Open goal – How SAP technology has taken this small village football team to the big leagues
In addition to SAP’s traditional focus on industry and business, the company’s technology is also being used in other, potentially surprising ways.
TSG Hoffenheim has experienced incredible growth over the past twenty years, rising from the fifth tier of German regional football to the Bundesliga and qualifying for European competitions several times.
Housed in a village of around 3,000 inhabitants located in the industrial heart of western Germany, Hoffenheim is an incredibly unlikely place to ever find a top sports team – but SAP’s technology has helped fuel this spectacular growth.
TSG Hoffenheim
“We have to do things in a different way… we have to find a unique path,” Jan Meyer, CEO of TSG Research Lab, told a media event attended by TechRadar Pro at the TSG Hoffenheim training center.
The team places a heavy emphasis on technology in the role of talent development, using multiple data analytics platforms to identify and nurture young talent that can be trained and resold for a profit.
SAP’s entry into top-flight football began with a partnership with the German men’s national team for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, a tournament memorably won by the team.
This success led to the creation of a specialized SAP division dedicated to sports and entertainment, and the development of SAP Sports One, an all-in-one platform that covers tasks from team management to data analysis, instant messaging and video highlights.
TSG Hoffenheim has a number of unique tools and services that can feed data into Sports One for their own use, including Footballnaut, a mini training zone that measures how quickly players can react to passes. Shaped like a (somewhat) enclosed cage, the player must control and pass a ball fired from one of four cannons to a randomly selected zone, increasing his skill level and providing useful data for coaches and managers at the club.
When it comes to mental stimulation, the club offers HELIX, a virtual reality-based space where players can test their reaction time, movement speed and spatial awareness, among other things, with a variety of games and challenges. Data from these events can again be used by TSG Hoffenheim’s management team to identify potential areas for improvement that could be the difference between winning and losing.
SAP Sports One can then combine this data with data from official third-party sources, such as Bundesliga video footage, to be analyzed and mined by SAP Analytics Cloud for essential insights.
We were shown how historical video and sensor data can be used to create a penalty analysis platform, showing the placement, speed and success rate of the team’s players, as well as goalkeepers’ chances gives to predict where their next opponent will place their kicks.
The team can use this wealth of sensor and video data to optimize individual or team training plans to assist with injury prevention, and also use AI for scouting and talent discovery reports, combining the findings of multiple reports over time into a single reference point.
Off the pitch, SAP TSG offers Hoffenheim a host of software platforms and tools that make it one of the most technologically advanced teams not only in the Bundesliga, but in world football as a whole.
By combining SAP ERP, Sales Cloud, Ariba and Commerce Cloud, the club can support a connected, smart experience across the board, whether that’s sending promotions for the club store or ticket sales, optimizing queue times at food and drink stalls, or by offering a mobile app that allows fans to pre-order.
And when it comes to business, a specially optimized SAP Interactive Data Space meeting room (pictured above) provides an ideal way to impress new partners or customers with the way it combines business and sports, with slides or documents displayed on the table of the room are projected. the information that matters, in the presence of the people who need it.
So for a team from a sleepy rural village, it seems TSG Hoffenheim have shown how embracing technology, and analytics in particular, can make a real difference when it comes to sporting success.