Footbar tracker first 'KNVB supported' football wearable

The Footbar tracker carrying the name ‘Meteor’ enables players to collect individual player stats. - Foto: KNVB Media

Footbar, a Paris-based sports tech startup, is the first to offer a ‘KNVB supported’ football wearable on the Dutch market. The Footbar tracker carrying the name ‘Meteor’ enables players to collect individual player stats like distance covered, sprinting speed and number of balls played.

Dave Dekker, Chief Commercial Officer at KNVB has used the Footbar tracker himself: “I have tracked my own performance and it is very interesting to see your own objective performance metrics. It is great that this technology is now available for Dutch amateur players.” Through the partnership with Footbar, the KNVB will help Dutch players and clubs in grassroots football embrace technology in the right way. “By identifying Footbar as a KNVB supported product, we want to emphasize that this tracker is a reliable and good product, that we recommend in case players or coaches want to engage in collecting player statistics”.

KNVB Innovation Hub #11

Footbar CEO Stéphane Martin is also excited about the new partnerhip: “Footbar is very proud to close this partnership with KNVB after 2 years of close collaboration with the KNVB Innovation Hub #11 and their incredibly talented team, who have been instrumental in this journey. KNVB values and traditions are a perfect fit with Footbar mission to bring fun into football practice for everybody around the globe, making the data available for grassroots players.”

Voetbalmedia, the company running the Voetbal.nl platform, also supports Dutch football adopting this new technology: “For Voetbal.nl we are constantly looking for innovations and improvements. Through this collaboration, we want to explore whether we can further enhance the team experience with these tracking data insights as a Voetbal.nl functionality. That’s why we will equip a team with the Footbar tracker for the entire upcoming football season and share all experiences via Voetbal.nl. In addition, it naturally fits perfectly in improving the individual player experience.”, says Felix van der Kooi, CEO of Voetbalmedia.

Reimagine Football innovation challenges

The KNVB has discovered Footbar through one of its Reimagine Football innovation challenges, where hundreds of sports tech startups submitted their solutions. As a winner of the 2020 challenge, KNVB and Footbar organized a pilot in which over 300 players in The Netherlands tested the Footbar tracker. Data validity of the tracker was also tested in cooperation with the performance management team of the KNVB. User feedback proved to be very positive and the validity of data offered a good basis for reliable player statistics. “The data validity tests showed that measured data on parameters as distance covered, sprinting speed and number of balls shot are useful for amateur players. Other statistics such as dribbles or distinctions between shots and passes are still unreliable, but as KNVB we will help Footbar to improve these metrics over the next years”, says KNVB Innovation Manager Giel Kirkels.

Interested in tracking your performance? The Footbar tracker is now available in the KNVB Shop

KNVB Shop Order Footbar here!