Photos: Did this SAP big data software really help Germany win the World Cup?

Although the software can perform a running analysis of the performance of both teams, a coach or player can also highlight an individual and zoom in on his match data.

Here you can see the operator picking out midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger.

For every second of the game, some 5,000 data points are captured, yielding information on measures such as average possession time, speed travelled including bursts, distance travelled, player position and number of touches.

For real games, where digital tagging is not permitted, the data is collected using pitch-side cameras and facial-recognition software to identify individual players and map their position on a grid using geospatial data.

The user interface itself is a combination of Java and HTML5 and is plugged in to HANA by a JDBC-ODBC connection.

Image: SAP

This image shows that the player picked out for special study in this case is left wingback Marcell Jansen of Hamburger SV. His image appears at the top left of the screen, and he's highlighted on the pitch by a small blue circle.

Across the top of the screen you can read Jansen's passing accuracy, shooting, movement and dynamics, which also breaks down into fast accelerations and hard decelerations.

At the top right is a graphic showing the player's ball-handling statistics, showing data such as ball contacts, possession and an overall rating.

The bar at the bottom of the screen is the match timeline, showing important events in the game, including goals as well as the individual's notable contributions, such as shots and important defensive interventions.

Image: SAP

The grey areas fanning out behind the German players show the defensive zones they are potentially covering and into which they could run. This feature can be selected so that coaches can study the cohesion of, say, the backline or the defensive midfield.

Because the whole team is being studied in this case the top bar has reverted to team statistics, rather than those of an individual player but a similar visualisation for ball-handling appears along with an overall team rating.

Image: SAP

The Match Insights software also allows you to create a radius around individual players, to check the effectiveness of defensive marking or to see how often forwards are slipping away from defenders.

By applying the technology to old games using match analysts to supply some of the data manually, SAP says it was able to show that the German team's average possession time of 3.4 seconds in the 2010 World Cup semi-finals and had been reduced to 1.1 seconds in Brazil.

Image: SAP

The software was shown at an SAP conference with the German national team at Campo Bahia on in Santo Andre, Brazil.

Speaking at the event, Oliver Bierhoff, SAP ambassador and off-field manager of the German national football team, said in 10 minutes, 10 players with three balls can produce over seven million data points, which SAP HANA can process in real time.

"Our team can analyse this huge amount of data to customise training and prepare for the next match," he said.

Bierhoff said the German national side had a lot of qualitative data available about the opposition.

"Jérôme Boateng asked to look at the way Cristiano Ronaldo moves in the box, for example," Bierhoff said in a statement.

"And before the game against France, we saw that the French were very concentrated in the middle but left spaces on the flanks because their full-backs didn’t push up properly. So we targeted those areas."

Image: SAP