Movement profile monitoring in professional football

Introduction: Professional football clubs are increasing monitoring players movements in training and competition to quantify total training load. Semi-automated motion camera tracking (MCT) is used in competition and global positioning satellite (GPS) in training. GPS also transmit data in real time (RT). To use data from the systems interchangeably the level and direction of agreement needs to be quantified. Experiment one: The comparison of a GPS data in RT to post session (PS). Over three competitive matches players were monitored in RT and data compared with PS. All external parameters were significantly different from RT to PS and all internal parameters showed no difference. Care should be used if basing training session benchmarks of external PS data and applying in RT. Experiment two: The comparison of an MCT and GPS systems data and an investigation into the validity of each system to report distance covered in the highest speed zone. GPS significantly under reported distance covered at all velocities compared to MCT. MCT over reported (170%) entries into the highest speed zone and GPS under (39%). Discussion: Data from the two types of system can currently not be used interchangeably and RT monitoring is not accurate relative to PS data.