What happens before the pass
“There are skills in football that players can only learn through playing matches,” Soham Nanwani, a student in Interaction Technology and an active member of the student football association v.v. Drienerlo, says. One of those skills is field awareness. Top-level players scan the field more often than the average player to anticipate what might happen in the next few seconds. This helps them decide their next action, with or without the ball.
Dennis Reidsma, an associate professor in Interaction Technology and Computer Science, gives as an example the Norwegian elite football player Erling Haaland: “Haaland is famous for his scanning skills: he scans his surroundings every two to three seconds. This is critical because the team has to move in a coordinated way, and in order for this to happen, each player needs to be aware of where everybody is on the field.”
Difficult to train
For his master’s research project, Nanwani decided to study whether it was possible to train players’ field awareness outside of matches. He spoke with football coaches and found out that field awareness wasn't something they specifically focused on during training sessions. “It is one of those skills players develop through match experience,” he says.
Match situations, involving 22 players making split-second decisions, are never the same twice, and that makes it hard to recreate them in drills during training sessions. Reidsma says: “But with VR we can recreate any situation systematically. Besides, it allows us to track where players are looking, how quickly, and how often.”
More than physical training
Nanwani is developing a VR prototype in which footballers immerse themselves in real match scenarios. A VR headset tracks the player's eye and head movements, and sensors on the torso and ankles track body rotation and feet placement. According to Nanwani, eye and body movement are intrinsically linked: as a player's scanning improves, they will naturally move their body into more optimal positions, while awareness of their body rotation can improve their scanning.
An important advantage of this type of VR training is that players can do it at any time without physical effort. Since professional athletes train multiple times a week in addition to playing matches, it is important that additional VR training sessions don't tire them out.
Potential applications
Nanwani is planning to test his prototype with football players in different clubs. “We need players who are really willing to improve their field awareness and won't treat the VR training as some game.” Once they collect the data, they will analyse it and develop a metric to evaluate the player’s performance.
How the VR training could be used in practice depends on the results of prototype testing and on players’ and coaches’ feedback. Reidsma: “They may be interested in training for very specific scenarios or in a detailed assessment of their performance. Or perhaps they need information on what situations they need to practise more.”
And what better way to validate the system than by testing it on an elite player? Asked who they would most like to test the prototype on, Nanwani and Reidsma laugh: “It would be fantastic to have Haaland try it out. Then we can collect data on what elite-level scanning behaviour looks like in practice.”
