TORONTO – For a little more than two months now, Toronto FC’s players have trained donning red and white shirts; neon green, pink or orange pinnies; and black sports vests wrapped tightly around their chests.
When they sit down for stretches, assistant coaches come around and yank pebble-sized plastic-covered chips from the back of those mysterious new chest bands. All the while, cameras perched atop massive, metal-framed towers loom overhead, recording everything.
“It definitely keeps you on your toes. You can’t get caught doing anything you’re not supposed to now that the cameras are on,” TFC midfielder Jonathan Osorio said.
With a combination of heart-rate monitors, analytics and work-management software and cameras, Toronto FC’s coaches are learning more and more about their team and using these tools to give them an edge in training. TFC head coach Greg Vanney says that raw data has already revealed a few interesting things about his side, too.
“The most important thing we’ve seen from the data is that we’re fit and we’re strong,” Vanney told reporters at training Thursday. “We can see that in our workloads. When we put the guys through good, hard sessions, they’re doing a great job of recovering quickly and they’re able to get back to another hard session. That, to me, is the most important thing.
“If you’re not fit and you have a hard day, then it takes three days to recover from that one day. We get to see and gauge workloads and a lot of other little things that are important in terms of how we play, our style of play and what we’re looking for physically out of guys.”
It was perhaps ironic to highlight fitness as a point of pride when Toronto FC are currently struggling with injuries going into Sunday's away clash against Real Salt Lake (7 pm ET; Fox Sports 1) with a depleted backline. But, Vanney says, those injuries have more to do with other factors like surfaces or rolled ankles, and that the base level of fitness for his players has improved tremendously as they now put in double sessions regularly.
The club initially spoke about stressing analytics during the offseason, and Vanney says the data has also highlighted some areas that they now use as guidelines for establishing their style of play.
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“We want to continue to create opportunities,” Vanney said. “The two games were very different games, so the sample size is not enormous just yet, especially given the circumstances of the two games. Plus, the two of them were on the road, so we don’t have a home version of that data yet. But in terms of our possessions and the amount of possession we have, and where we’re winning and losing possession, number of opportunities, all those things are important for us in looking at our style of play. It puts us in the right frame of mind as we analyze games from week to week.”
While the data is valuable, the players often joke around about having to wear the straps around their chests.
But it’s worth it, Vanney says, in the end.
“Oh, they’ll been fine,” said Vanney, laughing. “The monitors are kind of awkward; they’re like a 'manzier,' like a bra, so they’re kind of annoying. But they’re great in terms of the material, the data we get back. The players are informed on that data, so they know what’s happening, where they are at any given moment of time and what their needs are.
"They know it’s a necessary evil in a way so they put up with it. The reward is much greater than the pain of having to wear it."
