How Viborg are leading the way with immersive performance analysis

In my previous role, as Sunderland’s Head of Data & Analysis, it was my job to establish the fundamentals of an effective data performance strategy, creating actionable insights for the coaches and analysts to benefit from.

Now I’m on the other side, working for Genius Sports as their Director of Partnerships. Football teams and their analysts tend to be highly protective of the tools they’re using to find a winning edge, but Viborg have been open in the way that they are using theirs.

The club operates with a fraction of the budget of other European football teams. Therefore, they have to be both nimble and innovative with the technology they adopt to compete season after season.

A new era of analysis

Viborg were one of the first clubs to adopt our new ProView3D feature, which provides analysts with immersive 3D replays, meaning they can review key plays through a player’s eyes.

Behr said this allows the club to “take the conversation with players to a whole new level. The possibility to see what the player can see – simply elevates the conversations we can have with them”.

He added: “This new feature allows us to end arguments in terms of what the goalkeeper can see during shots as well as passing options from the player perspective.

“With our strikers, we can see exactly how opposition keepers move and how the defenders in front of them cover different parts of the goal.

“Before we sit down and talk with players between fixtures, we can now see the exact re-enactment of what the player saw during the game in key situations that we want to re-evaluate.

“This both helps the players to improve but also gives coaches and analysts a clearer understanding of why the player made that decision in that moment while enabling them to better explain and demonstrate their line of thinking.

“Our players have been very receptive to this, enjoying the new possibilities to study their own clips as well as upcoming opponents in greater depth.”

ProView3D sits within our long-standing Insight and Creator tools, that are used by teams across the Premier League, Ligue 1 and Danish Superliga. Viborg have used our wider suite of performance tools for four years and are increasingly maximising its capabilities before, during and after games.

Behr added: “It provides the video clips our coaching staff needs, completely automated. For opponent analysis, we have a fixed structure on how we approach the week and what phases should be topics on specific match days. The Performance Studio allows us to find the majority of clips we need automatically.”

Innovation in the age of tracking

ProView3D and the Performance Studio are powered by a powerful combination of tracking data and powerful AI.

At its roots, tracking data began as an innovation that could unearth new insights in the field of sports performance. For a long time, this centred on capturing and easily presenting analysts with new data points that would help them break down team and player performance in greater detail.

Recent advancements mean coaches at innovative teams like Viborg no longer have to review a play, but can relive it. Instead of just going back over a play with the normal tactical or broadcast footage, performance teams can now put themselves directly in the boots of the player and immerse themselves in it.

This feature is a quantum leap forward in football analysis and Viborg are leading the revolution.