NEW YORK — An emerging issue in the roiling player privacy debate is that not all athlete tracking data is collected the same way. From wearables to cameras, there’s an endless array of information being generated: internal versus external, personal versus positional, biometrics versus biomechanics.
While the collective bargaining agreements across professional sports leagues are skewing toward a precedent of voluntary participation with regard to wearable technology, MLB’s Statcast, the NFL’s Zebra Technologies and the NBA’s Second Spectrum systems all use some combination of optical, radar or radio tracking. Though the NFL system does require RFID chips to be embedded in a player’s shoulder pads, they are not directly placed on his person, meaning all three methods are largely non-invasive — and all mandatory.
Even the staunch defenders who say athletes have sole ownership of their own wearable data acknowledge the thorny issues that arise with exterior tracking.
“That’s probably the hardest question that we’re going to be tackling going forward,” NFL Players Inc. president Ahmad Nassar said at the SportTechie State of the Industry event. “One of the dividing lines — but I don’t think it will be the dividing line — is what goes on outside our bodies, or the athlete’s body, versus what is happening inside their body, so heart rate and things that we can’t actually see.
“We can see that they run fast and have technology that measures that, so that’s not necessarily logically that much different than seeing a home run. You might need something from a tech standpoint to tell you how fast that is happening, but you can tell, whereas I cannot tell what Tom Brady’s heartbeat was on the final drive of the Super Bowl.”
Analytically-inclined sports franchises are interested, by default, in gathering as much data as they can. It becomes incumbent on data-collecting vendors to provide solutions without being intrusive. Sportradar product manager Per von Rosen previously worked as ChyronHego’s head of player tracking services, when the company implemented optical tracking solutions for the English Premier League, Bundesliga and Major League Baseball (where its cameras provide half of the Statcast system that also uses a TrackMan radar).
“For me, it was always about gathering as much data as possible that we can use without playing around the integrity of the sport,” von Rosen said. “For baseball, it made a lot of sense to use cameras [and radar]. For football, it was just not possible to do it any other way, but we always looked at it from ‘How can we get the most data possible without disrupting anything?’ That was always the main thing we needed to go into new leagues with.”
At Sportradar, von Rosen is charged with implementing fan engagement products out of the company’s abundance of data partnerships with leagues (both in the U.S. and abroad) that are well structured and clearly delineated. As new data sources become available, however, there always will be questions of what’s permissible. For now, biometric data must be gleaned from wearable tech, but that may not always be the case.
“It’s certainly feasible that, at some point in the future, there’s a technology that doesn’t need to be on the athlete’s skin and it can measure heart rate,” Nassar said. “So what are we going to say then?
“The law is way, way beyond on all this. That is a further complication. There aren’t really strong laws that kind of govern the use of wearables or data in a workplace context yet.”
Former New Orleans Saints wide receiver Marques Colston, who subsequently became a sports tech adviser and investor, noted that there’s a lot more information that teams would be interested in for the construction of a “360-degree picture” of each player.
“Not to make this rabbit hole any deeper, but athletic performance is really a 24/7 ordeal,” Colston said. “If you track the two hours that someone is at practice on the field, that’s really the output, right? There’s a ton that goes into that, whether it’s sleep, recovery, nutrition.”
When the NFL Players Association entered its partnership with Whoop to provide each player his own wrist wearable, the “central bedrock starting point” of the conversation, Nassar said, involved athlete ownership of the data.
“I’m biased, but I think it’s the players’ data,” he said. “It’s the athletes’ data, and he or she owns it, full stop. Now that said, just like health data and health records are each of ours and the law is quite clear on that, but we may share that, and athletes certainly share that information with their employers.”
Much of the data’s utility resides in educated professionals — coaches, sport scientists, trainers, strength-and-conditioning coaches and so on — helping guide athletes to maximize their potential. Training work loads, recovery rates and the like are all valuable pieces of that information that, as governed by most collective bargaining agreements, the athletes retain some control over its distribution.
If and probably when such data is collected from unwitting athletes from external systems, that sense of ownership could be lost. The hope is for collaboration on implementing an agreement in which all sides benefit.
“I do think we have a tendency — and we at the NFLPA are probably guilty of this as well — to focus on the parade of horribles,” Nassar said. “‘Oh man, teams are going to make decisions on who to sign based on data, and that’s bad,’ and ‘Everybody’s going to just be taken advantage of, and this is just another way…for the league and the teams to screw [athletes.]’
“What we should be focused on — and I think we are turning the corner on this — are what opportunities does all of this create.”
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Colston acknowledged that such opportunities ought to exist to fans and broadcasters as well, not just the athletes, teams and leagues.
“In sports we’re in the business of creating access to some extent, right?” Colston said. “All of these leagues are driven by fans and fanbases and supporters, and I think the data on the commercial side offers a lens or an access point into that world that’s a little deeper dive than you traditional fan experience.”
That’s why Sportradar is investing so much in telling these data-minded stories. With last year’s acquisition of Mocap Analytics, the company now has a powerful artificial intelligence engine to scour through the data and identify the relevant nuggets to engage fans.
“Fans these days, they want to know everything about everything. If we would just give out the data that we have, all of the data, they would just eat it up,” von Rosen said.
“What I’ve seen is that fans, when it comes to the tracking data, they are very much interested in their heroes — what are their heroes doing, how are they doing it, so they can get closer to the game and mimic their heroes.”