Player Data Shouldn’t Be Played With
When teams use player data against athletes—rather than for them—the ramifications can cause reputational damage, loss of financial earnings, an erosion of trust, and reluctance to embrace tech that should make players better.
April 27, 2023
By Steve Gera
A week ago, I was in Tel Aviv with FIFPRO and 20 of the player associations that represent the bulk of global footballers around the world. We gathered in Startup Nation to discuss athlete data: who owns it, who controls it, and how players can be empowered with it—not hamstrung by it.
During one of my talks, I shared a story from the summer of 2004, when I was a Marine platoon commander in Fallujah, Iraq, and first learned about the RFID trackers that U.S. forces were using to track cargo around the battlefield. I also shared that it didn’t take long for this battlefield technology to find its way to the NFL.
Four years after that deployment, I was on the coaching staff of the San Diego Chargers when Philip Rivers, LT, Antonio Gates, and the entire roster suited up to play the Oakland Raiders in what was one of the first pilots for Zebra player-tracking data.
Some 15 years later, however, athletes are still being treated like the original thing we tracked in Iraq—cargo.
Just look at how Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud has been treated leading up to this year’s NFL draft.
I landed back in Los Angeles the same day that Stroud’s S2 Cognition score was leaked to the press. Since then, every anonymous scout, coach, reporter and general blowhard under the sun has opined about why a QB who was absolutely lights-out throughout his college career—a trusted leader of men and captain on the field—is now a sure-fire bust.
I won't fully break down the concepts behind the S2 Cognition score. To be sure, I don’t have anything negative to say about the company that administers the test. I’ve used it to help a MLB team that I consulted for, and it’s a good tool if you know how to use it. No one quoted in the articles I’ve read about Stroud understands the company or the test, but that’s another story.
No, what I’m Marine-Corps-pissed-off about is that an athlete's data was released without his consent. Furthermore, I’m certain that neither Stroud nor his agents own or control any of the reports or data generated by the test.
This is the real problem.
Scouts, coaches and teams ask prospects to take a test that creates data and then they all keep the results for themselves. Worse, selective data points get leaked, presumably by an NFL team furthering its own agenda.
And then that tiny selective part of a much larger puzzle becomes the only thing that the predictable NFL media machine—from TV’s talking heads to every last tweet—latches on to as a five-alarm news story for clicks, clicks, clicks, and even more clicks.
Let this click: We all know it’s wrong.
And it’s no small thing.
When teams use player data against athletes—rather than for them—the ramifications can cause reputational damage, loss of financial earnings, an erosion of trust, and reluctance to embrace tech that should make athletes better.
It’s bad for business when players are painted so carelessly in broad strokes by some scout or GM trying their hand at corporate espionage. The NFL looks careless, and teams look selfish.
The intent behind these annual leaks of player “intelligence scores” is to manipulate the draft board for team gain at the expense of athletes’ earning potential. Not only do players lose salary based on lower draft positions, such leaks can also scare away sponsors and other partners.
And when teams finally get players in the door, they’re less likely to embrace all forms of technology and data that are designed to help them win games. The truth about the S2 Cognition test is that 1) it’s not an end-all, be-all, and 2) some believe that many of the things that are tested can be trained. Teams, however, use it and other similar tests as blunt-force instruments to create a shopping list of cargo—sorry, I mean players.
Player data shouldn’t be played with.
Anytime an athlete is subjected to a data-generating event such as a test, the athlete should have equal access to that information—and the athlete should be compensated when a third party benefits financially from using it.
Where might that line be drawn? Hard to say, but it’s worth noting that all of the media publishers that sell ads benefit by putting Stroud’s leaked data points in headlines and tracking how far and wide those links travel around the internet.
Click. Click. Click.
Cargo.
In Tel Aviv, FIFPRO and its members discussed the FIFPRO Charter of Player Data Rights, which it published in 2022 alongside FIFA, the governing body of the sport. This landmark charter states that players should have data rights to be informed, to have access, to revoke, to restrict processing, to have portability, to rectify mistakes, to file complaints, and to erase data.
When it comes to his S2 Cognition data, Stroud is out of luck. He’s not a member of the NFLPA yet—and won’t be until he’s drafted after the damage has been done.
DATA-DRIVEN: NC State walk-on Thayer Thomas used athlete data to make himself NFL-ready
Fortunately, he’s entering a league that has an agreement with the players’ union in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that dictates sensor data is owned by the players. But let’s also be truthful about the larger, more complex puzzle here. The way forward for player data in the NFL is full of nuance and decisions still to be made in the next CBA when it comes to who can commercialize that data, and to what extent. We know this at BreakAway because we’ve been fighting alongside the NFLPA for players to get full and near real-time access to their data.
One former NFL agent recently put it this way to BreakAway when it comes to NFL players owning their data but not being able to commercialize it under the current CBA: “They’ve been given a Ferrari that they’re not allowed to drive.”
Let’s take that a step further.
When it comes to players having near real-time access to their data and control over it, the entire sports industry needs to wake up and realize that athletes are the engine, chassis, and fuel for everything that we collectively do.
Stop treating the Ferraris like cargo already.
Question? Comment? Want to chat? You can reach BreakAway Data co-founder Steve Gera at steve@breakawaydata.com and hit the rest of the BreakAway staff up here.