Sunday afternoon will live long in the national memory. When Liam Scales headed on to Troy Parrott for the winner against Hungary, elation spread quickly. Parrott, of course, was doing his own celebrating.
As the Irish squad swarmed around him, Parrott ripped off his jersey, revealing his GPS vest in the image that defined the day. A moment defined by millimetres with Irish developed technology at the heart of it.
The vest worn by Parrott, and the rest of the Irish side, was developed by STATSports in Newry. Earlier this year the company was acquired by Sony, having long developed a laundry list of top names in global sports as clients.
It is far from the only Irish success story in this space. Output Sports – like Liam Scales whose flick-on set up Parrott – is a product of UCD’s development. The spin-out has developed technology to track athlete performance down to infinitesimally small detail.
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Kitman Labs, from Dublin, and Orreco, from Galway, both work extensively in athlete health and biology. Like Output and STATSports, their clients cover essentially any major league or competition you can think of in sport today.
Limerick has in turn become a hub of sorts for sports tech in Ireland, with Stats Perform (the owner of Opta) having a base there. Between the IDA attracting multinationals and Enterprise Ireland supporting indigenous businesses, sports tech has become a tremendously successful sector in Ireland.
Irish business grandee Gary McGann on working with Michael Smurfit, the fall of Anglo Irish and the current state of the Irish economy
This week on Inside Business host Ciarán Hancock is joined in studio by Gary McGann, a grandee of Irish business whose many roles included being chief executive of drinks group Gilbeys, Aer Lingus and packaging group Smurfit. Born and raised in Dublin, Gary actually began his career in the civil service, with the Comptroller & Auditor General. He studied at night to become an accountant and later moved into the private sector, rising up the ranks and moving around to eventually become CEO of Smurfit in 2002.He has also had a busy career as a non-executive director, including roles with Anglo Irish Bank at the time of its collapse, and with bakery goods group Arytza, at a challenging time for that business. We covered a lot of ground in this interview. You’ll hear Gary talk about his childhood, his time in school and a couple of false starts in university. We also take a deep dive into his business careers, the highs and the lows. And he gives Ciarán his perspective on the current state of the Irish economy, and what we could be doing better. Along with some tips for young business leaders starting out in their careers. Produced by John Casey with JJ Vernon on sound.
The sheer breadth of options out there, however, may make one wonder what the actual need is for all of this tech. At the top level, the margins between victory and defeat are comically small. Parrott’s feather-like contact on the winner against Hungary illustrated that as well as any other moment.
That has created an arms race in sport – a rather profitable one for Irish industry – as teams seek to move from intuition to more evidence-based decision-making. Crucially, as the tech infrastructure all of these platforms use has evolved, it has become easier to mix and match the tools a team or athlete uses.
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That means that the extraordinary high volume of data created can be distilled. For an extreme example, a single season of Formula One generates about 27.4 billion data points.
Football isn’t quite at that level but it is still data-heavy. Heimir Hallgrímsson would have more success convincing one his dental patients to go without anaesthetic than getting an assistant to pore through all of the information they get manually.
All of these tools enable teams and athletes to maintain consistency across a long season while also working out how and when to either peak or rest.
The prevalence of sports tech has, however, had the unfortunate side effect of creating armies of LinkedIn lunatics spouting all kinds of guff about high performance.
You know the type, lots of slogans and a desperately formulaic way of writing in an effort to gobble up whatever online karma they can find. Aside from being irritating, they distract from the entire point of all the tools being developed to improve performance among athletes and teams.
Every single piece of data gathered, no matter what it tracks, is only as good as how much the person that actually performs can understand it. Translation is vital towards being able to take any action based on data.
The best example of this is xG, expected goals, a statistic that gets maligned largely because of people not understanding the point of it. The critics treat it as some nonsense crystal ball that doesn’t get how football works. Many of its more vocal advocates miss the trick on communication when it comes to explaining its purpose.
There’s a tendency to speak using the vernacular of a subset of techies rather than the majority of people who watch sports. At its heart, xG tells a team that creating one type of shot is more likely to result in a goal than from another.
That’s really it. It’s about providing evidence to support action.
Intuition in sport is essentially our minds trying to make sense of the examples we’ve seen over history of viewing it and trying to weigh those actions accordingly. Sportstech companies that generate data such as xG are simply providing an evidence-based approach to that.
In turn they are not only making teams and athletes perform better, they’re allowing them to expand what they do. By taking the heavy lifting away, and indeed enhancing the output, the millimetres between defeat and victory become easier to traverse.
Having a sports-mad nation has certainly aided the sportstech sector in Ireland. When coaches down to the lowest level are willing to try anything that makes them better, there’s a huge test bed on the doorstep of Irish businesses.
All of that plays a role, even if it can’t always be defined, in moments like Sunday in Budapest. The result was a nation united in joy as a young lad whipped his shirt off while wearing an Irish-developed piece of kit to celebrate.
