Zone 7: AI-powered injury prevention

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Image Credit: vectorfusionart / Shutterstock.com

Adversity has separated football stars from greatness throughout the history of the sport. Even the brightest of stars, those considered unstoppable, were halted by a roadblock of some sort. Injury is widely recognised as the sport’s most rampant and formidable roadblock.

For athletes, injury means being sidelined from the sport they are passionate about, sometimes for months at a time. This has proven to have a considerable impact on their mental well-being. For the club, player injuries can lead to extreme financial and competitive consequences.

Zone7, a data-driven and AI-powered human performance company, recognises both the physical and psychological impact of injury. It is, therefore, their aim to predict and prevent injury. Zone7 utilises an AI-driven platform to leverage analytics and support coaches, medical staff, and performance teams in optimising athlete performance.

Zone7 was founded in 2017 and is based in the United States. Since its inception, the company has logged over 200 million hours of athletic action.

The purpose of Zone7

The overarching function of Zone7 is to detect injury risk, which allows professionals to advise the affected athlete. Performance and medical technologies can offer sports organisations key data sets.

However, without the capability to contextualise them, these data sets are far less valuable in consistent and reliable intervention.  Zone7 is powered by data from tens of thousands of athlete injuries and therefore provides the required context.

Zone7 provides accurate injury predictions as well as real-time training suggestions. These suggestions are designed to optimise athlete workloads, recovery periods, and performance. Each of these factors is crucial in avoiding injury.

Zone7 separates itself from other data collection platforms through device agnostic AI. This feature allows an on-board device to analyse an athlete’s performance and detect otherwise invisible injury patterns. These findings, alongside mitigation strategies, are then able to be accessed via the Zone7 app. The app also features load management prescriptions and a weekly planner and periodisation simulator.

The core services offered by Zone7 have lightened the workload of professionals within sports organisations by removing the need to manually gather and analyse data. More importantly, sports organisations that utilise Zone7’s AI platform have seen improved player availability compared to prior seasons.

Benefits to Australian football clubs and organisations

Zone7 has been leveraged by many organisations across several sports. The platform is especially popular in the football world. Liverpool, Rangers, Queens Park Rangers, and Los Angeles FC are among the most notable of those advised by Zone7’s AI learning technology. As such, the program has proven to be a useful asset for elite sports teams, especially in football.

Liverpool has been utilising Zone7’s services since the 2021/22 Premier League season. Given Liverpool’s status as one of the world’s top clubs and the most recent Premier League champions, other clubs should consider their approach. This includes Australian football clubs, especially those in the A-League as they are particularly ambitious.

A prospective observational study found that from the 2012/13 to the 2017/18 A-League season, injury incidence ranged between 4.8 and 6.7 injuries per match-round. This shows the prevalence and impact of injury in the highest level of the Australian football ecosystem.

Considering the proven physical demands and extreme injury risk involved with the sport, A-League clubs could benefit massively from Zone7. These benefits extend beyond just reducing injury rates. The platform could foster long-term player development and possibly extend athletes’ careers. These advantages are invaluable for A-League clubs considering the competitive environment they operate in.

Conclusion

The A-League’s continuous push toward higher standards of performance and competitiveness requires clubs to embrace cutting-edge technology such as Zone7. This is especially the case for minimising injuries as the players are the club’s most valuable assets.

Through the use of Zone7, A-League clubs can ensure the long-term physical and mental wellbeing of their athletes and increase their chances of on-field success.

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France’s LFP eye return of Ligue 1 to traditional broadcast platforms

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Image Credit: ESPN

The French Professional Football League (LFP) are hoping to again attract a traditional broadcast partner for the 2027/28 campaign, believing there is renewed interest in their domestic football media rights.

Ligue 1 – the top division of professional football in France and home to PSG, Marseille et al. – has been without a traditional broadcast partner since 2025 following a series of failed deals and the exhaustion of their potential partner market.

In place of a traditional broadcast deal the LFP launched its own direct-to-consumer platform, which presently carries all ten Ligue 1 matches each week. The platform has attracted around one million subscribers.

The LFP had hoped a return to a traditional broadcast partner could be on the cards from the 2029/30 season, however given their assessment that market interest has returned, they are expected to bring that tender process forward by two years. 

