The Football Association has been working with
Google Cloud technology to enhance the selection, development, training, and
performance of the high-profile England women’s team.
The partnership has focused particularly on
making football more accessible and inclusive by using data to support The FA’s
“Inspiring Positive Change” strategy. This is intended to transform women’s and
girls’ football by enabling equal access to opportunities, boosting
participation, and supporting sustainable success at the elite level.
Making The Most Of A Narrow Window
There is often an all-too-short window between
England players completing matches for their own football clubs and the start
of summer tournaments such as the World Cup or the European Championships. The
upshot is a squad frequently having only short amounts of time to prepare.
So, to maximize the time available and ensure
players are physically and mentally ready, The FA leans heavily on the power of
data and technology to help. To this end, it partnered with Google Cloud in
2019 to enhance the selection, development, training, and performance of all
the England teams.
Ahead of Euro 2025 and other recent
tournaments, Google Cloud played a key role in providing coaches and
performance staff with access to the data and processing power they needed to
select the best available Lioness squad.
Moneyball, But With Help From The Cloud
A core application in this context was The
FA’s in-house developed Player Performance System (PPS), which runs on Google
Cloud. The PPS measures the training, fitness, and form of players across each
of England’s national teams. The aim is to understand who are at the top of
their game, enabling coaches and their staff to spot patterns in behavior and
performance that a human scout might miss.
The system does so by taking thousands of
hours of video and match statistics from training sessions. It then generates
insights on individual player and team performance and even offers guidance to
coaches and their staff on how they can best enhance it.
The PPS is also a central component of the
Helix management tool, which tracks the activities of over 3,500 male and
female professional footballers. This is the equivalent of more than 22 million
data points collected from competitive games and training sessions. Helix also
includes player profiles, scouting reports, and medical information.
Choosing The Best Female Players
Once the data has been analyzed, integrated
visualization tools provide coaches and their staff with multiple, customized
views of what was previously just disparate data. These views offer them new
and unique insights into player and team performance within minutes.
The result is that coaches are well positioned
to optimize their choice of tactics. This provided the Lionesses with an edge
that took them all the way to win the UEFA Women’s Euro in 2022, the World Cup
final in 2023, and to another UEFA Euro victory in Switzerland last year.
Sponsored by Google
Cloud.
