Maccabi Tel Aviv this summer joined a list of international football clubs and professional sports organization and became the first Israeli football club to sign with the Irish sports science and analytics firm.
Kitman Labs counts over 770 sporting organisations as partners including European football teams across the English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 as well as US Sports teams across the NFL, MLS, NCAA.
The firm, founded in 2012, by conditioning coach Stephen Smith, uses a combination of machine learning and analysis to support clubs in becoming player-centric and driving improved performance, higher availability rates and long-term development.
Over the past few days, Director of Sports Partnerships, Richard Byrne, and ‘Kitman Labs’ Senior Applied Sports Scientist, Jamie Schulz, visited Maccabi’s training complex at Kiryat Shalom. During their visit, the ‘Kitman Labs’ representatives completed the training to all the coaching, medical and technical staff in order to enhance better team performances across all departments.
Barak Itzhaki, Head of Maccabi’s Football Department explained how the Kitman Labs software is able to provide actionable insights and real-time risk alerts. “Professional Football has advanced to an extent where a massive amount of data is collected by our Sports Science and Medical staff. All the technical, physical and match related data is processed into the Kitman Labs software allows us to analyse and decide what is important in our set-up. Kitman Labs could even give us alerts in the event of an injury risk to a certain player so that you know what course of action needs to be taken. By partnering with Kitman Labs we have confidence that the data backed decisions we are making are focused on delivering successful performances”.
