How the growth of wearable technology is transforming football
It was not so long ago that professional footballers would treat their bodies with little more care than a Sunday league player.
“At Liverpool, if we played an away game in the late ’90s, we’d get onto the team bus and there would be a couple of crates of lager,” Michael Owen tells The Athletic.
“You’d have to tick a box before kick-off to say whether you wanted chicken and chips or fish and chips after the game — and by the time you were halfway home, the whole bus was engulfed in cigarette smoke.”
Fast forward to 2023 and modern-day football is worlds apart from the amateur game, most notably due to the detail with which players’ performance is objectively monitored — from the volume of passes made to the blades of grass covered.
We have grown accustomed to seeing players wear a GPS (global positioning system) sports