Germany, as we have learned in recent years, is the home of football that is studied, analysed and picked apart. In German football, advanced statistics and big data arrived before anywhere else, and for years teams have trained with drones or cameras mounted above golf carts, until a new term was coined for coaches who base their work on this approach: laptop trainers — laptop being a literal reference to the portable computer these coaches turn to constantly. Now, though, someone in Germany is beginning to wonder whether all this analysis has, in the end, swallowed up the human element.
That someone is Deniz Undav, the Stuttgart and Germany striker, who has called for a better balance in the way workloads are managed in professional football. The forward has criticised the excessive reliance on data and technology when it comes to training decisions, stressing the need to return to a greater consideration of each player’s individual characteristics: “Data analysis brings a lot to football,” Undav said in an interview with Bundesliga-Magazin, “but now there’s too much looking at the laptop. Footballers are treated too much like robots when it comes to planning training.”
For the 30-year-old striker, the risk is that parameters and standardised programmes are followed too rigidly, without taking into account the habits and personal and sporting history of each player. “Too often we’re told: we have these figures on your physical condition and this is the latest training programme, so you have to do it exactly like this,” he explained. An approach that, in his view, can prove counterproductive, especially when a player arrives from a completely different environment.
Undav offered a concrete example: “Maybe a player arrives from Brazil who has never done those exercises in his life and then everyone is surprised when he gets injured three weeks later.” Hence his call for a more personalised approach: every professional should be treated as an individual, with their experiences and habits taken into account. A criticism Undav was keen to make clear is not aimed at his club, but at professional football in general.
At Stuttgart, for that matter, Undav says he feels listened to, including when it comes to his personal needs. The club does not force him into overly rigid routines even from a dietary point of view: “In general I follow a diet that’s suitable for an athlete, but once or twice a week I need a kebab or a hamburger,” Undav admitted. Undav’s future could also be on the bench. Once his playing career is over, the striker would like to become a coach, although for now he sees himself mainly as an assistant. He is already interested in tactical matters and sometimes discusses his ideas with manager Sebastian Hoeneß: “I show him how I would solve a particular situation in a game. Sometimes he says, ‘Yes, we can try that.’ Or he explains what the opponent would do and I say, ‘Ah, right,’” Undav recalled. He still does not know whether he will become a coach or not, but he knows one thing for certain: he will not be a manager with his eyes fixed on a laptop.