Featured Company
Each month this section will give a company the chance to show its' expertise and provide indepth look at their business and they can benefit your club.
This month features: Green 4 Solutions - Player Per4mance
There is no bigger asset to football clubs than their players. They represent (normally) over 65% of the gross spend of clubs’ turnover and also offer salvation when the need arises to liquidate some of those assets or a chance of finance becomes apparent through the sale of one of those assets (sorry players).
The shift to thinking (from a business perspective anyway) of players as assets has been one which has gathered pace over the last three or four years. This will only increase as budgets become tighter, spend is monitored more heavily and even new legislation is enforced to cap squad sizes or wage spend.
One symptom of this shift is the analyzing of players welfare, performance, health and mentality. At academies at least it is common place to see both the professionals and youth players go through daily analysis to test their mind, body and soul. Technology is of course at the heart of this and modern training grounds now resemble ‘NASA’ like labs as much as they do football training areas. This is all rhetoric though. What isn’t is a new system from Green 4 Solutions titled ‘Green 4 Player Per4ormance’. If you’re thinking ‘I’ve heard of them’ then you’re right – you will have. The company has built its reputation by building CRM solutions for the Sports Industry, focusing on the commercial aspects on the game. Using the same Microsoft Technology that appears in their CRM software the ‘Green 4 Player Per4mance’ software now unites, harmonises and simplifies the collation, analysis and output of all the training and testing that players go through. Green4’s Olwen Astley explained more:
“We have developed a specific solution that caters for all coaching staff needs.
Due to amount of information collected, clubs can find it challenging to analyse all data sets against each other. Here is a system that centralises all your player information, allowing you to monitor and analyse from a variety of angles, predict the potential of players getting injured, and set alert points for any other potential issues. Streamlining the coaches ability to identify and understand specific influences that affect player performances.”
As the whole industry trundles along towards the reality of becoming a proper business like model, return on investment is key. Protecting the things (in this case players) that drive the money for that is critical and is clearly why the reasons for analysis and for both performance and business related reasons.
Leicester City are one of the first clubs to be using the software. Chief Executive Lee Hoos explained why it was such a simple decision to have it at there club:
“One of the biggest areas of concerns for a football club is the players. People come to matches because they want to see good football.”
The madness of testing begins to make sense when you think about it like that. If you can prevent an injury (to your top player say) then its impact is huge on the whole business. Clubs are already collecting this data but are they using it in the way that this new software allows? Leicester’s Andy Blake (Data Analyst) best explains this: “The club already records a great deal of analytical data (as most clubs do) from areas such as heart rates, body fat levels and even distance covered during training and matches.
“However, these measurement systems tend to be stand alone, and even when we do make comparisons in spreadsheets it is difficult to combine elements of the data. For example, the impact of hard pitches and two matches a week on muscle soreness. Half the problem is being able to see all of the variables in one system, the other is getting the players to provide us with critical pieces of information that are difficult to capture at the training ground.”
Now we’re talking. In a world when your club has become obsessed with what you eat, how you’re feeling and how you are sleeping, how do you (the club) get this data without the player giving his agent a buzz to demand a quick and timely exit?
The following is why F.C. Business is happy to get behind the software. It is actually set up for clubs to spend less time testing and more time with their players in a football sense – all at the same time of correctly getting data from your most prized and sacred assets. The software provides a ‘Player-Portal’, accessible from a browser on a mobile phone, laptop, or a touch-screen computer actually at the training ground. The player can then easily (and quickly) provide hydration levels, quality of sleep and muscle soreness levels before he leaves home for training. In the time it takes to have driven to the training ground the data will have already been processed, passed to the relevant coach or manager and the training session can be suited to the actual physical capabilities of the players on that day. When squads are likely to get smaller and money will need to go further you can start to see the sense behind it and the importance of optimizing players. Through analyzing the outcomes of each training session and implementing a traffic light system of alerts, not only will this lead to the optimization of a player’s physical condition but it will also prevent costly injuries.
What we are talking about here is efficiency and good business practice. At the moment most clubs will be taking in all data known to man. They will also be interested and no doubt recording data from a player’s home such as quality of sleep. The question you have to ask as a club is what this data means, is it reliable and is there a way I can make more use of it? As we’ve discussed, there is.
The harsh reality is that most players, whilst they understand why they have to do a lot of testing, only really buy into it in the long term if they see results on the back of it either in themselves, their team-mates or the team as a whole. Will this give you a better chance of achieving that? I think so and so do others: “Green 4’s Player Per4mance software provides a complete software management solution for professional football clubs. With individual player information being of paramount importance with the number of matches and the physical demands placed upon players, week in, week out, ‘Player Per4mance’ provides a customized software solution where every member of the squad, management and the medical team has access to the same portal of player information.” Alex Reid,Ex Strength & Conditioning Coach at Spurs and Fulham FC. The business/football paybacks for clubs are numerous. The provision of a more available, fitter squad in addition to less time lost to injuries, less underperformance and an (potentially) extended playing career. This clearly benefits the player but with current salary and transfer levels for professional footballers having someone injured and not available for selection is a huge cost to the business.
For further information:
call Olwen Ashley +44(0)7773 541 503 or email olwen@green4 solutions.com
