Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  And he’s bang on. Nothing makes any sense. The rooms are all over the place, and it’s ridiculous that the physios can’t keep an eye on the players doing their rehab work while they are treating others. In the Premier League and most of the Championship, medical facilities are always set up with that in mind.

  In the gym room I find a guy sitting in a little office. He’s not a physio: he’s there to show people how to use the equipment. When I knock on his door he’s surfing YouTube because I’m the only player around.

  “Some place, this,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he replies. “It would be good if somebody actually used it.”

  Believe me, I don’t want to bash the FA over the head; I’ve come to realise that if we want to move ourselves further down the road as a footballing nation then we should all pitch in. But, my God, they really don’t help themselves sometimes.

  There is no doubt that the FA has put in place a building with great facilities. I keep hearing that the pitches are no good, but in fairness pitches can take a few years of regular use to get up to par. The top pitch is an exact replica of the hallowed Wembley turf – same dimensions, same grass, same curvature, same goals and nets, same everything. There is even a little stadium around it for the watching media and, no doubt, “friends of Uefa and Sepp”. It was never going to be perfect but at least now we have a facility that is the equal of anything in the world. Whether that is a good thing is up for debate.

  Something that sticks in my mind is an interview with members of the great West Indian cricket sides of the 1970s and 80s, in particular something that the legendary Viv Richards said. When he was growing up, he and his friends didn’t have any proper equipment so they played cricket on the beach with baby coconuts and the thick part of a palm leaf as a bat. As a result they became extremely adept at judging the bounce of the oval coconuts, and very good at hitting them because the stalk of the palm leaf was only two or three inches wide. Their reactions were extraordinary and stayed with them right through their cricket careers. But once that generation of West Indian cricketers became successful in test matches and one-day internationals, the money began to arrive, and with it brand-new indoor facilities and state-of-the-art equipment for the next generation. The result? The standard dipped dramatically. It isn’t enough to simply pass success off as “a golden generation”, because there is always a reason for peaks and troughs.

  My good friend Phil Taylor, the legendary darts player and winner of 15 world titles, told me that he practises on a board half the size of a regular dart board to improve his accuracy. Once when I played against him he even showed me a training exercise where he covers the board with a sheet of paper so he can’t see any of the numbers and carries on throwing. His first two throws in that game were 140 and he was pissed off not to hit 180 – it was ridiculous. As a side note, when we played for real he was only allowed to use one dart to my three and he duly lost thanks to a memorable double 14. Thanks, everybody. The other 15 games, however, didn’t go quite so well for me.

  Back to football. When Arsène Wenger came to the UK he stopped all the Arsenal youth teams from playing on full-sized pitches and reduced the number of players, before asking them to play across the pitch instead. That meant that each kid had more touches of the ball at a higher tempo and improved twice as fast. And what about the wealth of ridiculously talented Brazilian players who grow up playing Futsal, a five-a-side game with a slightly heavier ball that naturally stays on the ground, so that the kids have more touches with their feet while moving it more quickly? At St George’s Park we apparently now have Futsal, but how many years did it take us to catch on? It is proven – we know it works. My own silly little example is that when my mates in the street were playing with a full-sized ball and barely able to kick it over 10 feet, I would practise against my garage with a tennis ball for hours. And I made it. OK, I’m not Lionel Messi, but I made it nonetheless. For me, less can definitely mean more.

  Whatever the future of the England team, something needs to change today to give them any chance of winning tomorrow; this is the approach the FA has chosen, so we may as well get behind it. In terms of investment in facilities, grassroots and coaching the FA is probably doing all it can, which is not to say that there aren’t ideas out there that will come along and improve football further. This area of our game is seeing a huge amount of investment at the top level. As a result, some very exciting things are beginning to emerge that, if successful, will change the landscape of football far beyond the borders of our country.

  * * *

  A good pal of mine works in partnership with one of the biggest clubs in the world and is one of those guys who becomes more excited as he tells you about the things that he’s working on. I’ve known him for a long time and each time I talk to him he waxes lyrical about the next greatest thing to come into football, and how it is going to change the game as we know it. I met up with him at a charity night at a London hotel: he was as enthusiastic about his work as ever, and particularly about a device that he and his team had been working on with a technology company on the continent. I took the opportunity to ask him a bit about it.

  “We have been interested for a long time in how to get information to players on the pitch,” he told me. “You know what it’s like: how many times has a manager shouted at you and you simply can’t hear them? Our players complain sometimes that they have missed a key instruction because of the noise levels, and sometimes it costs them a goal or a chance. So what if you could have the information passed to you directly from the touchline? For me, the manager shouldn’t even be on the touchline – he should be up in the stand with a team of people monitoring the game with every stat available to him, similar to American Football. He should be getting information from his team minute by minute and making his decisions with the information available rather than gut instinct. From up in the stand you can see everything; from the touchline all you see is one level – it’s hard to see the spaces and the opportunities.

