THE coronavirus pandemic may have put paid to any notion that elite sport is recession-proof, but Newry’s STATSports is still anticipating that 2020 will be a year of growth for the firm, despite the global sports industry hitting the pause button for almost three months.
The company’s GPS tracking tech had already found favour among 11 Premier League before the pandemic, including Man City and Arsenal, who will line out against each other at 8.15pm on Wednesday night.
But it has been the product STATSports designed for the consumer market that has really taken off during lockdown.
When all sport and training was halted because of lockdown restrictions, the company reached out to its elite clients in the Premier League and rugby with a potential solution.
That solution was the Apex Athlete Series. Originally marketed for serious fitness enthusiasts, it provides high level tech for tracking and analysing workouts.
“We said we have this solution; do you want it? They wanted it and it went out to all the clubs,” said STATSports managing director Paul McKernan.
“Suddenly we’re getting a lot more exposure on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook because the players are going out, posting their training session and competing against each other.”
Unlike the more sensitive elite systems, the data automatically ends up on a weekly leaderboard for all users, adding a competitive edge.
Prior to the pandemic, the leaderboard typically included a number GAA players and even some of STATSports’ own staff.
These days, you’re more likely to see Jesse Lingard or Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s name at the top of the table.
“You’ve got Liverpool players, Arsenal players, so many different Premier League and Championship players,” said Paul.
“Players from rugby and soccer players are going up against each other.
“They’re comparing speeds, distance covered. Our head of marketing loves a good run on a Monday morning and he tries to get to the top of the leader board before any player wakes up,” he laughed.
When it comes to growth, STATSports is an ambitious company. Just under two years ago the firm announced an aggressive multimillion pound investment plan to recruit dozens of new staff at its headquarters at Drumalane Hill on The Quays in Newry.
Inevitably, the pandemic has slowed the pace of that expansion.
Yet while the impact of coronavirus has left little scope to sign up new clients, the accelerated growth on the consumer side should ensure that STATSports retains its growth trajectory in 2020.
“While the elite side hasn’t progressed to what we had planned at the start of the year, we are still very confident that we will grow this year,” said Paul.
“The consumer side has been such a brilliant bolster to what we have been doing as a business. The sales of it have absolutely skyrocketed beyond what we had planned.
“The usage and uptake from the Premier League players has massively helped that. It’s something we’re really pleased with.”
Ahead of the Premier League’s return tomorrow, clubs have had players under a microscope like never before.
Alongside testing for coronavirus, teams are now tracking the movement of players during training using STATSports’ system.
A report by the firm’s head of sports science, Barry Watters, recently drew focus on the rate of contact between players, helping clubs decide on what drills could be implemented in accordance with the various stages in the government’s recovery plan.
“It was useful for the clubs to be proactive in looking after their players,” said Paul.
“Now it has moved on another level and they are using it for track and trace, both within the Premier League and the Championship.
“We are able to track what people they have come in contact within a training session, who they have been next to, how long they were next to them.
“It might not seem that big of a deal, but as the Covid testing is happening twice a week, if one player does test positive, at least you can find out who they were in contact with.”
Like many other tech-orientated firms, the transition to homeworking has been relatively seamless for STATSports.
It currently employs around 90 people across offices in Newry, Chicago, India, Qatar and Australia and Microsoft Teams was already part of doing business before the lockdown.
The company also had an emergency plan in place to respond to any major crisis, but Paul admitted that the UK Government’s furlough scheme came as a relief when announced toward the end of March.
“The furlough scheme was extremely welcome for many businesses and we have used it when we needed it.”
And like many other firms, STATSports has found that working from home has improved some aspects of the business.
The managing director said while there is scope to utilise remote operations to grow overseas, the company will eventually be returning to its Newry base, but not until 2021.
“As a business we have adapted to it. We found certain departments have been more productive from home. Our software development team is probably going to spend a lot more time working from home.
“But it is hard to beat sitting face to face with people. We will want a lot of our staff to come back, but from our point of view we don’t envisage that happening until the start of next year.”
