Vodafone PLAYER.Connect Takes Centre Stage at Wales Tech Week and Mobile World Congress Qatar
Earlier this year, Sport Science Agency partnered with Vodafone to deliver an interactive Vodafone PLAYER.Connect showcase at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, giving attendees the chance to step inside the world of elite athlete monitoring.
Last week, the experience went global again. Vodafone invited SSA to deliver the activation at two further events on opposite sides of the world: Wales Tech Week in Cardiff and MWC Doha 2025 in Qatar. The audiences were completely different, but the aim remained the same: to demonstrate how technology, data, and meaningful insight can support athlete wellbeing and high performance.
Across both events, the Vodafone PLAYER.Connect stand gave participants the opportunity to complete elements of an elite athlete’s daily monitoring routine. But as always, the impact came not from the tests themselves, but from the context, interpretation, and insight delivered by our sport science teams.
Recreating the Athlete Daily Monitoring Experience
Each event followed a structured participant journey, mirroring how professional teams collect and use data to understand readiness, fatigue, and overall well-being.
Daily Wellness Check-In
Participants completed a shortened version of an athlete’s daily questionnaire, designed to track sleep duration, sleep quality, disturbances, mood, energy levels, health and illness, and general well-being.
This data is fundamental in elite sport: it provides baseline patterns, flags meaningful changes, and helps medical and performance teams manage load and recovery.
For most attendees, the results were eye-opening. Many slept for around seven hours, perfectly functional for everyday life, but below what elite athletes target. Our team explained why sleep drives decision-making, reaction time, recovery, and resilience, and why more is not always better. Regularly sleeping beyond 9.5 hours, for example, can signal mood disturbance and is monitored closely in professional environments.
These conversations helped attendees understand that wellbeing data isn’t collected for curiosity; it informs the way athletes train, recover, and perform.
Physical Readiness Tests
The activation also included two cornerstone tests commonly used across elite sport: grip strength and a countermovement jump (CMJ).
Grip Strength
Using a dynamometer, participants tested hand strength, a simple yet reliable indicator of neuromuscular readiness. The outputs were compared against age and sex-matched norms, along with benchmarks derived from elite rugby players.
The comparison often surprised participants, making the discussion even more engaging. Our team explained how grip-strength trends are used in elite sport to identify fatigue, asymmetries, or possible injury risk.
Countermovement Jump (CMJ)
Using high-speed video analysis, participants completed a CMJ, allowing us to calculate peak power output in watts per kilo. This measure is widely used in high-performance settings to track neuromuscular status and readiness to train.
Participants could immediately compare their score to established norms and professional standards, often highlighting the vast difference between general fitness and elite performance.
Providing Meaningful Context, Not Just Numbers
Across all three events this year, an important pattern emerged: participants don’t simply want to be measured, they want to understand what the data means in context.
This is where SSA’s approach is different. Every test we deliver comes with explanation, comparison, and relevance. We help attendees make sense of patterns, outliers, and what these metrics can indicate in real sporting environments. In addition to gamifying the experience with our bespoke leadership boards, the aim was also to show how everyday data becomes part of a broader wellbeing and performance picture.
Wales Tech Week: High Footfall, High Energy
Wales Tech Week saw one of the busiest days we have ever experienced at an event. With a strong crossover between technology, sport, and innovation, the audience was highly engaged, curious, and often familiar with performance concepts.
Many conversations extended far beyond simple test results, diving into the science behind fatigue, recovery, neuromuscular adaptation, and how teams interpret data trends across a season.
The result was an activation that felt less like a technology demonstration and more like a high-performance workshop, interactive, educational, and genuinely valuable.
MWC Qatar: A Global Audience and New Conversations
The Doha leg of Mobile World Congress offered a different type of engagement. Footfall was more varied and the audience included visitors from sport, healthcare, business, and government.
Interest centred particularly on the notification system within Vodafone PLAYER.Connect, including how the platform alerts staff when an athlete’s data deviates from their baseline or when wellness entries indicate potential risk.
This feature resonated strongly with attendees working in medical and operational roles, who immediately recognised how real-time alerts can facilitate early decision-making and duty-of-care responsibilities.
With a larger stand footprint and greater opportunity for deeper conversations, MWC Doha highlighted how Vodafone PLAYER.Connect can extend beyond sport into broader wellbeing and workforce-monitoring contexts.
Why These Tests Matter in Elite Performance
The Barcelona case study introduced the concept of Vodafone PLAYER.Connect as a holistic performance and wellbeing system. The Cardiff and Doha events allowed us to go further, showing attendees not just the what, but the why behind athlete monitoring.
Wellbeing Questionnaires:
Provide early indicators of stress, illness, fatigue, or poor recovery
Identify trends before they become performance issues
Allow staff to tailor training, recovery, and support
Grip Strength:
Tracks neuromuscular readiness
Helps identify asymmetries or fatigue
Supports injury-prevention strategies
Countermovement Jump:
One of the most widely validated indicators of training load and fatigue
Allows teams to adjust sessions to optimise performance and reduce risk
These tests aren’t isolated metrics; they are part of a bigger conversation about athlete welfare. And that’s exactly the experience we brought to both events: the science, the context, and the real-world application.
Scaling a High-Performance Story
Across Barcelona, Cardiff, and Doha, one thing has been consistent: participants connect deeply with the combination of data, technology, and expert insight.
For Vodafone, it continues to be a valuable way to communicate the purpose and impact of their work in elite sport, and for us, it’s another valuable opportunity to bring performance science to life in a way that educates, engages, and inspires.