metrics in the above table), they are betting on who wins the game — ie. the strategy. For example, Beauden Barrett (All Black 1st five-eight) is not exceptional because of his ability to run distance, run fast or the number of sprints he’s done (once again see metrics above). He’s exceptional because he exhibits certain game-winning behaviors at the right times and these can only be worked out if you know what he is doing in different ‘situations’. That is, does he react in a game-winning way?
That’s why back line moves on TV etc in rugby have the camera panned out so you can watch the relationships between the players in a try-scoring move. These relationships are what make sports exciting. For example, “Can you believe that back line move with the reverse pass, then the long pass out wide and then the amazing link up with the fullback coming in at speed on the outside?”. Each link in the above backline move is a ‘situation’ and in each situation the players involved exhibited the right behavior at the right time in a sequence. Each player responded in exactly the right way to the other players around him and the flow of the ball handling interactions was successful.
This might be ‘geek speak’, but boiling it down this is what we are all watching for. It is how you might explain scoring in a team sport to a robot (Artifical Intelligence). If simply measuring how many times a player sprints and what their heart rate is is worth $1.5 billion, then what does knowing what the player and team are actually doing tactically worth?
This is what excites us at Performance Lab. Our algorithms are possible because of the tracking technology using cameras and other sensors that is now available. This means we can measure the location of every player from both teams and the ball for every second of the game. Our Performance Lab IP uses our algorithms and the information obtained from the tracking technology to combine the locations of certain players and the ball in relation to each other. These locational relationships allow us to identify different player behaviors which allows an automated system to identify all the behaviors of every player for every game.
This provides very powerful insights around individual player and team strengths and weaknesses, both tactically and physically. If you’ve seen the movie or read the book ‘Moneyball’, this is a version of that concept applied to a team sport such as soccer.
And we are excited to see how much that’s worth.
* Note that US Soccer will not be paying STATSports £1bn ($1.4b). STATSports has clarified, “That’s the total value of the deal if all 4.2m registered soccer players buy the APEX Device. USSF will pay for the devices which cover their elite teams and amateur players are expected to follow their lead.”
Performance Lab closed a fully subscribed token pre-sale for Arda in Q1 2018 and the Arda main sale is live now! To learn more and to buy tokens visit joinarda.com, or get the latest news by joining the Arda community on Telegram.
