Traditionally, the only data available to the football industry for gaining insight and analytics into a match or training session was the same data we could see on television: goals scored, corners won, ball possession, and so on. Nowadays, thanks to advanced data collection devices, tracking and cameras, real time data with X, Y, Z coordinates registering every relevant action for each player during training sessions and games is abundantly available.

These rich new data sources provide coaches and analysts the opportunity to review and analyse not only statistical information about the player, but also how they behave within specific contexts and circumstances, allowing them to better understand the player’s potential. Too often, however, the analysis of data for performance coaches, trainers, players, and related staff is cumbersome and time-consuming. Information is spread across many different sports performance applications for training, assessments, match statistics, medical and nutrition management, and scouting – and often, across spreadsheets or even paper. Finding and correlating relevant data points to enhance athletes’ performance usually means switching from source to source and sifting through massive amounts of data. This time-consuming work leaves little time to focus on achieving in-depth analyses and providing relevant, actionable insights that can be used to manage teams and players.

Given the real-world impact that a 360-degree view of player performance can provide, it is no surprise that digital transformation in professional football is an emerging trend.

Leveraging Clariba’s act·in | frameworks for enterprise mobile apps  

Clariba has significant experience in creating challenging data analytics solutions, as well as, digital transformation solutions across a range of industries. With the successful implementation of a sports & football analytics solution in Aspire Academy in Qatar, we welcomed the opportunity to deliver a next generation football performance solution for the Italian Football Federation (FIGC).

As part of a strategic innovation initiative, FIGC were seeking to implement a 360-degree quantitative and qualitative sports performance solution to assist members of their organization across different roles, including technical coaches, doctors, scouts, players and many others.

The foundation of this solution is our act·in | frameworks, which brings together connectors, flexi data models and a mobile framework to provide an integrated environment within which to build an end-to-end enterprise mobile application.

As the specification designed jointly with FIGC required football or sports specific visual components, we had to heavily leverage the underlying technology of our framework which is flexible enough to allow a completely bespoke design for each screen yet optimize the use of the code base to allow for optimal maintenance and support.

Developing highly customized applications with the act·in | mobile framework

A key part in achieving a complex enterprise-grade application of this type, was the combination of the Ionic app development platform, an open source UI toolkit for building high-quality mobile and desktop apps using well known web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with the power and efficiency of SAP HANA Services provided as part of the SAP Cloud Platform.

The advantage of using the Ionic app development platform as part of our act·in | mobile framework is not only the great results in terms of UI, but also the fact that it is cross platform. By developing the application once, we can port it to the web, as well as to a mobile native application for iOS and Android, without substantial rework.

By using Ionic, a Javascript-based open source platform, we also had the ability to import modules coded by other developers from other organizations, built mainly for the web, and import them into our application. Specifically for this application we required a number of components that were very personalized and specific to visualize the information as clearly as possible. As an example, we designed our own football field, where we placed the football players in their respective positions with a picture of their faces. We also design personalized visualization graphics to show many different types of statistical data related to players, like their medical information (injuries, sickness, etc) or their rating in scouting evaluations.

The future of enterprise-grade apps

The FDI360 solution developed with FIGC not only represents a complete digital transformation for the daily activities within the different areas of the Federation, but also provides valuable insight about the different teams and their players' performance, allowing their members to take decisions based on actual real-time data that they can manage throughout the platform.

We believe this is only the beginning for enterprise mobile apps that combine analytics and at the same time allow for the redefinition and optimization of entire business processes by integrating to back-end systems and allowing for data entry, approval processes and more. Using our act·in | frameworks, with an ever-growing list of possible capabilities and component, the possibilities are endless. Whether it is digital transformation for football federations, teams and players, or for enterprise customers across any sector, at Clariba, we’re very much on top of our game!