It was a triumphant declaration: “LaLiga is coming back,” said Marcos Pelegrin, country managing director of the Spanish football league in South Africa, running one of the organisation’s network of international offices. But it wasn’t just for the sake of soccer that he was so upbeat.
“It’s really good news not only because football is going be back, but because it’s a sign of normality, of society getting a little bit out of this crisis,” he said in a briefing to African media last week.
LaLiga restarted its season last Thursday, setting the scene for 39 days of non-stop football, with matches every day until 19 July. But in-depth preparations have been under way for some time, in six phases, which would provide a useful template for South Africa’s Premier Soccer League. The phases moved from preparation for training, training alone, training in groups, and collective training, to the start of LaLiga, and the conclusion of the season.
“LaLiga has been working on securing, first of all, the health of our players and the staff of the clubs and also the return of the competition because there there’s a lot at stake, it’s a big industry, with a revenue stream that represents 1.37% of Spanish GDP, employs nearly 200,000 people in the country, and pays 4-billion Euros in taxes every year.”
It is no surprise, then, that LaLiga invested heavily in technology to help with preparations, especially from the second phase onward.
“Everyone received individual training sessions for every day, the night before, on their computers and tablets, with detailed instructions of the timing that they could go to the facilities. In stage three every club had a roster in which players were separated into different groups that were able to train together. They got different times to go to different places to train, and different exercises to perform.”
Thanks to strict social distancing and sanitisation protocols, not a single players had been infected by COVID-19 b the time LaLiga restarted – despite 2,500 tests. Matches are being held behind closed doors, stadiums are divided into security zones, movement is regulated, kits are changed at half-time, and non-players all wear masks and gloves.
Pelegrin acknowledges that this is not ideal for fans or the media, but this is where technology lends a hand.
“We’ve been working on several technological solutions in order to make the product more appealing,” he said.
In a statement last week, the Spanish league announced that matches in its two main divisions, LaLiga Santander and LaLiga SmartBank matches, “will look and sound different”. The main innovations are virtualisation of stands and fan audio, along with new camera positions. Both are being implemented by Mediapro, LaLiga’s official production partner.
“We have made these broadcasting changes so fans can enjoy LaLiga,” said LaLiga President Javier Tebas. “We work with global partners to offer a great viewer experience. We are in an exceptional situation, but for us it has been important to be able to adapt and offer a compelling, cutting-edge broadcast to our fans.”
Visit the next page to read about how LaLiga has adapted with virtualised technology.
Just what does this mean? LaLiga offered the following breakdown:
Virtualised stands, new camera angles
“The biggest change for the return of the competition is the virtualised broadcasting that LaLiga will offer to international broadcast partners, which will allow matches to be seen in an attractive way that closely resembles how they looked and sounded before the competition was postponed.
“For these broadcasts, the stands will be virtualised and will always offer to-scale images of seated fans wearing the colours of the home club. To develop this digital experience, LaLiga collaborated with Norwegian company VIZRT, which also works with other European leagues.
“In moments when the game is stopped, this image of fans can be transformed into a canvas that matches the colour of the home team and will carry institutional messages among other offerings.
“This innovative broadcast will also feature virtual sound, which has been obtained through collaboration with EA SPORTS FIFA, in a project called Sounds of the Stands. Through this, the audio library of LaLiga official sponsor EA, which was recorded in real stadiums, has been used and has been digitally adapted so that it can be implemented in real time during the match. It will be adapted to the flow of the game as certain situations occur, such as a goal or a foul, creating what is known as Atmospheric Audio.
“Some cameras will shift their location to positions where they would previously have affected the sightline of fans in the stands. Among other examples, the aerial camera will modify its flight path to offer new shots, the bench camera will be moved to the opposite stand, while robotic cameras will be used in the tunnel for reasons of health safety.”
Visit the next page to read about how Bundesliga has been able to restart amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bundesliga brings new insights
Meanwhile, to the north, the German Bundesliga last month became the first major football league to restart, but with similar restrictions in place. There, too, technology is playing a major role. The league partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide fans watching in more than 200 countries with a new experience.
They debuted Bundesliga Match Facts, providing two new sets of statistics for commentators and fans to gain a deeper understanding of the state of play: Average Positions, and Expected Goals (xGoals), providing insights into intended playing style based on real-time analysis of data. The data is generated from live video feeds, streamed into the AWS cloud, analysed by a machine learning tool, and then instantly fed back to broadcasters as live statistics.
According to the IoT Newsdesk, published by the IoT M2M Council, the statistics help audiences better understand things like the strategy involved in decision-making on the pitch and the probability of a goal for each shot.
“Fans will be able to see the positioning of a team’s players on the pitch and gain insight into the team’s intended playing style. Average Positions provides insights based on analysis performed on data captured from tracking a player’s average location on the field, which is then displayed in real time.
“This Bundesliga Match Fact allows viewers to identify the current momentum on the field and understand tactical changes. The statistic will help pinpoint if a team is setting up in an attacking or defending style, pressing up the middle, or using the wings. By displaying the average location and position of each player in real time, Average Positions helps fans understand tactical changes as the game progresses.”
The system uses a system called Amazon SageMaker, a machine learning platform which, coincidentally, is also used by South African banks to identify fraudulent transactions as they happen.
IoT Newsdesk reported: “To calculate the precision of xGoals, machine-learning models were trained by analysing 40,000 historical shots on goal in addition to an array of features derived from positional data, including distance to goal, angle to goal, player speed, number of defenders in line of shot and goalkeeper coverage.”
According to Andy Isherwood, vice president of AWS, the company “is helping the Bundesliga enhance the broadcast viewing experience by delivering deeper insights into the game that didn’t previously exist”.
“Bundesliga is able to provide real-time statistics to predict future plays and outcomes. These two new statistics are just the beginning of what we’ll be able to deliver for football fans as we look forward to unlocking new ways to better educate, engage and entertain viewers around the world.”
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee