Large-scale presentation of Fit for Football
The football world makes its enthusiastic acquaintance with the Field Lab

The bustle of interest that there was during the morning of 10 May is a very rare sight in the canteen of PSV’s training complex at De Herdgang in Eindhoven. Leading representatives from UEFA, coaches and their assistants from professional football organisations throughout Europe, business people, representatives from government departments and research institutes; they had all come to witness the impressive Fit for Football presentation. No wonder, really, because they all wanted to find out how players could train better and more healthily.

It’s the morning of the EUFA Cup final in the PSV stadium. At about nine o’clock cars begin to filter from the queues of traffic around Eindhoven into the tree-lined drive to De Herdgang car park. A bus brings people from the stadium to the training complex. In the canteen the guests are welcomed by their hosts from PSV, the Eindhoven municipality, the provincial authorities, TNO and Sports & Technology.

Former PSV and national goalkeeper Hans van Breukelen begins the presentation at the club where they took the initiative some four years ago to introduce technical innovation to improve the training, in the first place, of the youth players. Eindhoven’s mayor Alexander Sakkers draws attention to his ‘brainport’ and sporting city, merged in the Field Lab, which is today receiving the attention of potential buyers and partners.

Hands together
PSV’s sports physiologist, Luc van Agt, and Frans Lefeber, project manager for sport at TNO, then go on to explain why their organisations joined hands some years ago to develop their ingenious training system that had brought so many interested people to De Herdgang.

“We thought: we can improve performance if we have fitter players able to use better technique,” Van Agt says. “We didn’t want to do it in a lab but in real circumstances and went in search of partners who were prepared to work on that with us. We started with the needs of the coaching staff, not the demands of the researchers.”

“So we discussed a number of themes on fitness, injuries and tactics and drew up a list of what we wanted to be able to monitor. We developed it gradually with our partners, with efforts being stepped up in the last year to bring about the first prototype that has been operational since this week.”

Lefeber adds: “Based on the wishes of the PSV coaching staff we developed the Field Lab in association with researchers and builders of infrastructure, software and measuring equipment, and with the support of various government departments. The players are equipped with bibs containing sensors and along the side of the pitch are synchronised cameras and antenna. The system currently measures speed, acceleration and heart rate and reveals on screen remote and in real time what is happening on the pitch. Afterwards all the data can be combined and analysed.”

Open structure
The system being demonstrated today is a start not the end, Lefeber emphasises. “The existing system has an open structure. It measures now what PSV wants it to measure. But there are numerous other conceivable possibilities and we are happy to work with other partners– research institutes, businesses, sports clubs – to look at these possibilities. Part of the secret recipe PSV wants to keep for itself, of course, but the rest of what we have jointly developed can be shared and adjusted to your wishes and needs.”

To whet the appetites of potential partners, the PSV youth team players supervised by Ernest Faber then put Fit for Football through its paces on the artificial turf behind the canteen.