SCOTT HEPPELL
England's Premier League has signed its first official tech partner in a move that could help further popularize the sport in the United States.
Cameras will be installed at every Premier League stadium to provide material for analysis by video game publisher Electronic Arts in time for a planned overhaul of the league's official player ratings system for the 2011-12 season.
FIFA's lawmaking panel has yet to reconsider the use of goal-line technology since the World Cup, so the cameras cannot be used to aid officials with the sort of controversial decision that helped contribute to England's exit from the tournament.
But they will be able to track players' movements for what EA Sports and the Premier League hope will be an enhanced analysis of aspect of the game, including shooting speed and distance covered.
The stats may help the sport compete with baseball and football in areas previously resistant to its appeal.
"As someone who lives in the United States and went over there in the 1970s, but also someone who understands American sports very well, Americans need to statistically analyze everything and this is where soccer befuddles them sometimes because it's too fluid," EA Sports global president Peter Moore said Thursday. "That U.S. consumer is used to waking up the next morning and being able to look at every baseball boxscore."
The Premier League will also continue to provide its existing player index, which placed Frank Lampard on top in 2009-10, for next season. The new cameras should be at all 20 clubs for the Aug. 14 kickoff so that EA and the league can spend a full year working on how to improve the index.
"We're going to be collecting a lot of that information by camera, a lot of new information as well," Premier League director of sales and marketing Richard Masters said. "The challenge for us is to work out how that information can be used to enhance...the performance index. How do you make it more objective?
"It's an important part of how we market the league. We need to be providing an enhanced product."
The data and technology used in the development of 18 editions of EA's FIFA football game and 22 editions of its Madden NFL game allowed the company to successfully predict six months ago that Spain would win the World Cup and pick six of the last seven NFL Super Bowl winners, Mr. Moore said.
EA currently predicts that Chelsea will retain the Premier League title in 2011 by two points from Manchester City. Mr. Moore stressed that the prediction is likely to change as player trading continues until the end of the summer transfer window.