WFS Live: "We've encountered a new era," says Barcelona's Plana

SportsTechX founder Rohn Malhotra was joined by Barcelona board member Marta Plana and Pixellot CEO Alon Werber on Thursday afternoon as the online football summit WFS Live held a discussion on soccer in a post-coronavirus world, focusing particularly on how technology can help it to adapt to the new circumstances.

Co-organised by World Football Summit, Ronaldo Nazário and Octagon Brasil, WFS Live is bringing together global football leaders to look at the challenges facing the game in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Barcelona, Pixellot announced partnership this week

Entitled 'The Hub of Innovation: Technology's Critical Role in the 'New Normal'', Thursday’s roundtable, which was moderated by Malhotra, also gave Plana and Werber an opportunity to react to this week’s announcement of a partnership between their two organisations.

Barça revealed on Monday that their Barcelona Innovation Hub (BIHUB), a platform that handles research, innovation and training projects for the LaLiga club, has partnered with Pixellot, a company that specialises in sports broadcasting technology capable of filming and even analysing the action by itself.

Plana: "We want to become the Silicon Valley of sports"

In a statement, Barça said the BIHUB’s deal with Pixellot would see the club become "a testing laboratory for developing new products for automated artificial intelligence-based viewing and recording of training sessions and matches, the aim being to improve technical and tactical analysis".

"We want to become the Silicon Valley of sports," Plana told WFS Live. "We want to make sure that we create a benchmark of not only education and knowledge and technology and innovation, but also on the field of play. So definitely what we’re trying to become is a reference point, and agreements with companies like Pixellot are putting us in the front row of technology engagement."

Werber added: "I’m happy about the announcement because this will allow us to go even deeper in furthering the new technologies that will be helpful to soccer companies all over the world."

Werber: "We're seeing a big change as sport starts to resume"

Asked by Malhotra about the impact of Covid-19 on the footballing world, Werber said: "We’re seeing a big change now as sport starts to resume […]. Most markets understand that there will be constraints on the [number of] fans in the venue, up to completely closed doors. And many organisations are having very severe hits on their budgets."

He explained that automated broadcasting could in particular prove financially beneficial to lower-level competitions that chiefly rely on gate receipts for revenue. "We see a much bigger demand for automation," Werber says. "What it does is it allows fewer people from production to be on the surface so you know its safe.

"It allows you to bring a lot of content - think about all the leagues that were living out of venue tickets. They don’t have revenue streams right now, so [a potential solution is] if you can bring in low-cost production quickly that will allow them to still connect with the fans and maybe apply models like pay-per-view or subscription, and also [give them a platform on which to bring in income from] sponsorships."

Plana: "We've encountered a new era"

Meanwhile, Plana talked more generally about the ways Barcelona are working to make it safe for fans to return to the Camp Nou in future. "We’ve been very much into measures to create a safe space,” she explained. “What we want is for our supporters, who I hope will be coming to the stadium soon, to encounter all the health measures that we’re implementing.

"We’re working with a lot of European teams to make sure that there are some [safety] standards […], not only for the sake of our supporters but also our athletes and everybody else that is making the game possible.

"Basically I think that we've encountered a new era - it definitely is the ‘new normality’ […] and we need to protect people and make sure that there are measures for us to continue living football and other sports to its very best."