A favourite story among British football journalists tells of a breathless young reporter who managed to catch up with the losing team’s manager after an important match. The reporter needed a quote to round off his story: ‘I know you’re in a hurry, but could you spare me a speedy word?’ he pleaded. The manager turned round and glared at him. ‘Velocity,’ he said, and was gone.
There’s not much chance of that happening at the 1994 World Cup, which begins next week in the US. Not because losing managers among the 24 participating teams won’t be in the sort of hangdog mood that leads them to brush off journalists, but because even if they do, the writers will be able to return to the press room and pull out enough material from a huge computer database to flesh out even the slightest of stories.
This World Cup will reflect the growing pace of technological change since the last one, held in Italy in 1990. A $10 million computer network, which was just a dream 12 months ago, will control and oversee almost every operational task at the four-week event (see ‘The World Cup network’).
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Linking nine cities in eight states across four time zones, the network will track hotel and flight bookings and car rentals for players, VIPs, media and package tour companies. It will monitor accreditation, security and the issuing of identity badges, coordinate transport, parking, scheduling and emergency services at each venue, store statistics about every player, match, team and country, and relay the lot to the headquarters of the international football association, FIFA, in Zurich.
KEYBOARD KICK OFF
Last but not least, the network will provide data, statistics, scheduling information and even video clips to the computer screens of the world’s media – and, except for the video clips, to anyone else able to hook into an international computer network (see ‘How to kick off from your keyboard’).
But most people will watch the event on TV, with the total number of viewers across 170 countries expected to reach 32 billion over the four weeks, or seven times the world’s population. For them, the visible sign of the network will be the statistics flashed up on the screen during each game, or reported in the next day’s papers. This reflects an evolution in sport towards a proliferation of information that the viewers themselves didn’t even know they wanted to know.
Statistics have long been the norm in American sports. Baseball fans routinely quote batting and pitching averages that run to three decimal places, and use them to compare players from different eras. Similarly, fans of American football compare yards gained by quarterbacks’ throws and points scored by kickers over several generations of their favourite teams. Basketball, too, measures the points a player scores, his ‘assists’ (passing the ball to a scoring colleague), rebounds (when the ball bounces off the backboard), time on court and fouls for and against.
‘Culturally, the American sports fan is a statistics nut,’ says Larry Lettieri, a spokesman for Sun Microsystems, the Californian company that developed the network for the 1994 World Cup with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a subsidiary of General Motors. Bob Yalen of the American TV network, ABC, agrees. He is the chief researcher and an associate producer responsible for the network’s coverage of the World Cup. ‘For baseball and (American) football you can get a million different figures. Each position in (American) football or baseball lends itself to this sort of analysis.’ Statistics, suggests Yalen, give American fans the feeling that they’re more involved in the action: ‘It seems more hands-on. Also, in our games you have a lot of breaks, which you’ve got to fill up with something.’
To many European viewers, sports coverage on American TV may seem one long list of statistics, either spoken by commentators or displayed as captions on screen. And yet their own TV networks are quickly catching up. In Britain, rugby matches now show figures indicating the proportion of the match that each team has had the ball, and how much of the time they have spent in the opposition’s half. Snooker captions show the size of the break, the number of points left on the table, the tournament’s largest breaks (if the player seems close to matching them), and, of course, the frame score. In an effort to bring home the fatal attraction of motor racing, viewers can now see data fed directly from a driver’s car to indicate the rev counter, speedometer, G-forces and what percentage of throttle is being used. Allied to the main picture, which is shot from a mini-camera mounted beside the driver, the display creates the feeling of being in the cockpit.
While this proliferation of statistics is fascinating, it begs the question: who has been demanding the information? ‘If the numbers weren’t useful, I would hope they wouldn’t be put on the screen,’ says Bob Burrows, controller of sports coverage for Britain’s independent TV network, ITV. ‘You don’t want to clutter the screen unnecessarily, though sometimes there is a tendency to do that.’ For him, American production companies ‘go over the top’.
John Rowlinson, deputy head of BBC Sport, emphasises the practical benefits. He believes that showing statistics on screen that are updated regularly is a useful service, especially for sports viewers who are hard of hearing. ‘Also, people do not necessarily follow a sports event from the beginning to the end. They may join the coverage at a certain point but still want to know what’s been happening.’
Football writers, however, seem much less impressed with the way that more and more statistics are being fed to them, particularly those covering important games at England’s national stadium. ‘We get printouts now at Wembley during the matches which tell you things like the percentage of possession, time played, number of free kicks and corners,’ says Neil Harman, senior football writer at the Daily Mail. ‘I usually turn them over and start scribbling notes on the back. They’re great for that.’ Most of the information is superfluous, he says. ‘I saw the game and I know what it’s about. The extra numbers are just a hindrance.’ Harman is apprehensive about what he’ll have to confront in the press rooms at the World Cup. ‘I’m sure that we’ll be swimming in statistics over there. Oh, God.’
