Understanding the FIFA quality performance reports for electronic performance and tracking systems: from science to practice.

The world's football-governing body, FIFA, developed the FIFA Quality Programme to set internationally recognized industry standards for electronic performance and tracking systems (EPTS). The positioning and velocity data from different EPTS, discretized into velocity bands, were validated against criteria measures. Discussions have been ongoing between practitioners regarding the FIFA quality performance reports, particularly when the findings are used to compare accuracy between systems. However, there are important methodological issues that should be addressed when interpreting these findings. The aim of this article is to provide practitioners with guidance on interpreting the results of FIFA's EPTS quality performance reports. We demonstrate that several methodological factors should be considered. For example, EPTS reports evaluate individual systems against criteria measures but systems are often not evaluated concurrently (e.g., on the same day using the same participants). Furthermore, technical considerations such as the total number of cameras used for optical (OPT) systems, the total number of antennas used by local positioning systems (LPS), the total number of satellites available for global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and the velocity bands should be considered before interpreting the post-test results reported for each EPTS. Specifically, comparisons between GNSS, LPS and/or OPT systems are inadvisable unless they are used within the same observation.