FC Bayern Munich is equipping its youth academy with a football simulator. The so-called Skills.Lab is designed to measure and evaluate the football-specific performance of a player. “Skills.Lab will allow us to increase the quality of our training at the FC Bayern Campus,” said Bayern sporting director Hasan Salihamidžić. “Our goal is to better understand the performances of our young talents and lay extra foundations for individuals to progress.”
Academy director Jochen Sauer also emphasised the benefit of data collection for performance development: “In a normal training session, it's not possible to compare detailed game and movement data of individual players. Skills.Lab is the only comprehensive football training system in which we can test players' footballing skills and train them individually.”
In Skills.Lab, game situations and tasks are projected onto the walls of a hexagonal mini stadium, which is about the size of half a football pitch. Fully automated ball machines can design more than 50 different training exercises over five difficulty levels. The player's performance is recorded using state-of-the-art measurement technology. Skills.Lab was developed by Anton Paar Sport Tec. in Graz.
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