Big data, drones and technology: Sarri and football 4.0 in Auronzo

The Lazio coach has signed an agreement with the Italian start-up Kama Sport. A platform is available to collect technical and tactical information

AURONZO

Maurizio Sarri, second act. The Tuscan coach is one of the most anticipated in Lazio’s pre-season retreat in Auronzo, the fifteenth consecutive that will start on 6 July. After having cleared through customs the figure of the psychologist, included in his technical staff in conjunction with the landing in the shadow of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo in the summer of 2021, for the 2022 edition withdrawal the former banker has thought up another of his in the past few hours by signing a personal agreement with the Kama Sport brand, a young and dynamic made in Italy startup that in the Auronzano training camp will provide the Biancoceleste technical staff with a platform capable of collecting information of all kinds, techniques, tactics and athletics.

Game processing, running trajectories, speed and movements in the passages, athletic parameters and then again density in the field areas and in the game phases, physical and medical indicators. In short, a “big brother of football”. Everything and more: twenty-two people will click in the button room, some in presence and others remotely. All twenty-two, in fact, for sixteen days will work alongside Maurizio Sarri and his loyal staff. Big data, football 4. 0 and so on and so forth.

Maurizio Sarri winks at the football of the future by opening the doors of the stadium to hi-tech technology. He is not the only one, nor the first to be honest. The services of Kama Sport are already used by other Italian coaches, from Pioli to Spalletti passing through Filippo Inzaghi and Carletto Ancelotti, the latter fresh from winning the Champions Cup at the helm of Real Madrid, who introduced technology in football at the time. (unlucky) of Napoli.

The Biancocelesti data that will emerge daily during Auronzo’s retreat will be processed by Lazio’s match analysts (a constantly rising technical figure) in close contact with the software developers. Kama Sport will put a team of computer scientists, developers, mathematicians, statisticians and physicists at the service of Lazio. The unprecedented staff also includes a designer, difficult to understand what his duties will be but he will also be in Auronzo.

Needless to say, at the service of Maurizio Sarri there will also be a drone that will film the movements of the players on the pitch from the sky of the Val d’Ansiei. It happened, a long time ago, even in the skies of Dimaro when the Trentino town hosted the Sarri-branded Napoli pre-season retreat. A first fruit that made people discuss sympathetically but which, over time, proved to be an extra weapon for a coach who focuses a lot on tactics.

Sarri will therefore use technology to improve his Lazio, the antithesis of what happens on the other side of the Capitoline where José Mourinho has repeatedly declared war on modern football. Derby skirmishes, which in Rome, it is good to remember, are played 365 days a year, on and off the pitch.