EXCEPTIONAL CLIMBDOWN
Before that can happen, however, the American companies responsible for ensuring that the World Cup is presented as football’s premier championship have had to confront an unusual challenge: the need to satisfy a critical international following familiar with the nuances of the game, while at the same time capturing the attention of a comparatively inexperienced audience at home. The result could change the way football, and the World Cup in particular, is presented in the future.
Because football usually gets little airtime on American TV, the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) lack the expertise needed to guarantee the sort of coverage that the world’s footballing nations already enjoy and expect, and so they all turned down the chance to produce the World Cup. It seems that the risk of American camera operators missing a goal or concentrating on the wrong player, and of producers selecting boring angles for viewers was too great, especially with any mistake being immediately visible on TV screens around the world. This marked an exceptional climb-down.
TV networks of a host nation usually take charge of the coverage so that they can reap the rich rewards of selling it worldwide. ‘None of the major networks wanted the responsibility of covering it,’ says Andreas Herren, a spokesman for FIFA. ‘It’s as if you brought American football to Europe,’ he adds. ‘You’ve got to have grown up with the sport – you’ve got to feel how the game develops so you can cut between pictures at the right time.’ An American producer might bring in some of the right shots, says Herren, ‘but not those that people who watch the game all the time are really accustomed to and expect.’
Instead, World Cup USA 1994, the committee organising the tournament, approached European TV producers who know how to televise football, and set up an independent production company. FIFA expects that this was a one-off; the host for the 1998 World Cup will be France, where there is plenty of experience covering football matches.
Working out how to satisfy the American audience has proved a more intractable problem because, compared with home-grown American sports, football produces very few statistics. ‘Soccer doesn’t have the depth of statistics that something like baseball does,’ says Lettieri of Sun Microsystems. ‘So we’re trying to collect as much data on the game as possible.’
SOCCER CONUNDRUM
For instance, unlike American football, there is no way to measure ‘yards gained’. The importance of a soccer player may lie in what he does when he does not have the ball – for example, when a winger draws the opposition towards him, leaving other players on his team with more space to run in. The difference may be that, compared with other sports such as golf, tennis, baseball and American football – all of which have in recent years spawned more and more statistics – football has very few ‘set pieces’, when play stops and a particular tactic or strategy can be tried.
The TV networks know that their viewers will want some figures to keep them involved in the action, especially for a game they rarely see. At ABC, Yalen has the task of deciding which ones to offer. ‘We’re not going to try to muddy the game by having too many numbers,’ he says. ‘We’ll try to give the basics – for example, the teams’ head-to-head records. And we’re also trying to look for things like when Sweden – or whoever – has scored first, they’ve gone on to win X per cent of their matches. Or, in all the matches in this World Cup, the team that’s ahead at half-time has won 83 per cent of the time.’ Yalen sees the information benefiting match commentators in particular. ‘They’ll be able to say ‘Z per cent of the shots on goal have been coming from the left hand side of the field, so clearly they’re feeding the ball to so-and-so’.’
But the seasoned football writer is still not impressed. According to Harman, the only beneficiaries of the proliferation of statistics will be writers with little knowledge of the game. ‘What’s useful, to a novice covering a sport, is having oceans of statistics, because you can say ‘They had this much possession and that many shots on goal’. But it’s without any feel for the gifts and nuances of the game.’ Harman speaks from experience. ‘When I had to cover American football, it was useful having all those numbers, because you could get some idea of what was happening, even if you didn’t really understand it.’
Despite such scepticism from football writers, FIFA seems convinced that there’s a market for the information, at least on TV. Although ABC will be keeping its statistics for its own viewers, FIFA has an outline version of the information tables that will be available during a game to commentators and TV producers, who will then be able to flash them up on screen.
CALLING THE SHOTS
For each of the two teams there will be a matrix, with the left-hand side naming each of the players in the squad for the match. Categories running across the top of the matrix define the number of minutes played, shots at goal, free kicks, penalties, headers, and shots inside the (opposition) goal area. There are the number of shots from outside the (opposition) goal area, shots into the goal, shots outside the goal, total shots and goals scored.
And there’s more. FIFA’s matrices will categorise how often a player has been involved in a goal-scoring move (assists), has kicked the ball out of play or has been the object of the opposition’s fiercest tackles. They’ll list the number of times a team has conceded corners, offsides and fouls, and which of its players has received yellow cards (following a warning from the referee) and red cards (following a dismissal from the field).
But is this really the sort of information that television has been pining for? John Watts is ambi-valent. He works for Grand Slam Productions, an independent company producing sports programmes, based in London. It’s worth knowing how often key players are involved in important moves, he says, and how frequently they are fouled. ‘If you get a key player, like Pele (of Brazil) in the 1966 World Cup, who was just kicked and kicked out of the matches, that can tell you something.’ Records of the numbers of corners, offsides and fouls can all enhance the flavour of a game, suggests Watts. But he doesn’t see much use, even in the future, for other details, such as statistics relating to a team’s territorial advantage and its possession of the ball. ‘In football, the territorial figure, for example, wouldn’t mean anything, because you might have a team which moves the ball around in its half and then suddenly kicks it upfield,’ he says. ‘Nor does possession mean much, because they might be hanging onto the ball and doing nothing with it just to hang on to a lead.’
