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Humans have always tried to enhance our daily lives by technology. With technology constantly and continuously evolving, the potential for human augmentations seems limitless. Scientists and enterprises are trying to implement the latest technological improvements and tools to the human body that enables creative functions like processing numerous amounts of data (Johnson,2021).

Currently the focus is on helping people with disabilities, prosthetics, and bionics augmentation. Moreover, human augmentation is also used to try and cure sicknesses. The goal is to eventually end the physical disabilities or prevent the injuries from happening at all. Neuralink for example promises that their device could soon cure paralysis, deafness, blindness, and other disabilities. Which has caused a fierce discussion amongst the scientific worlds. However, new technological advancements start to look towards human enhancements rather than racing towards helping the less abled.

While Neuralink technology has the ability to provide anything from human memory recording to thought control of external equipment, it also has significant ethical and legal issues. The small fitbit like device stuck onto your brain has potentially a lot of benefits, however the downsides have to be considered as well.

• Once your brain can control everything wirelessly, like your wheelchair, computer cursor or bionic arm, is becomes vulnerable to being hacked and controlled by someone else. Criminal offenses can be committed without your knowledge or consent. This will bring new legal regulations as well.
• Elon Musk has said that these links will potentially, in the future, allow us to record and download our memories. This instantly reminds me of a black mirror episodes regarding similar technologies, which focused on the negative side effects of the technology.
• Dependencies need to be considered as well. How dependent will we actually be on these devices? And what will happen if the chip suddenly stops working?

There are many uncertainties, ethical dilemmas, and discussions surrounding this topic. For now the technology is not advance enough to cause a crisis but we need to start considering the impact it could have on our society.

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Computer vision, tracking and specific software has allowed Opta to successfully collect data from football matches in real time. Every part of the game is now analyzed by the company, producing between 1600-2000 individual pieces of data each match (Wiggins, 2014). The data is then used by pundits, managers, teams and players a like. The sport is therefore not just based on opinions but based on actually checkable facts.

How does Opta do it?

Tracking players during the game is one thing, but actually turning each touch, movement, goal, pass, block and run into actual data is another thing. First thing that gets taught is that everyone in the data collection centers need to have the same definition of the terms, so that each match the data output is consistent with the last match. As for the actual game, each time three data collectors track the game. One watches the home team, the second one watches the away team and the last one fact checks every data point and analyzes the actions in the game that were missed upon first seeing it (Wiggins, 2014).

Why do we need it?

The need for such data has increased after the first few data outputs. Before the use of real time tracking in football, the data used to describe number of goals or saves. However, the potential now is almost limitless. Statistics such as percentages tackles won, percentage arial duels won or chances created could now be documented. These statistics help teams to capture the value of players based on actual data more extensive than goals scored or matches played. This can be helpful for teams to evaluate their players or to evaluate potential players.

This has been done before. Normally players will go with their agent to negotiate a contract. However, with the fairly recent data outputs player can do this themselves. Kevin de Bruyne is a perfect example. He did not like the contract renewal his team Manchester City, proposed to him, which would make him earn less than presently. He opted to join forces with a data providing agency which one goal in mind; to get a contract with a pay rise which would reflect his importance in the team. And he succeeded as we now know, as he signed a two-year extension.

This is just one example of a data driven opportunity that has arisen these years. The future still has a lot to offer as we have just seen the surface of the capabilities of data analytics in football.