By Freya Purnell
The German national football team may have a leg-up on the competition at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, with the help of the SAP Match Insights solution for football.
The result of a co-innovation project between SAP and the German Football Association (DFB), the solution, which runs on the SAP HANA platform, helps coaches and players to process huge amounts of data to identify key situations in each match to improve player and team performance via a simple user interface.
“Imagine this: in just 10 minutes, 10 players with three balls can produce over seven million data points. SAP HANA can process these in real time. With SAP, our team can analyse this huge amount of data to customise training and prepare for the next match,” said Oliver Bierhoff, SAP brand ambassador and manager of the German national football team (pictured).
The German national team will use SAP Match Insights in an early adoption phase for preparation and post analyses of the matches during the World Cup.
“Today each sports team is looking for innovative ways to gain a competitive edge over its rivals. The DFB is committed to providing the German national team with the best technology to maximise their performance. SAP meets this demanding criterion,” Bierhoff said.
The insights are also expected to be beneficial for the media, to help deliver better informed commentary.
“Big data is an incredible resource for coaches and players to contextualise information and draw well-informed conclusions to optimise training and tactics,” said Fadi Naoum, senior vice president, application and innovation head of sports and entertainment, SAP AG.
SAP and the DFB announced a partnership in 2013 to improve the business processes of the federation, and this extended to co-innovation on solutions to enhance on-field performance of Germany’s national team. Previously the DFB had successfully implemented the SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution powered by SAP HANA, as well as the SAP Event Ticketing software, both running the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
SAP Match Insights will be offered to other clubs and football federations in the future.
