Players should own the data their bodies produce

Wearable tracking has quietly created a market in athlete biometrics, and the athlete is the one party with no say in it.

A footballer signs a contract with a club. The club buys a tracking system from a vendor. The vendor stores the data, aggregates it across thousands of players, and sells insight products back into the industry. Somewhere in that chain a young player's soft tissue history becomes an asset on somebody's balance sheet, and at no point was he asked a question he could meaningfully answer, because the alternative to consenting was not being selected.

I do not think this is a scandal in the tabloid sense. Most clubs use the information exactly as intended, to keep people fit. The problem is what happens at the edges of a career. That same record follows a player into a transfer negotiation, where a buying club's medical department can read a history of warning readings and reduce an offer, and into a contract renewal, where a thirty-year-old's declining sprint numbers become an argument used against him by the people who collected them.

The obvious comparison is medical records, which are governed carefully in every other context. Nobody would accept an employer holding a searchable database of an employee's physiological decline and sharing it with prospective future employers. In sport it is routine and it is written into standard contracts in a paragraph nobody reads at nineteen.

Player associations have started pushing on this and I think they are right to, though the remedy usually proposed, which is a right to access your own data, is far too weak. Access is not control. What matters is the right to restrict onward transfer, and a rule that data collected for injury prevention cannot be introduced in a commercial negotiation without consent. That would cost clubs very little and change the balance considerably.

There is a competitive argument on the other side worth taking seriously. Shared data across a league makes injury research possible, and better research protects players collectively. Fine. Anonymise it. The research value lives in the aggregate and the commercial value lives in the identified individual record, and those two things can be separated by anybody who wants to separate them.

The vests are staying. They are useful. The question is only who gets to read what they say about a man's knee in five years' time, and right now the answer is everybody except him.