READING THE GAME Opta Vision’s technology analyses spatial awareness, which can reveal unseen tactical advantages
Calls, corrected Another application for tracking technology is to help referees make accurate, well-informed calls. Most recently, Major League Baseball umpires – who stand behind home plate, getting a pretty good view of every pitch – have received serious backlash for repeated mistakes. There’s been an uptick in fan outcry, especially since the MLB added a digital strike zone – the area in which a ball needs to land for it to be deemed a strike – to its broadcasts, highlighting discrepancies between what an umpire called and what actually happened. During spring training for the 2025 season, the MLB has been testing an automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system, which will allow the players themselves (batters, pitchers and catchers only) to challenge an umpire’s call. They must do so immediately after the call is made, without communicating with the » Unlike in a solo sport, football players are more than the sum of their parts, and how the team moves is just as important as one person’s performance «
applied again, enriching the data with predictive metrics. The type of data collected will depend on a team’s needs or a targeted area of improvement. Opta Vision offers raw tracking data, as well as information on aggregated fitness, shape analysis, pass predictions, pressure intensity and line-breaking passes. The Pass Predictions software, for instance, creates three AI-enhanced metrics: expected pass completion (xP), expected receiver (xR) and expected threat (xT). Much like a game of chess, football players and coaches can get a clearer picture of good moves, bad moves and blunders. Unlike in a solo sport, football players are more than the sum of their parts, and how the team moves is just as important as one person’s performance. Opta Vision’s Shape Analysis takes this into consideration, using XY data points to identify each team’s true ‘shape’ both in and out of
possession – and clueing coaches in on why a specific formation does or doesn’t work in various scenarios and against certain opposition. Elsewhere, the Indian Premier League uses Spidercams to collect data and capture the action during every cricket match, according to Marc Denker, managing director at Spidercam. The same is true of the Professional Gamers League (PGL) and Australian Open tennis. These stabilised cameras attach to each playing pitch via cables secured to the four corners, hovering above the field as if sliding across a spider’s web. They include built-in tracking technology which also records their location in space. “Tracking data reveals what is hidden from the human eye,” Melvang notes. Software-enhanced analysis offers additional info to players and coaches, allowing them to learn from these quantitative metrics and use them to their advantage.
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