Statistical or performance analysis for football has actually been around for nearly half a century. In the olden days, it would be the manual recording of a play or a player’s performance using a paper and pen. With the current advance technology, the in-depth analysis of the Beautiful Game has developed and plays an extremely important role in the understanding of the game, in particular, preparing for the future game.
Japan’s J.League, undoubtedly the best-organized professional football in Asia, understood the importance of statistical analysis of football as early as 2004 or much earlier. A J.League Data Center (JDC), under the J.League has been established and operated by Data Stadium, Japan’s top provider of real-time scores, statistics and editorial content for sports. It is a data supplier providing detailed match data for all the J.League matches and distributes to clubs and various media outlets.
So what exactly does Data Stadium do for J.League?
The Tokyo-based data supplier company records and stores match data for all league matches, approximately 306 J1 matches, 452 J2 matches and 300 J3 matches a season. The data covers roughly 2,000 events per match based on ball touches. With the “objective performance data” which the team has gathered, it then provides new content not only to media and football fans but also to coaching staff and referees too.
Junpiter Futbol paid a visit to Data Stadium under the exclusive recommendation from J.League Marketing team and was greeted by Data Stadium’s Media Business Division Producer/ Business Administration Division Manager, Mr. Okuda Tetsuya and Baseball Business Division Producer, Mr. Suyama Koji.
A quick tour around the office was conducted for us while the team was actively working on live baseball matches. Fortunately, some of the crews were analyzing some J.League football matches from the day before and we had the opportunity to witness the entire analyzing and even enjoyed some hands-on experience.
Typically, 2 football analyzers are assigned to a football match under the supervision of a supervisor who will be providing his team with an analyzing checklist to ensure all critical or required details are covered. At the end of a analyzed football match, details such as where/how the goal is scored, the creation of the assist leading to the goal, the number of successful/ failed passes, flick-on, through ball, ball trapping, percentage of possessions and more are recorded comprehensively.
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Photo: Data Stadium/ Football LAB
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Every movement and detail in the match is recorded to per second basis. For example, with a click on the player who scored using a mouse, the details of where the offensive movement is first detected in the match can be shown on your computer screen. Amazingly, every single detail or movement is saved with the actual video clip of that particular moment from the analyzed match.
And you think the job of a football analyzer is easy and fun? Each and every football analyzer is carefully trained and picked. Not only he has to love the game, a football analyzer has to go through 80-hours of training in order to understand how the system works. Thereafter, the person has to sit through a test that acquires a passing rate of 70% in order to be qualified.
In Japan, Data Stadium works with Yahoo Japan and was greatly involved in the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 by operating Live Text/Updates. In additional, they also provided contents to more than 20 media companies during the huge event.
Apart from Event Support, Data Stadium also provides services that carry entertaining contents to smart devices of in-stadium fans, main screen of the stadium, and for digital signage. Can anyone still remember that Konami Football All Star’s game card where one side of the card is the footballer’s photo, and the other side is the footballer’s profile and playing statistics? Data Stadium provides those statistics too.
The technology and the services which Data Stadium is capable of, has indeed moved the entire statistical analyzing industry up to a brand new level in Japan. One of the most renowned professional baseball clubs, Yomiuri Giant has it’s own exclusive players’ application where all of their players can check on their own match statistic 30mins after the match has ended. That is where the immediate team or self-reviewing of performance can be done.
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