LFP Media chief executive Oliver Bramly believes the time is right to amend a situation that proved deeply unbecoming for a league as esteemed as Ligue 1 – considered, until recently, an indisputable member of Europe’s ‘Top Five’ leagues. 

‘Before I joined, the idea was to issue a tender for the period covering 2029 -2034,’ Bramly told SportsPro. 

‘But the reaction was that this was too far away. Streamers … [and] all the pay-TV platforms expressed a clear interest in a bid for the period between 2027 and 2032.’

‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occasion to get a domestic league in a big market like France at an affordable price.’

In March, the LFP presented research that indicated 59% of 9.9million football fans in France watched Ligue 1 via illegal pirate platforms.

Article first appeared in SportsPro. 

Ernie Merrick: ‘There are many clubs that would be fantastic additions to the A-League’

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Ernie Merrick will be forever recognised as a key figure through the A-League’s golden early years. Appointed Melbourne Victory’s foundation manager in 2004 he led the club to not just silverware, but legitimacy and respect in a serious sport city.

A Scottish migrant and PE teacher by trade, Merrick was the youngest of the NSL’s managerial crop when he started with Preston in 1987 in the era of Thomson, Arok & Matic; when he finished with Newcastle in 2020 he was the elder statesman in the A-League age of Postecoglou, Popovic and Arnold.

For the places the game took him and all he achieved – including time as national team manager of Hong Kong – Victory supporters can comfort themselves in the fact that for whatever they feel towards Merrick and his iconic group of players, that feeling is mutual.

‘Yes, definitely,’ Merrick told Soccerscene Unfiltered when asked if managing Victory was the highlight of his career.

‘I think success is [fans] having identification with players, especially. We had Victorian boys playing for Victory.

‘That second year I was determined to have a complete pre-season. Archie Thompson bought me a birthday cake with 200 candles and said “Ernie, we’ve had 200 training sessions. We should celebrate this” – so he was looking forward to a big year, and we won the Grand Final 6-0.’

Nearing 20 years on, Victory and the A-League in general haven’t managed to drive forward as would have been hoped. Unsurprisingly that comes as painful to Merrick, as does the change in landscape regarding his other great passion and contribution in player development. 

‘I’m disappointed, as would most people be, that it’s struggled so badly. To me, there’s something missing,’ said Merrick of the current state of the A-League.

‘Those players we produced at the AIS and VIS went on to be the golden generation. Unless the league is fixed, there’s going to be ongoing problems with the financial status of things.

‘You just cannot earn enough money from selling a youngster, who you might get a million for, who then becomes worth several million in a few years if he does well. Maybe there’s a bit too much of selling players early.’

As someone who gave enduring service across Australia’s two domestic leagues, his voice holds weight in the consideration as to whether it’s time to now blend the, in today’s hyper-corporate landscape.

‘South Melbourne and Preston are two clubs that are perfect for the A-League, I think, down the track. They’ve set up, they’ve endured, they’ve been resilient, they’re playing good football and they’ve got a home base with a home crowd, which is far better than starting a club up from scratch.

‘All those players coming through those squads and the number of supporters they’ve got would be a huge addition. In Sydney too, there’s Marconi – there are so many good clubs around that I think would make a great addition to the A-League.’ 

Merrick also spent thirteen years as head coach at the Victorian Institute of Sport. He feels modern player development is an equation we still haven’t got right, post the closure of the AIS’ football program in 2017.

While many argue the move to club-based academy structures has seen Australia fall more in line with global practice while still producing players of quality, Merrick still feels there is merit in a national high performance program, in addition to club academies.

He was in the process of setting up state academies through the Member Federations during his time as Football Australia’s chief football officer from 2022-25. While the Victoria project was short-lived, academies in Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia continue to run, but it appears the broader expansion of the concept has been abandoned.

‘I think both systems should work [together] equally well. When I started with the FA program clubs thought they would lose players to us, but I didn’t take any of their players. We offered the opportunity of a high-performance program to other youngsters.

‘We could develop players completely; we weren’t restricted to playing 4-3-3 to combine with the way the first team were playing. We provided more of a rounded education, and good players can play in any system.

‘We managed to affect the coaches involved so they were up to date with the latest information on methods of coaching, etc.’

Catch the full chat with Ernie Merrick on Soccerscene Unfiltered: from being two-footed by a 15-year old Kevin Muscat to his enthusiasm for the future of the Socceroos, his memories of Wellington and Newcastle, and plenty more…

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