The Adidas miCoach System is one of the secrets behind Germany's World Cup success

Football for the future: the Adidas miCoach System

Adidas miCoach has been one of those innovations in sports whose effect and assistance on the pitch has influenced football to quite an extent.

With the 2014 FIFA World Cup nearing its end, we look at the German national team who are one of the two finalists and how they were successful in consistently performing throughout the tournament with the help of the Adidas miCoach system.

What is the Adidas miCoach system?

The miCoach system is just an advanced physiological monitoring system which includes a small device that a player has to wear so as to measure his speed, distance, acceleration, heart rate and power in real-time, with results being made available live on an Ipad.

The miCoach system features a wide string of products that could be used by teams and individual players to enhance performance with products ranging from their Smart Run watch to their Smart Ball which allows the player to record his shot frame by frame.

How did it help Germany?

Joachim Löw’s men were one of the tournament’s most consistent teams, leading the score chart with 17 goals, with almost 14 shots per game and a pass success rate of almost 86 percent. With a partnership with American company EXOS, the adidas micCoach elite Team System allowed the Germans to assess every side of their game, ensuring that the players are ready to perform at football’s grandest stage.

Speaking to Adidas’s official website, Director of the Performance Innovation Team at EXO, Darcy Norman said, “The miCoach elite team system has been an integral part of our preparation and training for the 2014 World Cup. It’s used in almost every training session to monitor each player’s performance and record their stats.”

He continued, “With this valuable information, we can reflect back on the team’s performance, tweak each player’s skills, and plan future workouts to ensure we’re improving performance and focusing our efforts in the right areas. There are a variety of metrics the miCoach elite team system is capable of tracking, and each metric can shape the coaching and training decision-making process in a different way.”

Interpreting a player’s efficiency

Norman explained, “One of the key metrics we track is power (i.e. how much power a player produces relative to their physiologic response to power). The more power a player generates during an exercise without burning too much energy, the more efficient and fit they are. If they generate a low power number with a large metabolic response, we know they’re fatiguing and that we need to keep a close eye on them.”

Putting the Adidas miCoach system into use.

Deducing the distance traveled by players on the pitch

”We can also look at total distance to get a quick snapshot of how much a player moves during a game or workout in comparison to his teammates. From there, we know that not all distance is created equally. Some distance is covered at walking speed, some at sprint speed, some during a drill, and some during the transition from one drill to the next. All of these factors need to be taken into consideration when determining how to interpret the data,” he continued.

However, since analysing distance covered between players playing in different positions wouldn’t really make sense, the movements are relative to the position held by the respective player.

“Just as there are many ways to accumulate distance, each position and how the player plays their position during drills is different,” explains Norman. “For example, a defensive midfielder may make the effort or acceleration to cover a big distance at speed but may only go 5-10 meters and then have to stop and change direction. In contrast, an outside defender – based on how they play and the team’s tactics – may cover a greater distance at speed. Both movements are important and relative to the position.”

“Keeping this in mind, those stats need to be looked at in the context of the game and how the coach wants each player to perform. For a defensive midfielder, we may look at distance in relation to the number of accelerations they made, while we may look at the distance covered, distance at high intensity, and the number of sprints for an outside defender,” he added.

How is the data collected put into use?

“Once we’ve established what we want to track, we can set goals. These goals focus on both particular drills and training sessions to plan for the weeks of training in preparation for a single match and in relation to the tournament as a whole,” he said.

“We look at our drill history to determine which drills fit the particular day technically, tactically, and physically. Once we have a game plan, we execute it, and then look at the numbers during and after training to see if we’re accomplishing our goals. From there, it’s all about fine-tuning for the next day’s training session. While the data is a key component of training smart, it’s what the coaches and players do with that data that ultimately determines the outcome,” Norman concludes.

With a range of devices to track match statistics, and a series of football training regimes, miCoach is certainly one of the most complete training programmes out there.