You can never accuse the German Football League (DFL) of resting on its laurels with regards to technological innovation, so it is of little surprise that the league’s Digital Sports arm is developing technology for soccer fans ahead of the forthcoming 5G revolution.
Last month, German soccer's top flight became the first league in the world to roll out a fan engagement tool that looked to capitalise on the next generation 5G network. A non-descript Bundesliga draw between Wolfsburg and Hoffenheim was enlivened by a demonstration of the new technology.
At this point, the DFL’s 5G experiments amount to an augmented reality (AR) mobile platform called ARISE that is able to use the coordinates of the pitch and provide live match data based on what is being picked up by the device’s camera. Users can click on the screen to bring up the selected player’s live statistics or even how fast they are running. Other information available includes distance covered, shooting figures, passing statistics and more historical numbers from across the season. As the platform develops, the DFL is aiming to collect data from 1,600 'match events' per fixture to power the app.
Delivery is made possible via the partnership the DFL struck with Vodafone earlier this year with the prototype platform created in partnership with Immersiv, a French company that specialises in the sports fan experience with augmented reality.
Andreas Heyden, DFL Group’s executive vice president of digital innovation, says the league has been working on creating the best possible broadcast experience, but with this innovation it is shifting some of that focus into the live experience by bringing TV elements into the live arena.
“This is the first time where we ask: ‘how can we extend the experience in the stadium?’,” he says.
Herein lies the power of the DFL owning its entire value chain – all the data and video content produced at a Bundesliga game is available for the league to utilise however it sees fit. The company responsible for the collection of the DFL’s match data is Sportec Solutions (STS), which together with partner ChyronHego collects up to 3.6 million positional data points which, combined with the visual tracking camera, allows users to select and follow a player at any given point of a match.
For the 5G demo, the DFL sent those data feeds to the Vodafone mobile edge cloud in 5G to transmit it back to a phone, also via 5G for visualisation in the ARISE platform. That means, with minimal latency, SportsPro was able to point a phone at the field, click on a player onscreen and get additional information in real time.
“25 times per second we measure where is the ball, the players or the referee. This data we then aggregate into the app,” Heyden adds.
“We are working on innovative KPIs like expected goals, but this is something that we can’t provide right now as in real time it takes more computing power – it is something that we may add later. For the users, we had discussions with the ultras, with the fans in the hospitality suites and with families. We’re going to do trials with real users and ask about the experience then do some differently or some more.”
The 5G-powered platform is able to show users how fast a player is running in real time (pic: DFL/Getty Images/Alexander Koerner)
The platform is going to evolve over the next couple of years, with Vodafone Germany’s director of innovation, Michael Jakob Reinartz, even suggesting the possibility of delivery via a hologram, contact lenses or glasses. Even in its current format it made for an interesting viewing experience, but also raised questions of when and how such a piece of technology is best used by fans.
“There are always situations in a game where there are pauses, someone is coming into the game or going out of the game, there is a critical decision to be made and in these types of situations we want to give fans the possibility to gain knowledge and better experience the football game,” Heyden explains.
“[This is designed for] younger, tech orientated fans. I sit in the family block with two kids and my kids always ask me questions that I can’t answer. So, I’m not that young anymore, but I’m technically orientated. So I would say [the platform is aimed at] the younger target group, at that middle age, fathers and people who love technology and [are] open to trying something.
“There is a whole generation coming up who learned football from FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer – they know their data. This data they’re used to having in real time and we want to satisfy that demand with apps like this.”
But does the DFL want fans coming to Bundesliga games just to watch the whole thing through their phone?
“It’s all about enhancement of the experience,” says Heyden. “It’s an offer that you are not obliged to take. If you feel that you are missing information, we are giving it to you. If you want to take your phone out and go on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok or whatever young kids are doing these days, people will do it and we can’t do anything to prevent it.
“I think turning down WiFi or reducing bandwidth to interact on the internet doesn’t make sense. If you hinder the fan to have fun and the fan decides how he or she wants to have fun then you’re missing out.”
The DFL believe breaks in play provide perfect opportunties for inquisitive fans to dive deeper into the action
As for Vodafone, the company is not a sponsor of the DFL and the 5G demo was a one-off activation. The telecommunications firm identified a use case it wanted to test, approached the DFL, and the league were keen to showcase how the next generation network could be utilised in a sports venue.
