Swedish company aiming to develop new training methods for the women's game
Photon Sports has developed a new technology to enhance research of sprints, movement and jumps in football, and are working with the Swedish FA and Gothenburg Uni on what it all means...
Swedish company Photon Sports has launched the first major study on women footballers, with the aim of enhancing explosiveness through efficient testing and training.
Partnering with a group of sports scientists at Gothenburg University and the Swedish FA, Photon Sports has launched a four-year study with the aim of finding clues on how to develop new test and training methods adapted for elite women’s players, with the long-term aim of also being able to reduce the risk of serious injuries which are currently dominating the women’s game.
A group of five experts, led by Project Leader Dan Fransson, who is also a PhD Sport Scientist at the University as well as Head of Performance for Allsvenskan side IF Elborg, and made up by Pontus Ekblom, Performance Manager for the Sweden women’s national team and Albin Oldberg, a colleague of Fransson’s at IF Elfsborg, as well as Farzad Yousefian and Bruno Tavares from the University of Beira Interior in Portugal, have set out to research key phases of actions such as quick movement and sprinting.
“I have been in football research for eight or nine years now,” says Fransson. “I did my PhD but mostly I the physical aspects of male elite football. I’ve used GPS data in my role but it’s just numbers, we don’t really measure by it.
“We look at sprinting and acceleration, but we don’t really know what it means, so what we want to do with the next step in this area is identify these explosive movements and their characteristics and context using video to analyse the specific movements.”
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That’s where Photon Sports comes in.
A couple of years ago, the company began work developing technology which measures the body’s position at 60 frames per second.
“It’s used to track physical abilities like sprinting, jumping and change of directions,” says Sven Burman, Marketing Manager for the company.
“Our first customer was the entire Swedish First League and we started building a very large database from thousands of tests and then a bunch of scientists got hold of this and did a pilot study on female explosiveness which came out in May last year.
“When we got results from that they realised there was so much to look into and dig into, so they’ve now created a bigger project across the next four years.”
Specifically, Photon Sports did 8,500 tests across the 2022 Damallsvenskan season, where they still to this day work with all 14 teams in the women’s top division, and work with roughly half of the men’s top division sides in the Allsvenskan.
The initial study revealed a “significant correlation between jump height in countermovement jumps (CMJ) and maximum speed during a 30-metre sprint”, and Fransson expands on what it all means and how both his university and club came to work with Photon Sports.
“I was contacted by Photon Sports, we had a meeting and he told me all about this new equipment and how it measures and I was really interested because before when you are testing those kind of movements, you have a timing gate, but this technology you get 60 measures per second and you can follow the whole spectrum.
“Which parts of this sprint need to be developed for this specific player? They are really keen on not only women’s football but the real world and for people to use their system. Let’s find out what’s going on in top class match play in women’s football and create specific tests off what we find.
“The plan is to do it position-specific, but we can also test the up and coming players against the already established top class international players, that’s the aim.”
On what they’ve discovered from their early studies, Fransson adds “We did an analysis last year with Helena Andersson [University of Umea] and she presented at the World Congress of Science and Football.
“One thing we found different from males to females is the countermovement jump, the ability to jump vertically correlated a lot with the top speed of 30-metre sprints in females, but that’s not what the research shows in males, so it could be the acceleration phase is very different between males and females.
“We don’t have any more information on that right now, but it’s interesting. The physiology has many differences, the hormonal system, but for me we need to investigate more specifics on female footballers.”
Luckily for them, the Swedish FA showed great interest partly due to what Fransson mentioned about the benefits particularly on young players, with many suggestions a key reason behind the current epidemic of ACL injuries in the sport is down to the lack of proper strength and conditioning training the current era of players had growing up given the women’s game has grown exponentially in the last few years.
They’re not again going beyond their own borders either, and Photon Sports has recently started working with Accra Lions in Ghana as well as the Royal Belgian Football Association.
