Spanish soccer club Valencia CF has announced a partnership with MEDIAPRO, creators of a production system that helps teams to analyze their players’ performances. The product, AutomaticTV, is geared towards coaches at all levels of the game, professional, semi professional and amateur clubs.
MEDIAPRO’s system has seen seven full high definition (HD) cameras placed strategically around four soccer fields at the Paterna Sports Complex, Valencia’s training ground, for analysis of the first team and other levels, including underage teams. The system also offers the capability of editing videos for subsequent post-analysis.
This technology enables the coaching staff to follow real-time ebb and flow of a game, or training session, and provides them with all the information they need for live tactical analysis.
The overall idea behind the technology was to maximize the technical and tactical preparation of soccer teams and to date, the system has been installed in 42 La Liga Santander and La Liga 1/2/3 venues.
In an interview, Mauro Margenat, Business Unit Manager at MEDIAPRO detailed the background of the deal: “The technical staff from Valencia CF came to us about a year ago to see our product, AutomaticTV.”
“They loved it, according to Pablo Pérez, an analyst for the first team, during practice they normally had two, three and even four groups of players doing different things in different areas of the field. He told us that they had one operator that had to climb onto a lifting crane high in the sky to try to record each practice session with two or even three cameras at the same time.”
The meeting got MEDIAPRO thinking about how they could upgrade their current system.
According to Margenat: “That made us think that there was a need in the market for managing multi-output productions with one person, so we upgraded our AutomaticTV Director product. Valencia ordered one system, we installed the fixed cameras and they tested it over the course of a few months, and decided that they wanted three more systems just before summer.”
The effect that the updated system had was clear.
“Now that same operator who was once in a crane, has one single system which can produce two, three, four or even more outputs, controlled by a single joystick and all this is done while sitting comfortably in his office.”
According to Valencia’s Infrastructure Manager, Christian Schneider, in an interview, such systems like MEDIAPRO are becoming increasingly important in professional soccer. “It is a key element to correcting errors and refining training tactics” as it offers “nearly immediate availability” training he said.