As many as five Bundesliga clubs showed interest in hosting the 5G event, but the Volkswagen Arena won out as it met the required specifications. Wolfsburg’s stadium was already connected to Vodafone’s fibre network and the company had previously held discussions with the club about innovation projects.
At this stage, the technology requires a mobile edge cloud component, with antennas set up in the stadium, in this case just under the roof at the Volkswagen Arena. Installed in July 2019, the Huawei active antenna has beamforming capabilities at a frequency of 3.6 Ghz with 40 Mhz bandwidth. The system is an open and available 5G commercial network that can be used by any Vodafone customer with 5G tariff and 5G device.
The main advantage of 5G is the capacity compared to 4G; the network’s best use cases will be in high data demand hot spots such as airports, train stations and sports venues. As general data demands increase with the amount consumed per customer rising year-on-year, the capacity of 5G will also increase over its lifetime. Right now the network offers a data rate between 100 Mbit/s up to 1 Gbit/s. In the future the maximum can be increased up to 10 Gbit/s.
For Vodafone, a live sports venue presented an opportunity to test 5G capabilities (pic: DFL/Getty Images/Alexander Koerner)
“5G is the optimal method for bringing high speed to a lot of people,” explains Reinartz. “The other thing is having a mobile edge cloud system here on premises in order to calculate all the data that we are receiving from the DFL.
“In contrast to previous solutions at 4G, 3G and below, the data was going to a hosting centre – somewhere in Germany or somewhere else on the internet. With 5G we are bringing computing power to the site where it is needed or where something is happening.
“There is a rack with a mobile edge cloud component that has been installed on site here in the stadium which leads to single-digit millisecond round trip times for people who are actually using the app experience on site.”
Whilst the technology is impressive, what is the end game for Vodafone here?
“Whenever we judge innovation there is always what we call a ‘connect to cash’,” adds Reinartz. “So we don’t do innovation for the sake of doing innovation, we want to have a thoroughly designed business model behind it and that’s how we measure it.”
For Heyden, as a spokesman for a rights holder, innovation has to come before commercialisation. Currently the DFL is investing in various places to generate new products, but in the future, the league is going to be moving towards industry partnerships for its technology offerings.
“Like all innovations we start with the user and try to satisfy them, then try to find the business model afterwards,” he says. “We are building, as a league, a technology ecosystem upon from which partners can build their products. This technology could get licensed to the clubs and put into their stadium app or it could be in our central Bundesliga app – we don’t know yet. For us it’s now about learning.”
You can never accuse the German Football League (DFL) of resting on its laurels with regards to technological innovation, so it is of little surprise that the league’s Digital Sports arm is developing technology for soccer fans ahead of the forthcoming 5G revolution.
Last month, German soccer's top flight became the first league in the world to roll out a fan engagement tool that looked to capitalise on the next generation 5G network. A non-descript Bundesliga draw between Wolfsburg and Hoffenheim was enlivened by a demonstration of the new technology.
At this point, the DFL’s 5G experiments amount to an augmented reality (AR) mobile platform called ARISE that is able to use the coordinates of the pitch and provide live match data based on what is being picked up by the device’s camera. Users can click on the screen to bring up the selected player’s live statistics or even how fast they are running. Other information available includes distance covered, shooting figures, passing statistics and more historical numbers from across the season. As the platform develops, the DFL is aiming to collect data from 1,600 'match events' per fixture to power the app.
Delivery is made possible via the partnership the DFL struck with Vodafone earlier this year with the prototype platform created in partnership with Immersiv, a French company that specialises in the sports fan experience with augmented reality.
Andreas Heyden, DFL Group’s executive vice president of digital innovation, says the league has been working on creating the best possible broadcast experience, but with this innovation it is shifting some of that focus into the live experience by bringing TV elements into the live arena.
“This is the first time where we ask: ‘how can we extend the experience in the stadium?’,” he says.
Herein lies the power of the DFL owning its entire value chain – all the data and video content produced at a Bundesliga game is available for the league to utilise however it sees fit. The company responsible for the collection of the DFL’s match data is Sportec Solutions (STS), which together with partner ChyronHego collects up to 3.6 million positional data points which, combined with the visual tracking camera, allows users to select and follow a player at any given point of a match.
For the 5G demo, the DFL sent those data feeds to the Vodafone mobile edge cloud in 5G to transmit it back to a phone, also via 5G for visualisation in the ARISE platform. That means, with minimal latency, SportsPro was able to point a phone at the field, click on a player onscreen and get additional information in real time.