  “One of the biggest problems we heard about from the manager of the club was that it was hard to get messages to the players because of the noise, so we developed and trialled something similar to Google Glass, which is a piece of eyewear that shows the user information in the corner of their eye on what is happening around them. It took a long time to develop, and one of the problems, ridiculously enough, was getting the font the right size so that the players’ ball control wasn’t compromised. Eventually we came up with a scrolling system rather than a small list of information; the code we use is receptive to eye movement and the glasses can be turned off with a double wink, so if a player is taking a penalty and wants to concentrate for a second he just has to double wink and the information will stop scrolling. This is the first step on the ladder of technology that works by simply having to think about a task. We’re still not there yet, but we believe that we are very close to developing a system that can operate through a contact lens via a separate receiver somewhere else on the body.”

  “How big is the bloody receiver?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s the thing. It’s still too big but it’s only a matter of time before we get it down to a flexible, stick-on, Post-it-sized receiver that we strap around your chest.”

  “It sounds amazing, mate,” I said. “What sort of information are you so keen to get to the players?”

  “This is where it gets really exciting. We are opening up our stats department to our entire fanbase. The point of stats is to have as many as possible and the only way to do that is to have as many people contributing as possible. So if you have a stadium of 60,000 people, then why not get them contributing as well? We ran schemes at local tech companies and universities asking for fans of our club to contribute and the results were pretty unbelievable.

  “One of our fans developed a pretty cool app that turns your phone into a heat-seeking camera. That means that he can sit in his corner of the stadium, hold his phone up and the app will show the heat o
f the players as they run around in real time. And that means that if we sync his app to the laptops of our staff members, who each monitor their individual player, they will be able to check if the player that they are responsible for is overheating, say, or not working hard enough. Once we build up the data over a few months we’ll be able to see a pattern that may help us to see if a player is coming down with the flu, especially if he is hotter than he was the week before but the temperature on the day is lower.

  “And that’s just one app: we have people who have developed directional apps that show where players are running or passing, and not just for the home team either. If we can monitor what a particular player on the away team is doing then we can get that information to our players on the pitch. We can spot a game plan within the first minute, instead of waiting 10 minutes to see how the game pans out, then we can send a message to our players’ lenses saying, ‘This player is trying to hit or run into this area continually,’ or, ‘There is space in this area because the fullback isn’t tracking runners.’ And we can send this message out in any language, at any moment. Once we have these apps developed we will stop sending scouts to watch the opposition, we’ll simply send 10 ordinary people to every away ground and capture the data from the game.

  “The other advantage is that we can monitor the heart rates of the players, their sweat levels and how much liquid they are losing and how quickly their muscles use energy, all from the apps that have been developed. We can then tell a player to come to the side to get a drink way before his brain tells him he needs one; as you know, if you feel thirsty you’re already dehydrated and a player who is dehydrated by only 1 per cent will see his performance reduced by 10 per cent. If you have 11 players who are all dehydrated by 1 per cent, your team ends up carrying a player. That’s when it starts to make a big difference. We used to do this test by taking blood before training, but now we can do it in real time. That’s the whole idea behind this – spotting a situation or a problem instantly, or even before it’s happened, finding the solution and instructing the player as quickly as possible. That’s the future. It will be science and technology that make the difference for the next superpower of football.”

  “It sounds phenomenal,” I said. “Very clever, to the point that it must sail close to the edge where ethics are concerned.”

  “It’s about winning, isn’t it?” he said.

  “That’s what Lance Armstrong used to say,” I pointed out.

  “No, come on. This isn’t the same as banned drugs – this is getting information to players in the digital age. What’s the difference between this and players passing notes on to the pitch?” he asked.

  “Good point,” I said. “I don’t know, but it just feels like it’s underhand in some way.”

  “That’s because you’ve never seen this before. It’s brand new, and we’re disrupting a game that, barring a few changes to the rules, has been played in the same way for 150 years. So anything new is going to look suspicious, but this is cutting edge and we’ll sell it on the basis that it prevents injury by warning players that they are tired and dehydrated.”

  “So you do think it’s cheating?” I joked.

  “No, absolutely not,” he said. “Every product has to be sold on something and it may as well be that, because we have to take into account the commercial potential, too. If we tie up with a major sports manufacturer when we’re ready, this will become a huge commercial business. Forget all those heart rate monitors that people wear – when they go for a jog or to the gym they’ll put their password in and pull down their entire training programme and even their personal bests.”

  “I agree, mate, it could be mega. It’s like something the military use that then comes into the mainstream, like sat nav. So what’s the plan now? When will it be ready?”

  “Well, I think we’re a couple of years away, then we’ll have to do the required testing, similar to the years it took with goal line technology. But you may not see it: this is the type of product that a big tech firm will buy from us and shelve until the market is ready for it. So the question will be, can we afford to hang on to it or will the club ultimately decide to sell it on?”

