Soccer Stars Embrace Personalized Insights In Bid To Find An Edge

At the start of January, Gabriel Jesus started to sleep more.

Not much more, but enough to ensure he was getting at least seven hours each night. The Manchester City and Brazil striker also stopped eating sugar for the month.

Jesus did not make these changes because he felt tired or was eating too much ice-cream. He did not do it because his club told him to.

Instead, it was objective data from Jesus’s body that suggested some small – but apparently important – changes in sleep and diet might provide a performance edge.

“What I saw after the four weeks was less oxidative stress, less impact on Gabriel’s body, less inflammation, higher heart rate variability,” Jesus’s performance manager, André Cunha, tells me in an interview.  

“He has more energy. He’s recovering faster. He’s more powerful now.”

Cunha has worked with Jesus for three years since the player, then 20, asked for a long-term health and performance plan.    

“This surprised me because it’s not common for me to see an athlete at this age thinking about health, performance, productivity and longevity in his career,” Cunha says.

Cunha works closely with City to design a “performance lifestyle” for Jesus. He also uses insights from Irish sports tech business Orreco.

Founded in 2011, Orreco analyzes athlete data and bio-analytics, including athlete blood profiles, to help teams and trainers deliver individualized training and injury recovery programs for players.

“Everyone is different. Everyone is an individual,” Cunha says.

“The (insights) give me directions on how to individualize what I’m doing with Gabriel. From recovery interventions, to nutrition, to sleep.”

Personalized training and recovery regimes informed by biomarkers are becoming increasingly popular in professional sport.

Orreco’s @thlete app, currently being used by Premier League clubs and teams in the NBA and WNBA, uses machine learning to combine multiple sets of data and make recommendations.

Athletes can keep track of everything from their sleep, GPS statistics and biomarker results, to their travel schedule and scouting reports on their next opponent.

The app offers personalized suggestions on what an athlete should be doing at any given moment to maximize performance or recovery. It might be a specific exercise drill or an iron-rich recipe to pass on to their personal chef.

“Gone are the days when athletes all trained in the same way,” Dr Brian Moore, co-founder and CEO of Orreco, tells me.

“I think everybody’s familiar with GPS, which is very much a measure of external load. We link that together with your internal load – what’s happening inside.

“It’s all about personalization. It’s the difference between an off-the-peg suit and something bespoke from Savile Row. It’s tailored to you.”

Orreco has offices in Galway in Ireland, London and Los Angeles. Moore, who founded the company with consultant haematologist Dr Andrew Hodgson, has been investigating sports haematology since studying for his PhD in 2005.

He researched Kenyan runners in the Rift Valley and how factors like altitude impacted their iron levels.

“There were 12 amazing Kenyan runners and then one Irish guy about 50 yards off the back,” Moore, who subsequently worked with multiple Olympians and sports federations, says.

Newcastle United was one of the first soccer clubs to work with Orreco, after the club doctor wanted a deeper understanding of why a player was fatigued.

Through a pin prick blood test from the earlobe, Orreco provides results of a player’s “internal load” within four to six minutes. This helps to identify when the player’s immune system is under pressure and allow training or recovery programs to be tailored accordingly.

The company counts 16 PhDs among its 40 staff, including computer and data scientists and experts in nutrition, haematology, biochemistry and immunology. The team has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, with a particular focus on developing knowledge about female athletes.

A joint research project between Orreco, FIFA and Western Sydney University, for example, will investigate menstrual cycle phases among professional soccer players to see how performance is affected by hormonal changes. Orreco has contributed more than $1 million to projects and PhD programs like this.

Moore says the athletes themselves appreciate how personalized insights can not only improve performance and increase injury recovery time, but also potentially maximize earnings.

“In society we now have very little patience for anything that doesn’t give you information that’s personal to you. The Netflix algorithm is tuned to you. We expect it,” he says.

“So the younger athletes are all over it. At the other end of the spectrum, the older players see ‘if I deploy this, I can actually play for longer and earn more.’

“Athletes are wired to overreach. They are wired to push. There are certain times though, where the law of diminishing marginal returns will apply. If you put more in, you’ll get less back and get sick or hurt.”

Orreco, which also works with player agents and NBA teams including the Atlanta Hawks and Dallas Mavericks, sees a consumer market for its insights.

It has already launched FitrWoman, an app which helps women track their menstrual cycle and offers training and nutrition suggestions tailored to changing hormone levels. Chelsea FC Women and the USWNT have used the platform, which is available to amateur athletes too.

Last year, Orreco secured $3.6 million in investment after a round led by Silicon Valley venture capitalists True Ventures. The firm was previously an early backer of companies including Peloton and Fitbit.

“Technology or innovation that happens in a Formula One car ultimately finds its way into a normal car,” Moore says.

“It’s the same exact concept.”