In the 12 years since he became the youngest Argentine to score a World Cup goal, Lionel Messi has won more Ballon d’Or trophies, awarded to the world’s best player, than anyone before him.1 He has scored more official goals in a calendar year than anyone in living memory. He is the top scorer of all time in Spain’s La Liga, and this season, his performances have been characteristically devastating … in part because of the juvenile nature of soccer analysis, we have barely scratched the surface of understanding quite how Messi does it. This is most true when looking at his movement. Messi may get the ball more than most, but he, like all players, still spends the majority of his time without it — making runs, hiding in space, creating space for his teammates. It’s an integral part of his game that we know almost nothing about. The outcomes are there for all to see, but the process is obfuscated — we observe and quantify what Messi does on the ball, and are blind when he is off it.
Anyone who has traveled across time zones and suffered from jet lag is likely familiar with the biological clock—also known as the circadian clock. This internal rhythm helps your body wake up, eat, and go to sleep in regular intervals. Exactly what sets your circadian clock is unknown, but it appears to involve a mixture of environmental cues (light, food, temperature) and genetics. In the same way that a mechanical clock has many pieces working together to tell time, your DNA has numerous genes working together to keep your body functioning with a predictable rhythmicity. One of the more influential genes in this genetic clock is the aptly named CLOCK gene.
More than 20 years ago, Dr. Martha Vitaterna identified the circadian locomotor out-put cycles kaput gene—otherwise known as CLOCK1. Early research in mice showed that this gene had a critical role to play in defining an animal’s biological clock. Both mice and humans show a repeating, wave-like rhythm where the peaks of the wave represent the point in a day where we are most awake. The distance between wave peaks is approximately 24 hours—meaning the time when you are the most awake one day is about 24 hours away from the time when you’ll be wide awake the next day1,2. Dr. Vitaterna and many others have shown that this 24 hour rhythm is partly controlled by the CLOCK genes.
The FIFA World Cup kicks off on Thursday, June 14 and most bookmakers have five-time winners Brazil and current holders Germany as the favourites. But like any sporting event, Russia 2018 will undoubtedly have plenty of twists and turns and one topical factor that could impact the 32 nations’ hopes of success is their differing travel demands. The tournament is being hosted by the largest country on the globe, which spans 11 time zones and accounts for 1/10th of the world’s landmass. Games will be split between 12 venues, across 11 cities, and match schedules will force some teams to travel almost 10,000km and potentially over 14 hours during the group stage alone.
As our league table below shows, it certainly won’t be a level playing field in terms of time spent in transit. We’ve estimated the return journeys each nation will face from their training base to the three Group Stage matches – and there are huge disparities.
For example, Egypt, who will be clocking up the most mileage, have over FIVE times further to travel than France, who have the shortest distance. Nigeria, Poland and Korea Republic can also feel somewhat hard done by. They will spend roughly 14 hours travelling over 9,000km in just nine days, whereas 26 of the competing nations play their group fixtures inside ten days. Hosts Russia and opening game opponents Saudi Arabia have 11.
Read running shoe reviews, and you’ll soon come across the statement that you hit the ground with three to five times your bodyweight with every step. Conventional wisdom says these impact forces are a major contributor to injury. After all, three to five times your bodyweight! How can that not hurt you?
One answer, suggests a new study: Because your bones, muscles, and other tissues are built to absorb those vertical forces. What might be more significant, the study says, are the horizontal forces that occur when your foot hits the ground. The study measured what’s known as “peak braking force”—the maximum amount of horizontal force opposite to the direction of travel. This research, just published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, found that runners with the highest peak braking force were almost eight times as likely to get injured than runners with the lowest peak braking force.
Fortunately, it’s easy to lower your peak braking force and, theoretically, lower your injury risk.
Todd Graham has recruited and coached plenty of fathers during his 17 years in college football. Married, unmarried. Engaged, estranged. The relationships between player, mother and child have varied and, therefore, so have the ways Graham has tried to help.
Never, though, has Graham viewed fatherhood at a young age as a red flag on a player or prospect.
“If it was I’d be hypocritical,” said Graham, a former Arizona State head coach. “I had a son when I was 17 years old. When I went to college and I was being recruited to go to college I had an 8-month-old.”
A few hours after Germany’s disappointing 2-1 defeat at the hands of Austria on June 2, Christofer Clemens’ mobile phone lit up with a dozen messages.
When would he upload the game’s video clips and stats to the “Player Dashboard” analysis tool, the internationals asked the team’s head of scouting and match analysis, with the mild impatience of kids desperate to play with their new toy. Back at the pre-tournament camp in Eppan (Italy), SAP’s Sven Schwerin-Wenzel was pleased. The team’s eagerness to use their latest technological innovation for the World Cup, which he had presented to them only a few days before, showed that this edition of Germany’s squad were just as thirsty for data and information as their 2014 predecessors.
Schwerin-Wenzel, whose job title at the German software corporation describes him as “design thinker for sports and entertainment” and development senior manager, was a member of the joint group of SAP employees and German FA staff who travelled to Palo Alto in November 2013 to brainstorm about the use of technology for football purposes. A year later, Germany’s World Cup winners made heavy use of “Match Insight,” a centralised platform that allowed them to study footage of opponents with the click of a button, at Campo Bahia.
