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Video: Prozone - transforming the face of the beautiful game
If Leeds United secure a place in the Premier League this season they might just have a homegrown success story to thank for it.
Grant Woodward meets the team behind Prozone, the system that has transformed the face of the beautiful game.
He may have gone down in the history books as the Wally with the Brolly who made a complete horlicks of England's Euro 2008 qualifying campaign, but believe it or not Steve McLaren actually helped change football forever.
It was while he was cutting his teeth as assistant manager at Derby County that McLaren became one of the first bosses to embrace video analysis.
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Then, when he landed a job at Manchester United as Alex Ferguson's right-hand man, he took it with him as an integral part of his coaching, a move quickly copied by managers up and down the land.
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The piece of kit in question was Prozone. Dreamed up by Leeds businessmen Ram Mylvaganam and Neil Ramsay, it would go on to revolutionise football as we know it.
Not that such lofty ambitions were in the pair's minds when they pitched up at Derby's Pride Park in the late 1990s. They had developed vibrating chairs designed to stimulate players' muscles before training and the club had agreed to give them a go.
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It got manager Jim Smith thinking that while they were sitting there it would be a golden opportunity to show his team some video analysis of their recent performances.
Mylvaganam and Ramsay duly came up with the idea for Prozone and today the system is used by over 100 clubs, leagues and federations around the world, helping the likes of Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger to take coaching to a new level.
Leeds United and Liverpool among the most recent clubs to get on board. All but six of the 20 Premier League teams use the technology, which was also harnessed by England's Rugby World Cup winning team of 2003.
But despite its global reach, the nerve centre of the entire Prozone operation is a humble redbrick office on a Leeds business park nestled between Elland Road and the White Rose shopping centre.
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Here, amid framed memorabilia signed by footballing legends including Pele, Bobby Charlton and Maradona, a giant screen beams back live feeds from cameras situated high up in the stands of sporting arenas up and down the country.
It shows analysts that Middlesbrough have a couple of cameras out of action, while at Nottingham Forest's City Ground a spider scurrying across a web obscures a corner of one of its eight screens.
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Maintenance of these cameras is vital as the entire system hinges on them providing the footage needed to make Prozone work.
While standard television coverage only focuses on about an eighth of the pitch, Prozone is able to cover every single blade of grass thanks to up to a dozen cameras dotted around a stadium.
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They provide a full 360-degree view of the field of play, capturing every step, touch, pass, header and tackle a player makes. The images are then fed into a database every one-tenth of a second to provide an interactive aerial replay of each game.
It takes 19 hours to map a single 90-minute match, resulting in a sort of animated chalkboard that provides managers with a bird's eye view of the game as it unfolded, along with a dizzying array of data on everything from passes to shots, player movements, distances run and tackles made. It means there's no hiding place for players who aren't pulling their weight.
When Cristiano Ronaldo joined Manchester United, Prozone convinced Alex Ferguson that the Portuguese star was taking too many touches. Told to keep it simple he promptly started scoring and never stopped.
And at Aston Villa, goalkeeper David James embarrassed winger David Ginola by trotting up and down his goal line to ensure the system recorded him covering more distance than the enigmatic Frenchman.
It sparked the hairdryer treatment from then manager John Gregory who accused him of being unfit, leading a defiant Ginola to whip off his shirt to reveal his toned torso when he netted his next goal.
"The data that's returned from a single game is like an encyclopedia," says Prozone marketing manager Simon Edgar. "It can give you absolutely everything. I don't think there's anyone out there who uses every single bit of it because there's just not enough time in the day.
"Different managers and coaches use different elements of it to enhance their understanding of their team's performance. It's the perfect merger of art and science."
The 25-strong team in Leeds is mainly populated by sports scientists like Paul Boanas, who has been with Prozone since its early days and is now its UK account manager.
He spent three years as an analyst under Steve McLaren at Middlesbrough and says the system has progressed with the help of advancing technology and input from the managers themselves.
"The beauty of Prozone is that you don't have to be on the field to have a coaching session," he says.
"When I started at Middlesbrough we did it with a small TV and two video recorders. Now players are getting the stats and clips they need to go through delivered on an iPhone for them."
The footage enables players to see every move they made during a match, helping to improve their positional play, hone tactics and generally sharpen their game. A reciprocal agreement between clubs allows them to mug up on the opposition, while it's also increasingly used by scouts looking to recruit new players.
Clubs pay varying amounts for the service depending on the package they opt for, ranging from around 25,000 to somewhere in the region of 100,000 a season.
It adds up to a healthy annual turnover of 3.5m for Prozone, now owned by London-based investment firm Sisu Capital, who also run Coventry City.
Asked if they think the system has robbed the beautiful game of its mystery and unpredictability, Paul and Simon are unapologetic.
"I think football is such a fluid, instinctive game that the unknown will always happen by nature of the skill and quality of the players," says Simon.
"What we're able to do is improve the quality of team and player performance through helping managers and coaches to structure training so that it derives the best out of those players. I think it's enhancing the game if anything."
Leeds United fans will certainly be hoping Prozone weaves its magic at Elland Road this season.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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