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Football statistics

Small microchips positioned round footballers
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By Football I mean English football .. US people .. please read 'soccor'.

Every footballer has to wear a few minute micro-chips (like - 1mm in diameter) on their left foot, right foot, knees, elbows and head. The football itself also has one of these chips, which essentially simply beam out precise coordinates.

Computers know exact positioning from signals this hardware spews out to the sideline.

Now imagine the statistics ..

'Owen ran 2.2 miles during that game where Heskey only ran 2.0 miles'.

'You can see from the computer that there is no-way Nistlerooy made any contact with the keeper'

'Beattie managed to out accelerate the player by 22% .. thats why he got to the ball first'.

etc.

Even better ... advanced computer graphics. The computer knows the coordinates of all the players ligaments on the pitch, so after a free kick has been taken .. we can have a computer replay 'Seeing it from the defenders viewpoint', or the keepers viewpoint, or anything like that.

So the commentator can say 'And if we look to see what Beckham would have seen, he spots that [some player] is certainly not in an offside position, and passes through to him'. We can actually see a computer picture of the play happening -- from ANY camera angle .. even if the camera was on the pitch!

In fact this idea can evolve to a load of sports .. but I'm thinking of football in the first instance.

britboy, Mar 10 2004

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       carling opta are the company for football stats ... would give you a link but their website seems to be down currently.
jonthegeologist, Mar 10 2004
  

       Maybe the players should keep these on after the matches, to simplify police investigations.
calum, Mar 10 2004
  

       Nnnoooooooooo! I like football but please, please, pleeaaasssseeeee don't give the ex-heroes, mentioned by Bubba, more material to work with. I'll never understand why they need to talk about it afterwards. I just watched the game, I *saw* with my eyes what happened, I already asked someone what happened in the bits I didn't understand.   

       There is no excuse for anyone to drivel on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on (like this) and on and on about it afterwards. And WHY does this seem to be of interest to most people who have penises? I'll never understand.
squeak, Mar 10 2004
  

       Make that "a penis" for the sake of clarity.
squeak, Mar 10 2004
  

       I've declared my love of statistics elsewhere on this site, but even I have my limits. Using stats to try to make something that is blindingly obvious in some way 'scientific' doesn't work for me.   

       The motion capture for graphics could be quite interesting. I'd be tempted to use visible dots and capturing the motion optically as I've got doubts as the the accuracy of direction finding on radio signals.
st3f, Mar 10 2004
  

       Sounds awful. Fishbone.
DrBob, Mar 11 2004
  

       The only upside to an idea like this is that there would finally be a simple and elegant scheme to determine if a player is offside... That is, if draping every player and the ball with minute 'micro-chips' doesn't in any small way invalidate the elegance of said scheme, which is does... er... not sure where I'm going with this...
fergdeff, Mar 11 2004
  

       "Beattie managed to out accelerate the player by 22% .. thats why he got to the ball first"
  

       If only... If only!
MikeOliver, Mar 24 2005
  

       They were probably headed towards the pie shop at the time, Mike.
DrBob, Mar 24 2005
  

       This really sounds terribly discombobulated. I'm tempted to give you a croissant for giving me a good reason to use the word "discombobulated" twice, but I won't. Fishbone.
disbomber, Apr 06 2005
  
      
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