Thomas was a PhD student and research assistant at the Chair of Performance Analysis and Sports Informatics at the TU Munich, and has worked with and for various football clubs, gaining a broad perspective. “Since 2021, I have been working for BARC as an Analyst Data & Analytics and as a Research Assistant in the medical department of Eintracht Frankfurt.”

Thomas observes that often, presentations on sports data deal with publicly known match data or business data like merchandising. “In my presentation, I will show a different perspective and focus more on performance diagnostic data in professional football, from a medical perspective. It is not about purely medical data, but which performance diagnostic sports data are used in order to be able to use them for load monitoring, prevention and rehabilitation. I will present and describe different tests, then show the consolidation in Club Information Systems (CIS) and finally, explain different use cases how Decision Intelligence can be realised in sport.”

With regard to player performance in football and sports, Thomas explains that

Data can help to make the complex structure of sport and the performance of athletes measurable: “to structure and individualise them, and to track them over time.”

“In professional football today, there is already a very high performance density. That means, there is usually very little room for optimisation. Here, data can help to identify this potential, which is usually very individual, and to address it in a very targeted way.”