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Bayern Munich have announced that they plan on introducing a state of the art “Skills.Lab” simulator at their youth campus (Bundesliga.com). The simulator was designed and developed in Wundschuh, Austria by Anton Paar SportsTec GmbH and their skills.lab has been open to the public for leasing since the summer of 2017. Essentially, the simulator is designed to simulate real life conditions and real life venues so that players can fine-tune certain aspects of their game in a closed, controlled setting. It uses state of the art lasers, projector screens, sound technology, and graphic simulations to produce the life-like conditions.
The Skills.Lab is strikingly similar to the “Footbonaut” technology that fellow Bundesliga clubs Hoffenheim and Borussia Dortmund use at their training facilities. The “Footbonaut” is the machine that fires footballs at players from different tubes in a cube-shaped space at different speeds and trajectories so that players can work on their reaction times, first touch, and distribution speed. The Skills.Lab will be a bit larger than the “Footbonaut” space and will be roughly half the length of a regulation pitch, which simulates the average amount of space any given player has during a match when in possession.
#RMCF's defeat means @achtzehn99_en is the only undefeated side in Europe's top 5 leagues. Is the "footbonaut" the club's secret to success? pic.twitter.com/wZQrTFsRvD
— CNN Sport (@cnnsport) January 16, 2017
Speaking on the new development, sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic expressed his excitement for the new technology to arrive at Bayern’s youth campus:
Skills.Lab will allow us to increase the quality of our teaching on the FC Bayern Campus. Our goal is to better understand the performances of our young talents and lay extra foundations for individuals to progress.
A glimpse at what the Skills.Lab will look like:
@Brazzo: "Mit Skills.Lab werden wir unsere Ausbildungsqualität auf dem Campus erhöhen. Unser Ziel ist es, die Leistung jedes unserer Talente zu erfassen und damit zusätzliche Grundlagen für die individuelle Förderung zu schaffen." #FCBayern pic.twitter.com/snL914XqM8
— FC Bayern München (@FCBayern) October 15, 2019
Additionally, Bayern’s campus director Jochen Sauer highlighted the fact that they’ll be able to work on significant details that would otherwise be impossible to simulate outside of an actual match situation:
In a normal training session, it’s not possible to compare detailed game and movement data of individual players. Skills.Lab is the only comprehensive football training system in which we can test players’ footballing skills and train them individually.
This is yet another massive step forward for Bayern, who have always found unique ways to utilize state of the art and cutting edge technology to enhance their training and performance analysis.