Brazil has more World Cup titles than anyone, five of them to be precise, but after going through five straight tournaments without adding to that count, the team is leaning hard on data this time.
Every player wears a sensor-packed “smart vest” tracking field position (via GPS), heart rate, and a stat called “player load,” the same kind of numbers that your Whoop band or Apple Watch brags about, but tuned specifically for the sport.
So what exactly do these smart vests track?
The vests sit under the jersey, and Brazil uses them for its men’s, women’s, and youth teams. Every club sends the match or practice data back to the national team on a daily basis.
That lets sports science chief Guilherme Passos monitor plenty of metrics including sprint speeds, fatigue, and hamstring rehab, not just for the national team, but for players scattered across continents.
The smart vests stay on during World Cup matches as well, helping decide which player needs rest between games. Here’s the twist, and an interesting one no less.
Passos once flagged a player covering only around 3.7 miles a match, which is about half what other teammates ran. By the numbers, he looked like a slacker.
Why did the data almost get one of Brazil’s players benched?
But when coaches reviewed the video footage, they realized that the player, in Passos’s own words, ȧs always in the right spot, in the perfect tactical position (via BBC).
The player’s identity is a secret, for obvious reasons, but it’s the lesson that’s more important here: playing better doesn’t mean running more on the field, and the smartest player on the field can have the most boring smart vest data.
This isn’t unique to Brazil, though. FIFA cleared GPS vest systems for official matches back in 2015. Most of the 48 teams at this World Cup are using similar setups from companies like Catapult and STATSports, the same brands behind a lot of consumer fitness gear.
FIFA has leaned further into the data trend this year with Football AI Pro, an assistant built with Lenovo. It uses machine learning to analyze match data and feed instant insights to coaches and players.