It was not so long ago that professional footballers would treat their bodies with little more care than a Sunday league player. “At Liverpool, if we played an away game in the late ’90s, we’d get onto the team bus and there would be a couple of crates of lager,” Michael Owen tells The Athletic .
Integrated video or not, the output that GPS tracking alone can provide is a valuable source of information that can inform a manager’s tactical strategy as the game is being played. “We can track distance between players, and distance between the lines — so team length and width,” explains Barin Sports’ Daniel Shopov. Advertisement “During a game, we measured how much the opposition was pressuring our team, as the defensive and midfield lines were getting closer together.