Referees are turning to the type of sophisticated analytics software used by football clubs in order to improve the standard of officiating in England.
Professional Game Match Officials Limited, the body which manages referees, will today announce a new partnership with Silicon Valley-headquartered sports technology Kitman Labs, whose products are also used by Liverpool, Chelsea and all Premier League academies.
The tie-up is designed to give PGMOL chiefs access to real-time medical, fitness and performance data for all of its officials in one platform, as well as help to fast-track new talent, including poacher-turned-gamekeeper ex-footballers.
“Despite what you might read, the margin for improvement is very small, but the elite performance environment is the area in which we like to operate,” Dr Steve McNally, PGMOL Performance Support Director told City A.M.
“By gathering this information and finding out what are valid and reliable metrics to measure our key performance characteristics against, we hope to be able to not only improve performance of the existing match officials on a continual basis to meet the evolving demands of the game but also to help with talent identification.”
The PGMOL Intelligence Platform by Kitman Labs follows Premier League academies’ adoption of the company’s Football Intelligence Platform, as well as individual contracts with teams and leagues, including in rugby union, the NFL, NBA and US collegiate sports.
While it is less easy to define high performance in referees than in players, PGMOL is “now starting to benchmark standards of physical fitness parameters that we think are relevant to match officiating,” McNally added.
That benchmarking can also help to identify and measure the progress of new recruits, he says. “By understanding what metrics and characteristics make a top ranking Premier League official, we can identify those individuals earlier and from wider streams – ex-players, for example.”
It comes just weeks after PGMOL, Football Association and Professional Footballers’ Association launched a joint scheme aimed at encouraging more former players to consider going into refereeing.
“There’s a new initiative to try and recruit players with craft knowledge of the game, that game understanding – which is one of the key characteristics we use – to try and get them into officiating,” McNally said.
“If their career has ended prematurely, for example, or if they didn’t quite make the grade to the level that they aspire to – and that can only enhance, I think, the standard of officiating and certainly the diversity of officials that we have in terms of their backgrounds.”
PGMOL is working with Kitman Labs, whose clients include Premier League clubs and NFL teams
Kitman Labs founder and CEO Stephen Smith said: “The use of the Intelligence Platform by PGMOL showcases the configurability, relevance and power of a single, integrated platform to address the performance needs of diverse stakeholders across sport.
“The platform has been developed to aggregate and leverage all data sources in a single platform to ultimately drive collaboration, eliminate information silos and provide actionable intelligence for anyone vested in or responsible for unlocking performance outcomes at the club or league level.”