A perfect match: How tech promoted a small soccer team to the top

During its long-term collaboration with SAP, Hoffenheim has achieved many things including assessing the health and performance of players, personalizing fan experiences to increase engagement and loyalty, and migrating and optimizing its business processes to a single platform to support international growth. “TSG partnered with SAP to steadily steer its business toward its goal of becoming an intelligent and socially sustainable company,” says Mayer.

Technological projects favor performance

With a data-driven approach, SAP technology allows TSG Hoffenheim to uniquely analyze player performance and tactics more effectively, helping the team improve and make strategic decisions. So the SAP Sports One solution, a cloud-based sports management suite that makes it possible to visualize in real-time team performance, was developed in close relationship with the club in 2014.

More specifically, it simplifies daily data management tasks, facilitates decision making, and provides information and diagnoses about the training and physical and psychological condition of players while cross-referencing metrics to understand player performance and tendencies. Furthermore, it helps in the search for talent using AI to develop scouting report summaries. 

Today, Sports One is used by 80 clubs and federations of different disciplines in 18 countries.

In addition to sports management software, the Zuzenhausen headquarters has two technological facilities aimed to improve player performance, both physical and cognitive. To train the agility and speed of its men’s, women’s, and junior teams, Hoffenheim has the Footbonaut, a 14×14 meter box, whose walls have 72 hollow squares illuminated in different sectors where players must target with balls of varying speed and spin launched by two machines. For cognitive skill training, there’s the Helix Arena, a virtual reality scenario initially developed with SAP, which has a giant 360-degree screen that surrounds the player and shows situations of a match in real time. 

“The training exercises in Helix are designed to help players sharpen their cognitive skills and, therefore, respond quicker in a real match situation,” says Mayer. In 2020, the TSG replaced the old Helix developed by SAP with an improved version. Currently, SAP supports the club with evaluation and processing data generated in the Helix and Footbonaut through the SAP Interactive Data Space, an interactive room and collaborative where players distil and learn from all this information, and devise strategies to apply it all on the field.