A perfect match: How tech promoted a small soccer team to the top

The story of TSG Hoffenheim, the football club from Sinsheim, Germany, has it all: a small German town, a seventh division team dreaming big, the return of an old acquaintance who comes to save the club of his youth, and the exciting advancement of the team from the lowest ranks to the highest division of professional soccer in Germany. It’s also a story closely linked to one of the world’s largest software companies.

Hoffenheim was created in 1899 in the eponymous town not far from Mannheim, where decades later, in 1969, five former engineers from IBM created SAP.

In 100 years, Hoffenheim didn’t see major advances and by 1996 it had only risen to the fifth division. But in 1999 came the club’s great stroke of luck. A former team player turned businessman, Dietmar Hopp, bought his youth club and boosted it with strong investments, determined to take it to the highest level. It was the beginning of a close relationship between SAP and Hoffenheim, which continues today.

Thanks to this injection of capital, which allowed it to improve its squad through new hires, Hoffenheim finally reached the Germany’s first division in the 2007-2008 season. 

A long-lasting relationship

Hidden in rural Zuzenhausen, the Hoffenheim headquarters doesn’t immediately reveal the revolutionary technological advances it holds within. And its relationship with SAP can’t be reduced merely to the investment of one of its founders. For 15 years, the software giant has also contributed its technology and innovation to co-create projects that improve the performance, agility, and physical and psychological capabilities of players, as well as increase the loyalty of its fans and enhance its operational activities.

“SAP is known for its innovation in the technology sector,” says TSG Hoffenheim MD Jan Mayer. “Partnering with a company of this type allows access to cutting-edge technologies and ideas used in the context of football and sports management.” As a result, the club has made a name for itself throughout Germany as an innovative club that sets standards of training and developing youth players. In fact, according to Mayer, 23% of their young talent reaches the big leagues compared to the average 3%. Names like Niklas Süle, Roberto Firmino, and Julian Nagelsmann all started their careers at the club.

During its long-term collaboration with SAP, Hoffenheim has achieved many things including assessing the health and performance of players, personalizing fan experiences to increase engagement and loyalty, and migrating and optimizing its business processes to a single platform to support international growth. “TSG partnered with SAP to steadily steer its business toward its goal of becoming an intelligent and socially sustainable company,” says Mayer.

Technological projects favor performance

With a data-driven approach, SAP technology allows TSG Hoffenheim to uniquely analyze player performance and tactics more effectively, helping the team improve and make strategic decisions. So the SAP Sports One solution, a cloud-based sports management suite that makes it possible to visualize in real-time team performance, was developed in close relationship with the club in 2014.

More specifically, it simplifies daily data management tasks, facilitates decision making, and provides information and diagnoses about the training and physical and psychological condition of players while cross-referencing metrics to understand player performance and tendencies. Furthermore, it helps in the search for talent using AI to develop scouting report summaries. 

Today, Sports One is used by 80 clubs and federations of different disciplines in 18 countries.

In addition to sports management software, the Zuzenhausen headquarters has two technological facilities aimed to improve player performance, both physical and cognitive. To train the agility and speed of its men’s, women’s, and junior teams, Hoffenheim has the Footbonaut, a 14×14 meter box, whose walls have 72 hollow squares illuminated in different sectors where players must target with balls of varying speed and spin launched by two machines. For cognitive skill training, there’s the Helix Arena, a virtual reality scenario initially developed with SAP, which has a giant 360-degree screen that surrounds the player and shows situations of a match in real time. 

“The training exercises in Helix are designed to help players sharpen their cognitive skills and, therefore, respond quicker in a real match situation,” says Mayer. In 2020, the TSG replaced the old Helix developed by SAP with an improved version. Currently, SAP supports the club with evaluation and processing data generated in the Helix and Footbonaut through the SAP Interactive Data Space, an interactive room and collaborative where players distil and learn from all this information, and devise strategies to apply it all on the field.

Internal and operational innovation

“Beyond the field of play, SAP business solutions help optimize various operations within the club, from finance, to marketing, to ticket sales,” says Mayer. Like many companies and multinationals, Hoffenheim uses SAP ERP software in its areas of finance, payroll, logistics, warehouse, and business partner management. Plus, there’s the Employee Central solution from SAP SuccessFactors, where TSG’s 320 employees can use self-service features in the cloud to create vacation requests, for instance. 

“ERP is an application designed to optimize business and IT processes by reducing complexity, increasing adaptability, and delivering greater IT value at a lower cost than traditional ERP solutions,” he says.

Likewise, it has several other platforms including SAP Analytics Cloud, which allows a more detailed view of data related to sports and the company; SAP Event Ticketing to analyze ticket sales; SAP Customer Checkout to analyze merchandise and catering income; SAP Sales Cloud to simplify sales and increase the customer and fan experience; and SAP Commerce Cloud where its online store is based. 

“It all helps TSG facilitate the purchasing process for fans with a seamless experience, from search to sale,” says Mayer. “A combination of intuitive self-service capabilities and AI-powered merchandising, guided selling, assisted service, and chatbots further aid the purchasing process. It also simplifies complex commerce and ordering processes so TSG can engage fans more effectively and manage the supply chain from demand to fulfilment.”