Developing German football, supporting the national teams, coaches and experts at the DFB and in the clubs with state-of-the-art technology and scientific knowledge – that is the goal of the DFB-Akademie.
With the DFB Campus, the German Football Association (DFB), the world’s largest sports association, will open its first own sports infrastructure in Frankfurt am Main in its more than 100-year history. The opening is planned for the beginning of 2022 and will also include the DFB-Akademie.
There, a building complex is being constructed on almost 50,000 square metres that will in future unite sport, innovation and creativity under one roof.
A place that is specially created for innovations also needs constant external impulses. The Master’s students of Brand University brought this fresh view to the unique innovation project. In the “Brand Innovation” seminar, the assignment for the first and second semester students was: “Think big!”
The briefing by Ralf Koch, Digital Project Manager at the DFB-Akademie, presented them with the challenge of developing innovations for an already highly innovative institution without budgetary constraints. In doing so, they had the opportunity to further develop what already existed or to add new concepts to the project.
Eight groups set to work under the direction of Prof. Michael Jonas and presented a wide variety of concepts at the final presentation in the video call. These included, for example, proposals for a training tool that supports the psychological development of young players in individually tailored VR experiences, a highly immersive IoT training arena to improve player performance under hyper-real conditions, and concepts for how clubs can collect and use their own training data.
Ralf Koch’s conclusion: “Impulses from outside, like here from Brand University, are extremely valuable for our work at the DFB-Akademie. I was impressed by how many innovative ideas the international team of students came up with in a very short time. Regardless of whether every concept can be realised, a project like this helps us to gain new thoughts and impulses. Therefore, on behalf of the DFB-Akademie, I would like to thank you for the excellent cooperation.”
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the DFB-Akademie for the cooperation in a project that provided our students with deep insights into the innovation potential of (inter)national professional top-level football and the largest sports association in the world.