“25 times per second we measure where is the ball, the players or the referee. This data we then aggregate into the app,” Heyden adds.
“We are working on innovative KPIs like expected goals, but this is something that we can’t provide right now as in real time it takes more computing power – it is something that we may add later. For the users, we had discussions with the ultras, with the fans in the hospitality suites and with families. We’re going to do trials with real users and ask about the experience then do some differently or some more.”
The platform is going to evolve over the next couple of years, with Vodafone Germany’s director of innovation, Michael Jakob Reinartz, even suggesting the possibility of delivery via a hologram, contact lenses or glasses. Even in its current format it made for an interesting viewing experience, but also raised questions of when and how such a piece of technology is best used by fans.
“There are always situations in a game where there are pauses, someone is coming into the game or going out of the game, there is a critical decision to be made and in these types of situations we want to give fans the possibility to gain knowledge and better experience the football game,” Heyden explains.
“[This is designed for] younger, tech orientated fans. I sit in the family block with two kids and my kids always ask me questions that I can’t answer. So, I’m not that young anymore, but I’m technically orientated. So I would say [the platform is aimed at] the younger target group, at that middle age, fathers and people who love technology and [are] open to trying something.
“There is a whole generation coming up who learned football from FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer – they know their data. This data they’re used to having in real time and we want to satisfy that demand with apps like this.”
But does the DFL want fans coming to Bundesliga games just to watch the whole thing through their phone?
“It’s all about enhancement of the experience,” says Heyden. “It’s an offer that you are not obliged to take. If you feel that you are missing information, we are giving it to you. If you want to take your phone out and go on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok or whatever young kids are doing these days, people will do it and we can’t do anything to prevent it.
“I think turning down WiFi or reducing bandwidth to interact on the internet doesn’t make sense. If you hinder the fan to have fun and the fan decides how he or she wants to have fun then you’re missing out.”
As for Vodafone’s, the company is not a sponsor of the DFL and the 5G demo was a one-off activation. The telecommunications firm identified a use case it wanted to test, approached the DFL, and the league were keen to showcase how the next generation network could be utilised in a sports venue.
As many as five Bundesliga clubs showed interest in hosting the 5G event, but the Volkswagen Arena won out as it met the required specifications. Wolfsburg’s stadium was already connected to Vodafone’s fibre network and the company had previously held discussions with the club about innovation projects.
At this stage, the technology requires a mobile edge cloud component, with antennas set up in the stadium, in this case just under the roof at the Volkswagen Arena. Installed in July 2019, the Huawei active antenna has beamforming capabilities at a frequency of 3.6 Ghz with 40 Mhz bandwidth. The system is an open and available 5G commercial network that can be used by any Vodafone customer with 5G tariff and 5G device.
The main advantage of 5G is the capacity compared to 4G; the network’s best use cases will be in high data demand hot spots such as airports, train stations and sports venues. As general data demands increase with the amount consumed per customer rising year-on-year, the capacity of 5G will also increase over its lifetime. Right now the network offers a data rate between 100 Mbit/s up to 1 Gbit/s. In the future the maximum can be increased up to 10 Gbit/s.
“5G is the optimal method for bringing high speed to a lot of people,” explains Reinartz. “The other thing is having a mobile edge cloud system here on premises in order to calculate all the data that we are receiving from the DFL.
“In contrast to previous solutions at 4G, 3G and below, the data was going to a hosting centre – somewhere in Germany or somewhere else on the internet. With 5G we are bringing computing power to the site where it is needed or where something is happening.
“There is a rack with a mobile edge cloud component that has been installed on site here in the stadium which leads to single-digit millisecond round trip times that people who are using the app are actually experiencing on site.”
Whilst the technology is impressive, what is the end game for Vodafone here?
“Whenever we judge innovation there is always what we call a ‘connect to cash’,” adds Reinartz. “So we don’t do innovation for the sake of doing innovation, we want to have a thoroughly designed business model behind it and that’s how we measure it.”
For Heyden, as a spokesman for a rights holder, innovation has to come before commercialisation. Currently the DFL is investing in various places to generate new products, but in the future, the league is going to be moving towards industry partnerships for its technology offerings.
“Like all innovations we start with the user and try to satisfy them, then try to find the business model afterwards,” he says. “We are building, as a league, a technology ecosystem upon from which partners can build their products. This technology could get licensed to the clubs and put into their stadium app or it could be in our central Bundesliga app – we don’t know yet. For us it’s now about learning.”