The user-friendliness of their system reversed the traditional top-down flow of tactical information for football teams. Players would pass on their own findings to Joachim Low and his assistant Hansi Flick; captain Philipp Lahm and Per Mertesacker were even allowed to have some input into the main pre-match briefing by chief scout Urs Siegenthaler and Clemens. Most importantly, however, Match Insight helped instil a sense of personal and collective responsibility.
The German National Team is hoping to defend its World Cup title using SAP-powered data analytics to help coaches and players scout opponents and review performance.
SAP first partnered with Germany ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, building a centralized big data war room that assisted the team as it worked toward its fourth World Cup win. Germany’s coaching staff was the first to use SAP Match Insights, which pulls in data from third-party resources to help the team find and assess key situations in a match, build tactics, monitor player fitness, and prep for games.
In the four years since then, SAP has significantly built out its SAP Sports One platform, expanded to other European soccer teams, and moved its system onto the cloud so that insights can be accessed by players and coaches from anywhere via their mobile devices. At the 2018 World Cup in Russia, an even more powerful version of SAP Sports One will be on hand for the German Football Association (DFB).
Flexible hybrid electronics are beginning to roll out in the form of medical devices, wearable electronics and even near-field communications tags in retail, setting the stage for a whole new wave of circuit design, manufacturing and packaging that reaches well beyond traditional chips.
FHE devices begin with substrates made of ceramics, glass, plastic, polyimide, polymers, polysilicon, stainless steel, textiles, and other materials. They can be anything from flexible chips to conductive ink printed onto fabrics.
Academia is working with industry to develop these substrate materials. Arizona State University, Cal Poly, MIT, Northeastern University, Purdue University, Tokyo University, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and the University of Sheffield are among the institutions of higher learning involved in the field.
Sometimes a doctor needs to measure his or her patient’s cardiac activity for longer than a brief ECG reading would record. In this instance, a physician might prescribe a Holter monitor to record long-term vital signs during normal physical activity, but these devices can have some drawbacks. They might be bulky to wear and could cause itchiness and skin irritations where they are attached to the body. And they don’t provide information in real time.
Umana Medical Technologies has developed products that aim to make wearing a heart monitor more convenient for patients and offer the ability of being able to transmit information as it occurs. For instance, the T1 system, currently in patient trials in Europe, includes a tattoo sensor, a monitor, and an app that work together to gather and analyze clinical-grade data in real time using advanced algorithms.
Today, during a World Cup game between Morocco and Iran, Moroccan winger Nordin Amrabat suffered a wicked head injury when he collided with an opponent. After he went down, a team trainer tried to revive him by slapping his face—a move decried by athletes and followers online.
But despite the frequency of those kinds of injuries in soccer, you won’t see many international pros wearing gear that might prevent a concussion—reinforced headbands. Recent tests show that some brands can reduce the impact of a concussive blow by more than 70 percent. Unlike sweatbands, these headbands are made with hardened polyurethane foam, like that found inside military helmets, while still allowing players to see the action around them.
Still, soccer pros are loath to slip them on. The combination of peer pressure (“Does it make me look weak?”) and institutional inertia (some soccer officials don’t think they help) means that soccer is sort of backwards when it comes to preventing head injuries.
Weekdays can be exhausting for parents. You get your kids out of bed, take them where they need to go and help with homework. You make sure they have the proper food to fuel their brains and bodies. By the time the weekend comes, everyone is exhausted and ready for fun. Out comes the frozen pizza for dinner, the soda and popcorn with a movie and the Jujubes for dessert, because it feels like it’s time to unwind and indulge.
If this is your habit — to generally enforce dietary rules on weekdays and get a little lax on weekends — you’re not alone.
Sibylle Kranz, a registered dietitian nutritionist and nutrition expert at the University of Virginia, says that for both kids and adults, “weekend dietary intake is very different from weekday. On weekend days, we seem to have more of what we call celebration food. It’s birthday parties, or going to the pool and getting something from the vendors there, or families getting together and having big meals.”
The organizers of The Basketball Tournament, the $2 million winner-take-all pickup-style challenge entering its fifth iteration, did not know quite what to expect last year when they experimented with a radical change to crunch time: shutting off the game clock and playing until one team reaches a target score.
Some coaches and players worried the tournament was bastardizing hoops with a needless gimmick. Tournament higher-ups decided they would use the gambit only in 11 play-in games.
A year later, they are going all-in, implementing the so-called Elam Ending for all of the tournament’s 71 games starting on June 29.
The Premier League has long been a scapegoat for England’s below-par performances at major tournaments but manager Gareth Southgate says he has benefited from close study of the tactics used by its foreign coaches.
England start their World Cup campaign against Tunisia on Monday with a formation Southgate believes will play to their strengths of pace and attacking flair.
“We’ve got some of the best coaches in the world working in our league so there are some fascinating ideas,” Southgate told the FA’s website.
In a culture that models itself on punctuality and efficiency, German football has been packed with teams that are organised, strong and physically fit. Following a complete shake-up, coaching methods and precedencies were revamped and, subsequently, ample amounts of technically cute and tactically rational stars have entered the fray. From the youngest of ages, training sessions are done on the sprint and discipline takes a high order within society, making for a profound footballing lifestyle. If something needs doing today, the Germans did it yesterday.