In this blog post, I explore five pivotal trends in sports science that are coming to the fore in 2025.
Table of Contents
Professional Athlete Workload: An Ongoing Debate
The conversation surrounding professional athlete workload has been a longstanding one. However, 2024 marked a crescendo in this debate, with numerous headlines highlighting the intense demands placed on athletes. The discussion is poised to intensify in 2025, with some in the field advocating for players to go on strike. As sports scientists, our role in monitoring and managing training loads becomes paramount. Notably, wider initiatives like FIFPRO's Player Workload Monitoring Tool provide valuable data to try to help navigate these challenges, but calls are growing for changes at the top.
The Continued Rise of Women's Professional Sports
The evolution of women's sports is both rapid and inspiring, yielding significant focus in recent years. I've included it as a trend in each of my last three years! As we gear up for events like the Women's Euros in football and the Rugby and Cricket World Cup, there’s a pressing need to bridge the gender data gap in sports science research.
Collaborations among institutions such as UTS, Edith Cowan University, and the Australian Institute of Sport are spearheading this change through collective research initiatives. These collective efforts emphasise better research methodologies and minimise research waste, creating a foundation for impactful future studies. It's not just about more research in women's sport, it's about better research.
Integrating Diverse Data Streams
In our technology-driven age, the integration of various data streams remains crucial. While wearable tech continues to dominate discussions, the growing collection of data across platforms presents key challenges in sports science. The evolution of sports science practices increasingly depends on centralised data systems to unify insights from disparate sources across player tracking, strength and conditioning, testing, medical, scouting, and many more. Our responsibility extends to ensuring data security and compliance with evolving regulations, as we discussed earlier this year in our publication 'Big data. Big potential. Big problems?'. The seamless integration of these data streams remains key in deriving actionable insights for athletes.
5 Sports Science Trends in Full
For more detail on the three trends described above, along with the final two trends - Generative AI in Sports Science and Synthetic Data Solutions - watch the video below:
Looking Ahead
In conclusion, these five trends cement an exciting future for sports science in 2025. I'm excited for the developments at Global Performance Insights and encourage you to stay tuned for a forthcoming course on load monitoring due early next year! Your engagement and support have been invaluable throughout 2024, and I look forward to sharing more sports science insights with you in the coming year.
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Looking Back on 2024's Trends
To look back on last year's sports science trends discussion, head here. There remains much overlap in the key trends with technology and data management at the fore, along with the evolution of women's sports, which has been an ongoing discussion for a number of years.