The wearable vendor probably owns your squad data

Monitoring contracts bundle hardware, software and analysis, and switching supplier can mean walking away from years of history.

Read a monitoring contract closely and the interesting clause is not the price. It is what happens to the data when the deal ends. In plenty of these agreements the raw signal stays on the vendor's platform, the club receives derived outputs, and export at termination is either limited, expensive or in a format that is technically complete and practically useless.

That is a lock-in, and it is a deliberate one. The hardware is a commodity; anybody can sell a vest. The value sits in the longitudinal record, which becomes more useful the longer it runs, and in the vendor's proprietary derived measures, which cannot be reproduced from somebody else's device. Four years in, a club that wants to change supplier is being asked to restart its baselines from zero, and no head of performance will sign off on that in the middle of a season, which is to say ever.

I think buyers deserve some blame here. Clubs procure this equipment the way they procure kit vans, focused on unit price and turnaround, without a data ownership annex or an exit clause specifying export format and completeness. Then the renewal arrives at a much higher number and there is no alternative.

The player angle is worse and gets less attention. Athlete monitoring generates continuous data about individuals, held by a commercial company, under terms the athlete typically has no visibility of. Player unions in some countries have started pushing on this, arguing that a squad member should be able to obtain his own record and take it with him. Clubs resist, and their reason is not really privacy. It is that portable monitoring history would strengthen a player's hand in exactly the same way a portable medical file would.

There is a straightforward remedy that a league could impose in an afternoon. Mandate a standard export format, mandate that the club and the athlete both receive raw data on request, and let vendors compete on analysis rather than on captivity.

Until that happens, the most valuable asset in the performance department is on somebody else's server, rented back annually.