A New Integration: Lion City Sailors Add Visual Context to Physical Data with WIMU & Sportscode

Scouting an opponent's strengths and weaknesses using football video analysis software

For Lion City Sailors First Team Performance Analyst Nigel Goh, a key area of his role is opposition analysis. In the pre-match report of the opposition before the Zhejiang fixture, which was won 2-0, he identified a major weakness of the opponent.

“We found that Zhejiang, they like to hold the ball a lot, a lot of possession, but when they are without the ball they are very poor at defending,” said Goh. “We learned from pulling statistics and video from Wyscout, that they concede the most goals in their league from counter attacks. Counter attack isn’t the only way we can play, but it is definitely one of our strengths - attacking transitions. So we sat deep and compact in defence, then when we won the ball, we sprinted into our counter attack.”

For this counter attacking strategy to be successful, the players need to be able to meet the physical demands required to sprint at a high-intensity within the transitions in play. There needs to be synergy between performance analysis and human performance departments for a game model to be implemented most efficiently - the needs for physical readiness of players should not be siloed off from the tactical side of team preparations.

The value of combining video analysis with human performance data

While Nigel is focused on performance analysis, Head of Data Analysis He Qixiang uses scientific approaches via WIMU Pro to ensure that the Lion City Sailors players are physically prepared for both their training workloads and the match day itself.

WIMU Pro combines wearable sports tracking devices with integrated software, providing the human performance data and scientific metrics to accurately measure how physically capable the Lion City Sailors players are to execute the game plan required of them.

“We use WIMU Pro as our football GPS tracker during our training sessions and matches,” said Qixiang. “This is done across all our teams - from Under 15 through to the First Team. Every team has the same workflow, so we can use WIMU Pro across the club, which we do by measuring metrics to see how hard our players are working, but also to plan our sessions, see whether we hit our targets and then review to see why we did or did not hit those targets and then be able to improve in future sessions.

We started using WIMU in early 2022, at first in the Academy. At that time, we were using a different football GPS tracker for the First Team, but then we found that WIMU had a nice integrated workflow with WIMU Cloud, which really bridged the gap between the Academy and the First Team, so we decided to extend its use across the First Team as well.”

• WIMU Cloud stores all of the physical data from the WIMU Pro wearable devices. Physical data stored in WIMU Cloud can easily be brought into Sportscode for video analysis. 

How integrating athlete monitoring with football video analysis software provides a new level of visualization

Lion City Sailors FC are one of the first clubs in the world to combine WIMU Pro human performance data together with Sportscode football video analysis capabilities into one integrated solution within their workflow.

WIMU wearable football GPS trackers generate up to 20,000 data points per second. Lion City combines this physical data with a Sportscode output report that provides a unique visual context to the data. 

“We have the Sportscode dashboard, which I can filter with different players to see their stats and all the data is from WIMU that Qixiang will upload after the game, so that's how we work together,” said Goh. “For different players, we have their screens available in the Sportscode output where we can access video for each player.

It shows stats that we really look out for like high speed running, high speed effort, sprints, acceleration, total sprints, sprints maximum, across different players. Attacking transition, like I said, is a big strength of our club, the counterattack. So in the attacking transition, we can see here if the player is sprinting, but also with the defensive transition, are sprinting to get the ball back? And did the sprints lead to any chances? 

That's what the coach wants, that's what the technical team wants. So, from a dashboard standpoint, we can immediately see who is making those runs and who is not making those runs.”

Empowering Physical Readiness with Contextual Data

From a sports science perspective, the ability to combine physical data and performance analysis allows the Lion City staff to really hone in on whether their players are exerting themselves correctly on the pitch and then using that data to make adjustments to training plans, if necessary. 

“Before this integration with WIMU and Sportscode, we had one set of data, the physical data, but we had no kind of context on how these actions happen,” said Qixiang. “So this integration is really great from a technical standpoint. It's perfect that you can see which phase of the game the players are sprinting or not sprinting, it's really great for reviewing.

But also from the physical standpoint, we can also better understand if there are certain needs to push the players. For example, if our wingers need to be involved in a lot of counter attacks where they are involved with offensive transition sprints, then we know that a player is sometimes not capable of doing something and that’s where we can identify areas to push for more in training.”