Using global navigation satellite systems for modeling athletic performances in elite football players

This study aims to predict individual Acceleration-Velocity profiles (A-V) from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements in real-world situations. Data were collected from professional players in the Superleague division during a 1.5 season period (2019–2021). A baseline modeling performance was provided by time-series forecasting methods and compared with two multivariate modeling approaches using ridge regularisation and long short term memory neural networks. The multivariate models considered commercial features and new features extracted from GNSS raw data as predictor variables. A control condition in which profiles were predicted from predictors of the same session outlined the predictability of A-V profiles. Multivariate models were fitted either per player or over the group of players. Predictor variables were pooled according to the mean or an exponential weighting function. As expected, the control condition provided lower error rates than other models on average (p = 0.001). Reference and multivariate models did not show significant differences in error rates (p = 0.124), regardless of the nature of predictors (commercial features or extracted from signal processing methods) or the pooling method used. In addition, models built over a larger population did not provide significantly more accurate predictions. In conclusion, GNSS features seemed to be of limited relevance for predicting individual A-V profiles. However, new signal processing features open up new perspectives in athletic performance or injury occurrence modeling, mainly if higher sampling rate tracking systems are considered.