Catapult and multi-club ownership group Mercury13 have embarked on a new collaboration to advance the research and practice of performance training in women’s soccer.
Mercury13’s three clubs -- Bristol City Women in England, FC Badalona Women in Spain and FC Como Women in Italy -- will all implement Catapult’s GPS wearables and analytics platforms. Founded by Victoire Cogevina Reynal and backed by Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund, Mercury13 is one of the first multi-club ownership groups entirely focused on the women’s game.
“Everything that their vision and mission are as an ownership group heavily leans towards what we’re trying to lead towards, which is creating more opportunity and more education for female athletes and, in turn, female footballers,” Catapult VP/Global Strategic Partnerships Kieran Dannatt told SBJ.
Bristol City was already using Catapult products, and the other two Mercury13 clubs will now follow suit.
“We see this as an area where the women’s side of the game has lagged and we’re trying to close that gap because we all know that physiologically the female body is different, the way it should train, the way it recovers is different,” Mercury13 CRO Alexandra Goldschmidt said. “And yet there isn’t the data in the insights behind it yet to really inform the decisions that are being made by the medical and performance teams -- that’s what we’re trying to change.”
In addition to the use of Catapult’s hardware and software, the Mercury13 clubs will gain access to Science for Sport, its educational platform with guidance on a range of topics such as nutrition and rehab.
The two partners recently held a workshop to map out plans for the project and ways to close the research gap in women’s sports. That could be investigations around ACL injuries, the impact of the menstrual cycle on athletes or other areas to “collectively raise the standard of the sport,” Dannatt said, noting that the results of this work could influence Catapult’s standard metrics in the future.
“The reality is one of our clubs felt that it was the exemplar provider, and we wanted that to happen across all three. That’s obviously the beauty of a multi-club ownership group,” Goldschmidt said. “All three clubs can now come together, work with the same performance equipment and actually potentially share that data in due course so that we can elevate all of the three teams.”
