The English Premier League (EPL) celebrates its 30th season this year, and much has changed since the league’s inception in 1992. For many long-time fans, the period may well be defined by the influx of money into the sport, with player wages ballooning, transfer records toppling, and broadcasting deals reaching into the billions of pounds.
Some of this wealth has been used to impose major technological enhancements on the league, including the video assistant referee (VAR), goalline technology, and vanishing spray applied to the playing surface by the referee to indicate where set plays should be taken from. Meanwhile, increasingly advanced player tracking systems have given commentators and pundits access to team performance metrics in ever more granular detail.
These changes have improved the accuracy of refereeing decisions and the quality of pundits’ player analysis. But it’s less obvious how training technology and sports science is being used behind the scenes, in and around club training grounds, to improve the quality of the product itself: the football on the pitch.
