Real Madrid and Barcelona prepare for the El Clasico with data software. Next Saturday, April 10, one of the most important soccer matches in Spain will take place: El Clásico between Real Madrid and Barcelona. A match of great importance, since winning it will allow both clubs to fight for the league title. For this reason, the coaching staff of both teams has been working for days with a LaLiga analysis app to prepare matches and measure performance.
Real Madrid and Barcelona prepare for the El Clasico with data software
LaLiga, as the body responsible for soccer competition in Spain, has been using different technologies for some time to improve the sport, such as augmented reality and drones, or a film camera for broadcasts. On this occasion, the organization has made its Mediacoach tool available to members of Zinedine Zidane and Ronald Koeman’s coaching staff, offering everything from reports to real-time data and videos in the cloud.
In soccer, the smallest detail can decide the outcome. In that sense, the Mediacoach platform saves time when collecting information and offers teams access to the most detailed data of each match, such as the position of a specific player, distance covered, speed or ball movements. Since its creation in the 2009/2010 season, this tool has become the coaches’ best ally.
Studying the rival
Ahead of the El Clásico, the coaching staff will download a pre-match report from the app with a total of 24 pages with the most important statistics of the rival in the last four matches. Thanks to this report, analysts and coaches will be able to study the performance metrics and, based on the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, establish the strategy that will allow them to obtain the three points in this match.
The coaching staff thus gain access to evolutionary graphics, playing style characteristics, individual statistics of the most in-form players, and more data on their opponents. Once the game plan has been decided, the opposing team continues to be analyzed during training sessions.
To do this, coaches and their technical staff use the Mediacoach Desktop and Mediacoach Vision tools, with which they perform an exhaustive video analysis of all the technical-tactical actions to simulate and anticipate what may happen in El Clásico.
Also, both platforms allow access to any game situation, such as studying how the opponent presses the ball out, discovering how to break the high pressure or the strategies that will be found in set pieces, see how they elaborate the attacking actions and which are the key players.
The coaching staffs also have access to the ‘accumulated reports’ which, as if it were a chessboard on a tablet, allow them to rehearse the different moves depending on the players they expect to start for the opposing team.
With this, they can study the situations that may occur on the field depending on the opposing player on the pitch, such as the system that the coach will use or what their first moves will be.
Live statistics
Mediacoach also provides a wide variety of real-time data to both coaching staff once the referee signals the start of the match. At that moment, Zidane and Koeman’s coaching staff will be able to rely on Mediacoach Live and Mediacoach Mobile, two applications for cell phones and tablets that allow them to monitor all the metrics of the match, both individual and collective, up to 25 times per second.
These tools offer an infinite number of real-time parameters that can be observed through the dashboards, such as heat maps with or without the ball, the distance covered at over 24 km/h for each player, the percentage of successes in duels, or the number of passes under pressure, among others.
These applications also launch a series of alerts when a player reaches a predefined value. For example, it is possible to alert the physical trainer when a given player exceeds his average distance run at high intensity to inform the coach so that he can make the best decision in this regard.
On the other hand, Mediacoach also offers the video signal from the tactical camera to the team staff. With it, they can perform a real-time analysis by viewing a wide shot to follow the game live, analyze the tactical positioning of the two blocks in each phase of the game (such as width or tilting), or replay a play.
Videos and more data
Once the match is over, the LaLiga application continues to provide more data. For example, in just a few minutes the coaches of both teams can access the post-match reports, consisting of 56 pages with graphs, rankings, and statistics that summarize in detail everything that happened on the pitch.
In addition to this analysis, Mediacoach Desktop and Mediacoach Vision offer thousands of video clips to view all the technical and tactical actions of the match: the turnovers that have ended in a goal opportunity, the passes that have overcome a specific number of opponents, the defensive actions that have neutralized a rival attack, the total distance covered by each player at different intensities, the total number of high-impact offensive and defensive actions, or the attacking plays that have ended in a goal.
These two tools can also be used to review the match plan and discover areas for improvement for the following matchdays. It should be noted that, in turn, all the data collected in El Clásico will be used to create the pre-match report for the next match played by both teams to prepare it in the best conditions.
