In the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, the Enterprise systems company SAP was demonstrating how an application called Match Insights could gather data before and during a match and use it to influence the coach’s tactical decisions while the game was on.
Most saw the demo as a marketing exercise. But when Germany won the World Cup, systematically outplaying opponents with superior tactics, the data game became very real.
In fact, when England played in Ecuador and Honduras for “warm weather training” in June ahead of the World Cup, they’d already lost the tournament – they just didn’t know it.