Martin Lames presented a study at the WCSF2019 at Melbourne, Australia. He talked about performances of top-level soccer clubs being negatively affected by delegations of players to the FIFA World Championships 2018 in Russia. The study presented operationalizations of performances being negatively affected by numbers of delegations, statistical methods to test these hypotheses, and three measures for players being stressed by a delegation.
At the conference, leading studies in all football codes (e.g. Australian Football, Rugby, American Football) were presented allowing comparisons of the scientific standards. The audience was very international, although Australia took advantage of its home advantage. Taken together, one can state that the chair of Performance Analysis and Sports Informatics is well positioned in international trends, e.g. talent research, new performance indicators, modelling of game sports, and sports analytics.
The conference was well organised, an AFL-match in a 100.000 spectator stadium at Melbourne was a welcome introduction to Australian football codes. Martin Lames took the opportunity to visit our former member of the department, Peter Lamb, who is now senior lecturer for biomechanics at Otago University at Dunedin, New Zealand. Collaboration on side-lies in golf was arranged.