Vodafone & British and Irish Lions

Vodafone UK approached Sport Science Agency to help develop credible performance benefits for the British and Irish Lions. The key was to highlight and be able to tell the story of Vodafone technology. Sport Science Agency provided a number of options for Vodafone. Ultimately they settled on a concept for developing an IoT based tool that aggregated player performance data from multiple wearables. This became PLAYER.Connect

Working with Vodafone’s internal development team IoT.nxt and marketing agency Fuse, Sport Science Agency developed the concept, project managed the development and implemented it with the Lions.   

CLIENT VIEW

As Lead Partner of the British Lions on their 2021 Tour to South Africa, Vodafone sought to push the boundaries of possibility when bringing the power of Vodafone IoT to an elite sporting environment. We set an ambition to be not just a logo on a jersey, but the connectivity power behind that jersey, driving the Lions players to even greater performance levels.

To turn this from grand ambition into a deliverable concept we worked with the best in the business. The team at The Sport Science Agency navigated us to a world-first product -  a state-of-the-art data collation and monitoring system, connecting multiple wearable devices through Vodafone IOT and available in real-time, anywhere in the world over Vodafone’s 5G network.

From concepting and technology development to embedding themselves into the British Lions training camp, the SSA team brought all their data and elite performance expertise to the fore, whilst using their considerable powers of relationship-building in a high-performance environment to make this project a success.

We are delighted with Vodafone PLAYER.Connect and immensely thankful to our partners at The Sport Science Agency for being by our side throughout this project.

Mark Huckerby, Senior Manager - Sponsorships, Partnerships and Activation, Vodafone UK.

PLAYER.CONNECT EXPLAINED

BACKGROUND

Wearable technology is widely used across sport providing a large volume of data.  With this increased amount of data, analysis can take sport scientists hours after training and matches to review and report on. This time spent on analysis impacts on the ability to make real-time decisions and on the sport scientists’ ability to act on the data.

COVID-19 provided unique challenges for the Lions tour of South Africa, one of those challenges was the likelihood of reduced player and staff numbers due to the travel and quarantine resrestrictions

SOLUTION

Sport Science Agency proposed a solution that would utilise Vodafone’s IoT.nxt technology to aggregate the data from all of the wearables used by the Lions. This included an expanded daily monitoring questionnaire (an online tool that the players use each day to record the quality and quantity of sleep, their mood, health and stiffness, soreness and injury status) which was built into PLAYER.Connect. A member of the SSA team was on site in Jersey and Edinburgh for the first two weeks of the Lions tour working directly with the performance team, then after they travelled to South Africa, supported them remotely. Something that would not have been possible without PLAYER.Connect.

The solution was designed to draw data from Catapult for GPS, Firstbeat for heart rate monitoring, WHOOP for recovery, HITIQ for head impact monitoring and the daily monitoring questionnaire. This was brought together into a set of dashboards that were always available to the sport science, coaching and medical teams. It provided a holistic view of how each player was coping with training, recovery and travel. The dashboards were available on all devices at all times so even members of the team who had not travelled could access the data and provide feedback.

DATA IN SPORT

The volume and importance of data in sport has been increasing rapidly over the last few years. However, with the volume of data increasing, coaches and sport scientists need better tools to analyse and provide insight from that data. PLAYER.Connect is designed to do just that. In the video below, Alex Skelton of Sport Science Agency joins Gabby Logan, Vodafone Head of Innovation Danny Kelly and British & Irish Lions Player Maro Itoje to discuss the importance of data in sport.

OUTCOME

PLAYER.Connect was used every day of the Lions tour to South Africa in 2021. It was not just an important part of the Lions performance support but was also one of the pillars of Vodafone’s sponsorship activation in 2021. PLAYER.Connect was so successful that Vodafone and IoT.nxt have committed to further development with Sport Science Agency. The aim is to take the learnings from the Lions and provide those benefits to teams across sport.