Training Ground Guru | How Ajax is building a ‘whole football model’

BEFORE Professor David Sumpter started working on football (with teams such as Ajax, Barcelona and England), he studied the movement patterns of birds and fish.

This may sound a bit surreal, but Sumpter says football has a lot to learn from this work – both in terms of findings and the structure of research.

“When we studied fish and birds, we photographed them many, many times, built models, did new experiments, and repeated this cycle,” he said. TGG Podcast.

“I don’t think the will is there, even though some clubs have a huge amount of money.”

However, Sumpter highlighted one football club that DOES do the right thing by investing in research and trying to understand the fundamentals of the game: Ajax.

He has been working on research projects with the Amsterdam giants for the past few years and has been hugely impressed by their “curiosity-based approach to data science”.

“What has been really good has been looking at player movement rules, which goes back to where we started with the fish,” Sumpter told the TGG Podcast.

“What cues does each player use in their run? How do they open up space? How do they coordinate and move as a group?

“What’s amazing there—and a lot of this is from Vosse de Boode, who leads the research team—is that they’re doing basic research. They do a lot in free kicks, penalties, how you kick the ball and different things in training.

“We want to build a full football model that allows us to do more complex things. We’ve found that in some ways analytics has bypassed some of those basic things and we’re trying to put them in place.

“Ajax is one of the few places where they try to do things at a more fundamental level, understand the fundamentals of the game. The thing is, it costs money.

– There is a really great group of people there. I visited in June and they sat quite close to each other, they had these great training facilities with rooms where cameras record how the players shoot; and they force them to wear glasses to see what they are looking at.

“So how do you take a free kick? They put the glasses on so they can follow their eyeballs to what they’re looking at when they shoot a free kick or look down to take a shot.

“It’s a curiosity-based approach that you have to have. It became that university atmosphere when you went there.”

The soccer university Sumpter mentions is the Adidas Performance Centre, located in Ajax’s Sportpark De Toekomst training center on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

It was opened in April 2011 and shortly after the arrival of this Vosse de Boode. She had just completed her master’s degree in equine biomechanics at Michigan State University’s McPhail Equine Performance Center.

“An old colleague asked if I could come and visit Ajax because they had Adidas sponsoring a sports biomechanics lab,” De Boode recalled in an interview with Professor Sam Robertson. The One Track Mind Podcast last October.

“There were things like 3D biomechanics cameras, infrared cameras, EMG (electromyography), force plates, high-speed cameras and it was a really cool facility. It was on a fully covered football field, but at the time they had no idea what to do with it.

Ajax initially asked De Boode to stay with them for six months, and he “played a few demo cases” and then “decided to go from the lab to the field to see what the trainers were doing”.

“I started observing,” he told Robertson. “I thought, OK, maybe I shouldn’t try to force soccer into the research environment, I should build the research environment around the soccer players without them noticing too much.”

He had discovered what Sumpter had – that you have to start with the basics and build.

“It was a really good lesson for me,” De Boode said. – We started out too complicated. Back to top What information is needed, what can help and how we can provide it.

“I started with things like speed lights and I asked them, ‘Do you want to know who your fastest player is?’ And they said, ‘I already know – and that guy is really slow.’ Turns out the guy is one of the fastest players and then it’s interesting , then you add information that they didn’t have before.

“And then you start asking the real questions – why isn’t he on time with the ball? Because he’s either going too late or not pushing his opponent out of the way or running in the wrong direction.”

At the end of six months, De Boode got a full-time job as a sports researcher at the Amsterdam club and in June 2016 she was promoted to head of sports science and data, making her one of the most powerful women in world football.

He also worked very closely with Erik Ten Hag, who took over as Ajax head coach in 2017, and is now still held in high regard by the Manchester United manager.

“Over the past 11 years, we have built a really nice research environment, the goal of which is still to help with day-to-day decision-making, rather than to research everything possible,” De Boode said. One Track Mind.

“The club has a philosophy of change, subtitled ‘for the future’. I feel they are much more open to trying new things than I hear from my colleagues at other clubs.

“The reason my own department exists at the club is to provide coaches, players and staff with objectively informed insights so they can make better decisions. You’re constantly looking for information that will help them make decisions.”

Ajax’s sports science and data analytics department has 13 full-time employees and close cooperation with Amsterdam’s VU University.

Research projects have been done on players’ reaction time, eye behavior (which Sumpter was referring to when he mentioned the glasses players wear in practice), gait analysis, power-to-speed ratio, goalkeeper diving speed and shot analysis.

Devices used include GPS, speed gates, 3D motion capture, eye tracking devices and high speed cameras. Data from the research is collected, analyzed and converted into reports and visualizations.

The club’s analysts act as a conduit between the coaching staff and De Boode’s staff in the Performance Center’s “soccer university”.

“They are the ones who talk to the coaches and collect all the questions from the team; they bring it to the analytics department,” De Boode said. “That’s where we have our experts and together we try to think how can we find the best solution to this question?”

“If you do it this way, you always have a good process during the season on how to improve your product. The people on the team have to deliver the product back and make sure the relationship with the trainer is really strong.”

The challenge for De Boode and his staff is to keep innovating, he admitted.

“That’s an important thing for people in our position – that we never get comfortable and think, what can we do tomorrow that will make our work even better? If you keep asking this question, the job will change.”