Every Other Week

Rugby, video analysis, and being a student again at 30

If I were asked what my passion in life is, I would most likely answer rugby. I’ve been playing for more than a decade now, and even got a couple of caps with the Danish national 7s team.

When I got a long-term injury in 2025, the national team staff asked if I wanted to join them and work on video analysis. This sounded super cool, combining my passion for the sport and my interest in numbers & analysis. But that was very new to me.

To learn a bit more about what I was asked to do, I signed up for a degree in sports video analysis and data science. Here I was, at 30, a student again! I mainly learnt how to use the software, and what to do with the data.

Then I got to use these new skills for the 2026 season. I helped the rest of the staff analyse our opponents, in order to build a tailored strategy before the games. During the tournaments I also processed the footage of our own games to get some statistics about what we needed to fix and focus on before the next game.

It takes about one hour to go through a 14-minute game in order to clip every single element of the game we want to track.

Who made the pass, was it good? How many infringements did we do, and which ones? How many phases of play did we go through before we scored? Are we able to score every time we enter the 22m zone? … The list of questions is very long. But the numbers I get out of the video clipping help answer most of them.

It is a lot of manual work that will probably become obsolete soon because of AI, but I enjoyed doing it. It also allowed me to stick around the team despite being injured, and follow them to tournaments across Europe (by train, of course).

I have now moved back home to France, so the coming season will be a bit different, and mainly remote. But the plan is to keep doing the same, as long as it’s helpful!