Such characteristics of football can only be appreciated by watching the game and picking out the pattern of play, not by studying any statistics, says Watts. He contrasts this with American football, which he describes as ‘almost graphics-led’. On balance, he urges caution. ‘You’ve got to be careful because if you put all these things on the screen then you take away people’s attention. And you don’t want to do that when someone might be scoring a goal.’
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The World Cup network
The vital statistics of the computer network that will support the organisation and running of the 1994 World Cup are as extraordinary as those it will carry. Spread across the US, the network will include more than 1000 computer workstations with a total storage capacity of more than 2000 gigabytes – about enough to hold 10 000 copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The workstations will be linked by five satellites, 37 000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable and 10 000 telephone lines, which together will serve 25 000 World Cup staff, 5000 official participants and more than 8000 members of the media.
In a country where the phrase ‘information superhighway’ has moved from concept to cliche in just 18 months, even this development, by the Californian company Sun Microsystems working with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a subsidiary of General Motors that specialises in developing and running large computer applications, can seem run-of-the-mill. A few years ago it would have been state-of-the-art.
The key to the system’s effectiveness is that it has no centre. Rather than relying on one huge, expensive machine that controls everything – and so becomes crucial to the entire operation – the computing power is distributed around a network, with parts of the data stored (and in some cases replicated) at 13 server machines: one or two at each of the nine World Cup venues, and two at EDS’s data centre in Plano, Texas. The main advantage over a centralised mainframe system is that if any server breaks down, it can be replaced without disrupting the whole network.
Anyone who logs onto the network, perhaps seeking details in Los Angeles about the members of the teams who will be playing the next game in Chicago, may end up getting data stored in New York – without knowing it and at no extra cost.
The network is probably not the biggest Sun Microsystems has ever done. ‘I would bet that we have larger networks with more workstations for clients in the financial services industry,’ says Larry Lettieri, a spokesman at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. But he reckons that the World Cup network is the most public demonstration of how easy it is to use a network.
The organising body, World Cup USA 1994, chose the Sun/EDS network in preference to a proposal from IBM, which developed the computer system for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. This system used three mainframes linked to a network of PCs, workstations and minicomputers. The software took four years to develop, and the system used four different operating systems, a legacy of IBM’s broad range of machines. Sun’s network uses only one operating system, which all its machines have been built around from the start. This also helped to keep the development time for the system down to 12 months.
But IBM faced more stringent demands at the Olympics. The performances of all 2000 participants in 61 events had to be recorded, and the results posted within a second of the judges’ decision – without failure. There were also 2500 PCs on the network, able to send electronic mail between its users, besides administration, information and results services. The World Cup is less demanding in terms of the density of data about each participant, and the need for up-to-date information. The proximity of the Olympic events also made a mainframe-based system feasible.
The 1994 World Cup also shows how far the technology has come in the past four years. The system used for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, developed by Olivetti, was also based around a network of workstations in 12 different cities. At that time, the technology for such wide area networks was still being developed, and the system was used only for logistical planning, issuing credentials and to offer a limited number of historical statistics about the game.
Time constraints, allied to the fact that most of the historical data about past matches was held on paper at the headquarters of the international football association, FIFA, based in Zurich, meant that the eventual system fell short of the early hopes. ‘We had some problems,’ recalls Andreas Herren, a spokesman for FIFA. ‘Entering the data was manual and laborious.’ For this World Cup, however, the data has already been stored on a database; any new information will be entered onto the network, and sent over automatically by a dedicated phone line to FIFA.
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How to kick off from your keyboard
If you have a computer and a modem, you could follow the football from your keyboard and receive the same match and tournament statistics as the media covering the World Cup. FIFA’s database of results is available through a bulletin board on the Internet, the international computer network.
The service is being run by CompuServe, the online computer service company. Would-be users will have to contact CompuServe to sign up to use the special bulletin board, which will cost $20 (about £15), with a monthly membership support fee of $2.50. (Although the tournament lasts only a month, the data will be available to pick over for some time – as yet undecided – after the teams have gone home.) The hourly charge for the service will be $10, billed in one-minute increments, though users will get an initial $15 credit.
Users will be able to read statistics of a match as it is being played, as well as getting results, team and player biographies, venue information and news from FIFA’s committees on refereeing, sports medicine, doping and disciplinary measures.
For information about using the FIFA bulletin board, contact the FIFA help desk in the US on US+310-843-3030. Alternatively, contact CompuServe, which has freephone numbers in eight countries: Britain: 0800-289458; US: 800-848-8990; Australia: 008-023-158; New Zealand: 0800-441-082; Germany: 0130-864643; Japan: 0120-22-1200; Korea: 080-022-7400; Switzerland: 155-31-79. For other countries, call the US headquarters on US+-614-457-8650.