  Personally, I think it’s genius and I’ve no doubt that it could change the game. Whether the game is ready for it, and I include the players in that, is another question. I’m inclined to agree with my friend: the likelihood of us seeing this in use in football is slim, not because it isn’t a brilliant concept and product but because it is so valuable to other industries.

  The future of this technology is to send players messages, pictures and video that enable them to see their own game in real time and adjust accordingly. As my friend explained, “A good example of that will be if we concede a penalty kick or find ourselves involved in a penalty shoot-out. We can actually send historical kicks taken by the penalty-taker that our keeper is standing in front of straight into our keeper’s field of vision so that he can best determine which way to dive. If he stands on the goal line while the team are getting ready to take the kick, it will actually appear as if that player is taking an old penalty against him, so he’ll be able to see body shape, the way he runs up and, ultimately where he is most likely to put the ball.”

  “But you’re still going to need players who can cope with that level of information as well as play football at the same time,” I said.

  “Absolutely right,” said my mate. “We’re about 20 steps ahead of you. The players that we now take in at youth team level undergo a huge amount of testing themselves. The latest is bone testing, which means that we are able to determine what their physical attributes will be 10 or even 20 years down the line. That technology has been around for years, but nobody has ever thought to apply it to football players before. We can now find a really young kid who would otherwise have been lost to basketball, rugby or athletics and bring him into our youth team even if he can’t kick a ball, because we know that years down the line he’ll be 6ft 5in with a chance of becoming our number one goalkeeper and a valuable asset.”

  I have heard about this approach before, and to me, at least, it is interesting that my friend’s club is not the only one thinking this way. I once wrote a column on the future of goalkeeping in which I quoted another friend of mine at a top-four club who said they didn’t even consider goalkeepers now unless they knew they were going to be at least 6ft 2in. Crucially, they didn’t care whether or not their recruits showed any aptitude as a goalkeeper because they felt they’d be able to develop them into the finished article.

  “And these days bone testing has evolved so that we can now tell so much more physiologically about a player,” continued my friend. “We can determine the size of a player’s glute and hamstring muscles and the flexibility in their ligaments years down the line, which means we can work out roughly how fast they are going to be. It isn’t an exact science like bone testing but it’s crucial information for us. If we add this information to the neural technology that we now have, we can build up a really good picture of a kid’s reaction times, his speed, his will to win and, of course, his physical stature. You watch: not too long from now there will be periodic testing on kids in schools by big football clubs. And the clubs won’t be paying off parents any more to secure the services of their son: they’ll be paying off the schools.”

  I remain very good friends with one of my old club doctors, who sits on the boards of a number of research institutions that are at the forefront of mental health and understanding neural behaviour.

  “You can only be so fit,” he told me. “You’ll get the odd freakishly fit person, of course, but essentially all the players at the top level are going to be as fit as each other, and that means that more and more clubs are going to turn to sports science and specialised areas such as neural behaviour to gain an advantage.

  “In the last few years there has been a tremendous leap forward in understanding the brain. In America the Obama administration has just announced a multi-million-doll
ar plan to map it. It is being sold as a chance to help people with neural disorders such as Parkinson’s disease but it’s more likely to have a military agenda to it.

  “A big thing for us is neural behaviour. Specifically, we want to study the parts of the brain that deal with reaction times and decision-making. And we can do this now, thanks mainly to MRI scans that allow us to monitor brain activity in volunteers who are conscious and responding to a set of instructions. For example, we can give the subject a red ball and a blue ball and ask them to squeeze one or the other as soon as we tell them which. The quicker the part of the brain lights up that deals with reaction times, the faster that player is likely to be at making the right decision on the pitch. Providing he squeezes the right-coloured ball, of course. But even if he squeezes the wrong ball first, we can measure the time between the wrong decision and the right decision when he then squeezes the correct ball. That is also a reaction time that is important to us, because everyone is going to make a mistake from time to time.”

  And this is going on right now. Big clubs are beginning to screen their young recruits to help determine the potential of every player. If my friend is right and large clubs begin to subsidise schools in order to screen their best athletic talent, who will ultimately benefit? This could be the answer for the England team; this could be the chance to take a giant leap forward and possibly even steal a march on our rivals. But I’ll bet you one thing: the FA don’t even know about it.

  THE PASTOR V THE PHYSICIST

  Years ago, I played for a club that had a pastor as its designated sports psychologist. He was a nice guy but we used to have some fantastic ding-dongs. I’d load up on YouTube clips of Richard Dawkins and come in on a match day armed with ammunition to throw at him. “Do you really think that the earth is 5,000 years old?” I’d say, or: “Are we honestly saying that fossils were put there by the devil? You’re an intelligent man: intelligent men admit when they are wrong.” He gave as good as he got and took it all in good spirits. Years before I met him I was a serious atheist … until some bright spark told me that by saying you’re an atheist you are almost admitting that there is something up there to rebel against. The truth is that nobody knows what’s out there or where to look. Are we saying that there is no God? Well, we can’t prove that one way or the other.