The symbiotic relationship between football, industry, and academia is deepening, creating opportunities to develop every facet of the game. The combination of new technology, research-led approaches, and football expertise is cultivating an environment where ideas can be developed, assessed, and implemented faster than ever. It is important to ensure that the implementation of these ideas benefit the world of football and are supported by evidence. 

Johsan Billingham (Research Manager at FIFA), Dr Tom Allen (Editor-in-Chief of Sports Engineering), and I first discussed the idea of a collection of research on football in 2019, at FIFA’s Research Symposium in Zürich, Switzerland. The purpose of the collection would be to provide a home for the extensive research activity around technologies being developed and implemented in football. 

In 2023, the finished Topical Collection on Football Research in the Sports Engineering journal was launched. The collection captures the latest research developments in football technology and aims to increase awareness of future topics in football across academic, industry, and public audiences. The collection contains 15 papers that address current challenges in football, game analysis and player tracking technologies, officiating technologies, and football-surface, -player and -environment interaction. The collection was extremely well received, with two of the top ten Sports Engineering articles of 2022 being downloaded from the Topical Collection on Football Research. 

Importantly, and aligned to FIFA’s Women’s World 2023^TM, an invited paper within the collection explores why women specific tailoring is needed in football. Having captured media attention, the paper identifies the unique challenges that female players experience due to the design and development of technology and football products around male players, as well as a lack of research for female specific challenges. The paper identifies where focus is needed and calls on industry, and academia to leverage new technologies and research methods to improve performance and health for female players. The Sports Engineering community is keen to explore ideas on how this topic can be further promoted. 

Other papers in the collection, from authors around the globe and an array of backgrounds, include:

1. The effect of surface geometry on the aerodynamic behaviour of a football
2. Correction of systematic errors in electronic performance and tracking systems
3. Validation of football locomotion categories derived from inertial measurement
4. Repeatability of a piezoelectric force platform to measure impact metrics for a single model of football
5. Effect of football boot upper padding on shooting accuracy and velocity performance
6. Automatic event detection in football using tracking data
7. Quality measurement methods for video assisting refereeing systems
8. Effects of soccer ball inflation pressure and velocity on peak linear and rotational accelerations of ball-to-head impacts
9. Environmental factors affecting a football’s trajectory at the direct free kick
10. Spatiotemporal variability of a stadium football pitch during a professional tournament
11. Validation of a LiDAR-based player tracking system during football-specific tasks
12. Development and evaluation of a sensory panel for collecting reliable player perceptions of third-generation synthetic turf football surfaces
13. Comparison of player perceptions to mechanical measurements of third generation synthetic turf football surfaces
14. Comparison of a computer vision system against three-dimensional motion capture for tracking football movements in a stadium environment

The Topical Collection on Football Research is free to read during the tournament – enjoy! 

Let us know, in the discussion section below, your ideas on how engineering and technology could further promote and support women-specific tailoring in football.