“Women’s football is evolving,” says Burman. “It’s much faster now, the game pace is higher, the spaces on the field are higher in volume and there’s higher velocity and we’ve seen an increase in things like ACL injuries.
“These scientists wanted to really look at when do these occur during a match, what does it look like, what events make these injuries happen? That’s the first part of the study which was initiated in January.”
The technology hasn’t been created for games, but specifically for training and with knee injuries such a key part of the sport now, the level of the technology could prove to be groundbreaking for women’s football.
“Working with the Swedish FA, the sports scientists have access to their GPS data from the last four major tournaments,” says Burman. “They can synchronise video footage and GPS data to start isolating these events.
“We have a 3D sensor measuring your body’s position so you can isolate these events. You can do a sprint, a change of direction test, we can take all the data from the first phase from real world situations and create new training regimes specifically for women. A lot of it is based on men’s data, but they are very different, so we are developing new tests and new training methods.”
Fransson too is pleased to be able to collaborate with the Swedish FA, admitting only “bits and pieces” of research have been undertaken in the women’s game so far, and the collaboration with the national team and the involvement of Ekblom will prove key in their long-term ambitions.
He’s also more than open to taking the research further afield if it will help the wider women’s game.
“The Swedish FA was a collaborator in this project, it’s important for them the young players we train for the future demands of the game.
“We don’t mind if it goes abroad and if we find anything in particular for women’s football I would be happy to take it abroad, that’s no problem. It all depends on what we find. Our research group, we know in general athlete performance and power in the lower extremities and how to accelerate faster, but we have to bring the whole chain into the football specific movement and events, that’s always our aim and that’s quite unique.”
He adds “We all have the same approach, the starting point for us is the game and how we can train to improve the game and still have these important explosive movements incorporated into a session. We want to look at the elite level players, we have data from the Swedish FA, the four latest tournaments for the women, we have the GPS and video and let’s start with that to analyse the explosive movements.
“The aim is not to end there but find what is happening and how we can train that in football exercises in training to cope with the increased demands of women’s football overall in the future.”
Even though the key aim of the study isn’t injury prevention, in the women’s game particularly the increased analysis on sprinting and lower body movements could inadvertently prove important information on the likes of ACL injuries, and Fransson admits if they can devise more specific training plans then injuries will “naturally go down” in the future.
“For me, they go parallel, the performance and prevention part,” he says. “If you teach them how to move they become faster but the tolerance to these movements will become better. One person who analysed around 150 ACL injuries in the men’s game on video and what kind of situations most of these injuries occur, he found out 55 were uncontrolled deceleration non-contact movements.
“In my club now, we take this in and maybe it’s not about the gym, it’s controlling the movements on the pitch and if we teach them how to do that maybe we can reduce the risk of injuries. I’m no specialist in injury prevention but my belief is if we teach players how to control their body better, the risk of getting injured will probably go down.”
Fransson says the long-term aim once they have the research and information they need over the next four years will be to create seminars and courses for both teams at the elite level of the game all the way down to academies and grassroots to ensure these processes start when players are young.
“We know from studies at U14 to U16 level there are so many injuries and we need to know more about them and how to train against them and I hope our study can contribute to that.
“The PhD project is four studies, but we have so many spin-off ideas from this. I think we could go on forever. Maybe we can collaborate with other research groups to speed things up and get this research out there.”
He also hopes everyone does more to help the current issues in the women’s game, as well as just the general development of the sport, with resources in many countries now being directed more than ever towards women’s football.
“We do need to do more. UEFA and FIFA have put out grants you can apply for for female research specifically. England and many other countries put in resources like never before now, many teams are investing and I think that is needed.
“In Sweden, the resources of women’s football is very limited. It’s about money, but you can also do a lot with education and facts and bringing it down to the pitch. My feeling is more companies and more organisations want to and are interested in getting involved with women’s football.”