Armağan Karahanoğlu, an associate professor of Interaction Design at the University of Twente, studies how athletes interact with the data they generate. Her research is mostly on recreational athletes, but her findings on how sports data affects motivation are relevant to what is happening on the pitch at this World Cup.
Sports data can negatively affect athletes
Gathering and analysing data such as real-time position, distances covered, peak velocities, accelerations, and heart rate is essential not only for a team’s success but also for individual players’ performance and growth. However, it can have negative effects too. In an article that Armağan wrote together with her colleagues Dees Postma, Dennis Reidsma, and Robby van Delden, they show how sports data could diminish athletes’ motivation. Data can also divert attention from bodily signals: chasing data-driven goals can make an athlete neglect their body's limits.
“Athletes and coaches shouldn't make every decision based only on data,” Armağan says. “Sometimes it can be healthier not to check sports data at all as it might be inaccurate; there can be fluctuations, and those fluctuations can make an athlete feel like they are underperforming when they are not.” She thinks that coaches should make decisions together with athletes, clearly communicating how their data is used in training and selection.
Armağan points out another effect of data collection that sometimes gets overlooked. When an athlete hasn’t slept well, that has consequences for their recovery and eventually their performance. This is data a coach can use to make decisions that benefit the whole team. However, that is precisely why athletes might be reluctant to share that data as it could mean they would be benched.
The data athletes can see and the decisions they can’t
Selecting players for a match is one of the most important and recurring decisions a coach makes. It is a decision that impacts the team's success but also individual players’ careers. Performance data is central to those decisions.
“The data is available to the players, but coaches might make decisions without informing the players on what data those decisions were based,” Armağan says. In other words, a player can see the numbers from his GPS vest but doesn’t have a grasp of what those numbers mean for whether he starts the next match.
Can a player say no?
But does an athlete have the right to opt out? Refusing to share performance data may backfire. “It can cost the team useful information, and it can cost the player insights that might help their technique or performance. But if an athlete says no, their decision should be respected,” Armağan says.
The question — who gets to decide what happens to players’ data — is a whole rabbit hole and currently at the heart of Project Red Card. More than 850 current and former professional footballers, from the Premier League to the lower divisions, have joined the claim, asserting control over their data that has allegedly been used by gaming and betting companies without their consent.
Who has a right to players' data?
Players, clubs, governing bodies, and technology companies each hold different rights and responsibilities over how players’ data is collected and used. Contracts typically authorise clubs to collect and analyse it, and data protection law grants players rights over their personal information, including rights of access and, in some circumstances, control over its processing.
Technology companies make that picture even more complicated. As Armağan explains, “Smartwatches and other wearables collect a lot of data. You share your data with the company, and that company uses it to build the next generation of products.” The data, therefore, informs not only coaching decisions but also product development. Still, for the athletes generating the data, the main issue remains, and that is who benefits from their performance data.
