What is the innovative technology that the German national team uses to improve its performance?

“They’re German,” the soccer fan usually says when he sees that the players of the German soccer team never slow down, not even 45 minutes into the second half. But it seems that the progress of the German team is not only based on something that has to do with the genetics of its members (as the fan usually surmises, based on some fable on the board), but also with the latest advances in technology.

“The sports management software we use is very important for the national football team as central platform for collecting and analyzing data and to present the strategic information obtained from that data to our players,” explains Benjamin Glück, assistant coach of the German national team.

Glück grew up in Ohlstadt in Upper Bavaria and studied mathematics and sports in Munich. He then pursued a career as a coach and initially worked for four years as a coach. video analyst in the youth team of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim. He then went on to join the coaching staff of the first team of RB Leipzig and the Bayern Munichuntil March 2023. Since then he has been part of the technical staff of the German national team.

“Glück is responsible for video analysis in the coaching team and mainly deals with self-analysis. And it analyzes the performances of its rivals and those of its players,” Bayern published on its official website when the team managed to win the championship, with Glück as a key part of the coaching staff.

“We use the visualization and video features on the SAP Sports One platform to help us illustrate findings about our opponents and their key players. These characteristics make transmitting tactics and preparing for specific matches much easier and clearer“, the coach reveals now, already in the National Team. SAP is a German software company and in its field it is the one with the highest turnover in the world, not including the North American companies.

The German team also uses analytical information to prepare for scenarios where the encounter leads to instance of penaltiesIn SAP Penalty Insights (is there already a software for penalties?), goalkeepers can study the behavior of potential penalty takers, such as what area of ​​the arch they tend to aim for and even how these preferences change under pressure. On the other hand, it is also the penalty takers who can gain insight into the tactics of their opponents’ goalkeepers.

But this mathematician and coach is not the only one of the group who uses technology in search of excellence. Players use an app on their cell phones to share information about themselves. For example, they fill out questionnaires about how intense they perceived their last training session or match to be, how well they slept, and how they feel overall. Their answers are used to generate an RPE (rating of perceived exertion) value.

By measuring the overall health and well-being of each player in this way, coaches can handle intensity levels depending on the situation of each individual. Both the coaching staff of the German team and the player’s local club monitor this RPE value to protect against overtraining and injury.

In the Brazil World Cup in 2014which Germany won, the country’s national team was already using software from the same company that helped the German team to Evaluate large volumes of data for match analysis.

Today, more than 1,000 users of German football’s parent body – players and the “teams behind the teams” – work with SAP Sports One. “Our successful collaboration with the German national team was a key factor in the decision to turn the prototype we developed for them into a standard product. Clubs and associations in 19 countries are now using this tool,” says Fadi Naoum, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Development.

And that’s not all. On the horizon, the Germans already have artificial intelligence (AI). “We hope that the AI ​​co-pilot will Joule (N of R: it could be compared to ChatGPT or Gemini, but with a more profile for business management), it provides enormous benefits in terms of consolidating match reports. That It would minimize the manual tasks our match analysts need to complete and reduce the time it takes to get answers to a number of key questions we have when preparing for games,” says Martin Vogelbein, member of the Scouting, Match Analysis and Diagnosis team of the German national team.

Typical questions are: What patterns are visible in the opposing team at different phases of the match? What does this tell us about the team’s strengths, weaknesses and options? “We already have a lot of information – particularly qualitative data – before games. With our technological tools we can visualise strategic insights from that information and analyse it with the team. But looking ahead, AI-powered analytics could help us prepare key background information for our players even more easily”, says Vogelbein.