Lost in the cloud. England turn to Google to give teams a data edge

June 3 – The data revolution has arrived at the English FA who have signed a new partnership with Google Cloud and the creation of a new analytics system that will be accessible to all the English national teams.

Called the Player Profile System (PPS), it will aggregate the huge volume of data the FA currently holds, including video, player GPS and more into a single central location.

Google Cloud will become the official cloud and data analytics partner for the England Teams and St George’s Park, with the data and analytics within PPS being made available to coaches and players in the 28 teams at St George’s Park.

PPS will measure performance, fitness, training and form of players using Google Cloud smart analytics, data management solutions and machine learning capabilities to provide near real-time data analysis.

“We believe technology is a key area of potential competitive advantage for our 28 teams and everything we do at St George’s Park,” said Dave Reddin, The FA’s Head of Team Strategy and Performance.

“We have progressively built a systematic approach to developing winning England teams and through the support of Google Cloud technology we wish to accelerate our ability to translate insight and learning into performance improvements.”

With England’s resurgence in terms performance on the international scene, the machine-learning part of this will hopefully not mean a return to the too often robotic performances that fans had to endure in the past.

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