As a coach your aim is to win matches, correct? You want your players to perform their best, don’t you? You need the team to play as if it was one entity, are we talking your language?
Celebrating a goal is an excellent time to check the mental health of a team.1 Immediately after scoring a goal, the player and the team that has scored become the centre of attention of the audience and the media. The actions that football players do in those seconds of joy allow assessing a team’s internal functioning and checking cohesion among the players.
Football is the most popular sport in China, followed by basketball. Chinese fans now represent the biggest number of international fans in many European leagues and clubs. This partly explains why in recent years, President Xi Jinping has expressed his preference for this sport and has drawn up a plan, together with his leaders, for his national team to match the great champions of the world.
Ice baths and cold-water baths have become a much talked about topic lately among athletes as well as non-athletes. The rise of personas such as Wim Hof, better known as “iceman Hof”, who has reached nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, has brought the concept of dipping oneself into a cold body of water, viral, reaching the general public.
Whenever we see a TV program or film about statistics in sport there is nearly always a scene where we are shown a wall of numbers scrolling down the screen, sometimes on a computer monitor, other times as a special effects flow of numbers through the ether around our sporting heroes. We are told how many measurements we can make per second of the players’ heart rate, the velocity of their movement and their gaze direction. Everything is logged and monitored.
Football is a sport with a significant risk of injury.. There are constant sprints, changes of direction, unexpected events and situations involving complex coordination… We also know that there are factors that can increase the probability of suffering an injury. The players’ age, the exposure time to the stimuli of training and competitions or having previously suffered from another injury in the same body region multiply the risks.
Top-level athletes are getting older and older. Technology, materials, nutrition, preparation, injury prevention, financial investment, scientific knowledge, and the excellent level of coaches are some of the factors that have lengthened players’ careers.
This article culminates the three-part series on philosophy and football. In the same way, the two previous articles could seem temporally correlated; this one presents a coexisting perspective with the two subsequent ones. Despite always being influenced by the prevailing view, the so-called Platonic conception of football has had great exponents over a long time, keeping its most romantic essence.
The Camp Nou’s 3D digital Twin model from the IoTwins project has been developed in the supercomputer MareNostrum 4, which is property of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). In addition, adaptations of the pilot project for testing purposes are already underway. During the Granada vs FC Barcelona match on 20 September, Monday, all the experimental trials conducted in the laboratory were taken at the stadium for the first time. This is a tool which will simulate and predict the behaviour of the attendees during a game, improving big facilities management. Besides, it will provide fans with comfort, safety, amongst other advances.
Women’s sport has seen a spectacular growth in the last five years. The teams, thanks to better preparation, have been accumulating tremendous success, and a higher level and spectacularity in their competitions. But this is only part of why they have attracted public interest and growing fan attendance to the matches. Furthermore, with a growing interest in equality and non-discrimination between the sexes, society has been drawn to female competition, identifying sporting values with social values.