As recently as four years ago, FC Barcelona’s four professional indoor sports were using four different athlete tracking systems. The club’s flagship team—the La Liga soccer powerhouse—was using a fifth product, STATSports’ GPS wearables, running on a completely different technology.
The club’s R&D branch, the Barça Innovation Hub, set to work benchmarking the various tracking systems on accuracy, reliability, and usability. The best-rated wearable was Wimu, a hybrid indoor-outdoor technology built by a startup called RealTrack Systems, whose team consists of former Nokia engineers based in Andalucia, Spain. The BIHub’s head of knowledge, Albert Mundet, said RTS “had a lot of potential with what they were delivering and what, at the same time, they were willing to improve.