Ok let's look at hard data. Rather than waste time on who said what, or an academic study.
The main selling point of Catapult and StatSports is injury prevention. You monitor player load and adjust their training and game exposure in order to optimise their performance and reduce injury prevention.
So the flagship sport code for StatSports is soccer, i.e. the Premier League. StatSports have more PL teams and they also tend to be bigger names such Arsenal, Liverpool etc. Commentators such as steverattray make the claim this must mean they also have the better product (excl price). Given PL is a widely followed sport, injury data statistics are easy to get.
So is StatSports product better? Not according to the last two seasons. In fact it significantly underperforms Catapult teams' performance on "number of injuries" and "total days unavailable". Quick summary below per season:
2016/2017 Premier League Season (this was a bad injury year)- CAT teams (7 of 20 total) recorded 35% less # of injuries and 69% less total days unavailable than StatSport teams.
- Of top 5 teams for season, CATs were #1 (Chelsea) and #2 (Tottenham), rest were StatSports.
2017/2018 Premier League Season- CAT Teams (8 of 20) recorded 15% less # injuries and 31% less total days unavailable than StatSports teams.
- Of top 5 teams for season, CATs were #3 (Tottenham) and #5 (Chelsea), rest were StatSports.
I don't think the data supports StatSports supposed "superiority" or having a "leading product". Many of StatSports PL clients are higher profile and have more expensive players, they are also higher earning football clubs and therefore would have more resources to devote to injury prevention. Yet, they record significantly higher injury rates than CAT teams.
Ultimately, I think this is due to the fact that CAT invests significant amount of time in training football fitness and conditioning coaches on how to read and interpret their data - they often stress this. Where StatsSports is much smaller and under-resourced. The wearables market across PL teams really took off sometime in 2010-2013, so is still in its infancy. Being UK based and offering a much lower price point StatSports had the upper hand here and managed to capture market share quickly. I would presume, many clubs would initially be skeptical in this type of tech. So they would want to trial it first and see the results. This may last 2-3 seasons. So I do believe over the next few years CAT can take market share off StatSports in PL given their teams record lower injuries, plus offer a wider range of resources and services. It's estimated, in one of the links below, last season injuries cost PL teams +£150m, that's huge for just 20 teams in one sporting code.
Keep in my mind, not everyone is sold on the tech yet, previous Man United coach never used it, yet StatSports claimed them as a client - not sure how that works unless its free . I think over time, this will play in CAT's favour. The CEO/CFO departing so suddenly is concerning, but the business is still well capitalised, offers a better product and frankly will continue to capture market share.
Data below:
Sourced from:
https://www.physioroom.com/info/english-premier-league-injury-analysis-201617-season/and
https://www.jltspecialty.com/-/media/files/sites/specialty/insights-sport/2017_18-sports-injury-index.ashx?la=en-gb&hash=F2D03E9ABD644A55E1EDF07DA99E41619BEDEF75
(20min delay)
