How Blackburn use a portable videowall to enhance training

Towards the end of pre-season training this summer, Rovers started using a portable videowall called CoachCart from SmartCart Technologies.

This 75-inch screen is placed on a cart and can be driven anywhere on the club’s training ground – including on to the middle of the pitch. Training sessions will be filmed by a camera on a drone, with the footage transferred to a laptop and then projected on to the screen – which is unaffected by the glare from the sun.

It means that rather than coaches having to wait until the end of the session for players to watch clips of themselves on a screen in a room, Head Coach Valerien Ismael and his staff can show them what they have done right – or wrong – immediately on the pitch.

“We always use it in the training sessions during the week on big pitch session days, if there’s a particular pattern for that week or the opposition – or something they want to work on,” Blackburn’s Lead Performance Analyst Joe Robinson told TGG.

“We can use the TV on the pitch to focus on games and focus on opposition to give instant feedback to the lads and say ‘right, this is what we’re going to do on the pitch’. Then, especially on matchday minus one, we’ll always have it on the pitch when we’re doing tactical work for the game. So we’ll set up all the training with the drone and what we can do is hook the drone up to the TV and it make a live projection of the drone view, so with the manager on the pitch, he’s seeing everything.”

‘Best feature on it’

Robinson said the screen’s mobility is the key factor for Ismael.

“He finds this the best feature on it. Sometimes you might be on one pitch during one session and on another pitch during another and sometimes we leave it on the side of the pitch, but quite a lot of the time – especially during set-pieces – I would just drive the cart straight on to the pitch.

“Say for a set-piece, for example, on matchday minus one, I can drive to say in-between the halfway line and the 18-yard line. The lads actually don’t need to move from their location. They’re set up and they can see the screen and see the clip and then I can just drive it off again.

“Before we had this cart, we used just a normal TV and had so many issues like the light or the reflection of the grass and you couldn’t really see things. The manager has mentioned this screen is really good in terms of being made for outside so no matter where we are, even if the sun’s beaming through, you can see on it and he likes the fact it’s mobile. The screen size was also a big factor.”

Blackburn are not the first club to use a videowall during training sessions.

As far back as 2017, Bundesliga side Hoffenheim put a huge screen at the side of their training pitch. Head Coach Julian Nagelsmann would regularly control the footage using an iPad and stop sessions to show clips to players. He also introduced a videowall for training when he was at Bayern Munich in 2022.

In 2019, Championship side Bristol City followed suit after manager Lee Johnson had visited Germany and seen how Hoffenheim and other clubs were using screens in their training sessions.

In 2022, Norwich City started using a screen on a buggy, with the club’s Set Piece Coach Alan Russell saying: “What the cart does is bring clarity to everything, because you can get your message across and reinforce it with the footage on the cart.”

SmartCart was founded by TGG Member Gilbert Cowie. The company says that CoachCart is “designed for coaches who need instant. visual feedback on the pitch”.

Robinson says: “As the drill’s going on, I’m clipping things to [analysis system] SportsCode and then the manager can come over and say ‘show me that back’. All I need to do is go on the clip, project is on the screen and then the drone’s still filming as a separate device so then we can do whatever we want – pause and rewind.

“There’s two-screen features on there as well, so if the manager wants to highlight something on the pitch himself he can use that. It’s really good in that sense.”

The club takes all manner of different information from the films of their training sessions.

“It could be anything the manager’s looking for,” Robinson says. “Sometimes it’s individual things, sometimes it’s from a small-sided session or maybe a transition session. He pulls lads out individually and says ‘your position here wasn’t particularly good’ or ‘you could have made this run’ or whatever it might be.

“Same for the goal-kicks, for example. He might be looking at it as if he’s in the middle of the pitch. Have we got the press right, have we got everything else right but what are the back line doing, what are the centre-halfs doing? So he’s coming over and looking at the big picture and he’s more looking at distances, positions and then, because we use the filming the drill, it can show us all of that.”

It is often said that football is a game of fine margins and with Blackburn’s form picking up recently, the use of this technology could be a key factor in their possible chances of promotion back to the Premier League.