Ronaldo’s Whoop Data
Cutting Edge Insight or Smart Marketing?
For those of you based in Europe, and with even a slight interest in the sport of football (or soccer), it’ll be hard to escape the clutches of the European Championships which have taken over our summer TV options. Here in the UK, there are two matches on most days, spread across two different channels. For me, this is great, especially in an Olympic year, with more sport due in the next couple of months. Although, I can also see how this may not be ideal for those who find sport boring. I won’t waste my time talking about how England are performing so far...
At the time of writing, the tournament has just concluded the round of 16. This leaves 8 teams still in the competition: England, Spain, France, Germany, Türkiye, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Portugal. So far, only one of these matches has required a penalty shoot-out to separate the teams – Portugal vs Slovenia. This situation was able to give us data which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t been publicly shared before.
Cristiano Ronaldo is arguably the most recognisable athlete in the World. He has appeared for Portugal on over 200 occasions, and scored 130 international goals. This is in addition to his 33 senior trophies. As if his sporting achievements weren’t enough, he is also the most followed individual on Instagram, with over 630 million followers.
Earlier this year, he invested in, and became a global ambassador of, Whoop. If you’re in the health and fitness space, you’ll have done well to have never heard of either Whoop or Ronaldo before. Whoop are a company which claims to possess the World’s most advanced wearable health device, with their band having over 99% accuracy for heart rate and heart-rate variability tracking. This gave Whoop the opportunity to observe and share heart rate data for an athlete who is widely considered to be the greatest of a generation, if not of all time, during one of the most high-pressure situations possible on a football pitch. Have a look below.
In the image, you can see Ronaldo’s heart rate for the period of time after the match ended and during the subsequent penalty shoot-out period. For context, after the final whistle, there was a period of time spent deciding who would take the penalties and which goal would be used, before the teams took it in turns to take penalties. On this occasion, Slovenia took and missed the first penalty, before Ronaldo took Portugal’s first and scored. Slovenia missed their next two, with Portugal scoring theirs to secure a place in the next round. This only took around 10 minutes to complete, but you can see there are great fluctuations in heart rate during this time. However, one of these timestamps is more contentious than the others...
The image above depicts Ronaldo entering what Whoop are labelling a ‘flow’ state, in the short period of time after the full-time whistle but before his penalty. By definition, a flow state is a “... particular state of optimal activation in which participants are completely immersed in their activity...leading performers to feel totally immersed in the activity and have the feeling that no effort is required.”1
There are some flaws with this logic. Research is pretty unanimous that flow state may only be reached after 10-minutes of undivided attention. This entire trace is only just 10-minutes long. We also cannot simply state that a flow state has been achieved based on heart rate data. There is a difference between a state of relative calm, and a state of flow. Perhaps more tellingly, there’s just a lack of common sense here. The heart rate graph begins at the end of the match: 90 minutes of regulation time followed by 30-minutes of extra time. Ronaldo had just completed two-hours of international-level competition, which, if we take some average data for International-level forwards, will have involved over 10km of total movement, including 20-30 maximum intensity sprint efforts. It is therefore only natural that, in the five-minute period of rest immediately after the match, his heart rate dropped as his movement levels declined. For many athletes, a heart rate recovery of 0.5 beats per second of recovery is a good standard. It makes sense that Ronaldo’s heart rate looked to have declined by ~70bpm in the 2-3 minutes immediately after the match.
We also need to assess the reliability of the heart rate data itself. I’m assuming here that Whoop collected the heart rate data themselves, using their own devices. If this is true, then blood flow data is collected using LEDs on the device in a process called Photoplethysmography (PPG). This method may be suitable for day-to-day exercise, but it must be questioned as to whether it is suitable for elite-level competition. If Whoop obtained this data from a third party, is may well be from a ECG-derived chest strap, which is more accurate and reliable, and more commonly used for elite sport than PPG.
So – what is the moral of the story? Data is absolutely great, and I love that Whoop have made this data accessible. However, there is a responsibility to ensure that we do not mislead the public with statements or speculation. Critical thought is so important, and we cannot tell the full story from a sample of data. In this example, the lack of concurrent heart rate and GPS data probably helps the narrative that a ‘flow’ state was achieved, which is likely a good marketing ploy. In reality, Ronaldo just took a short rest after 2 hours of exercise and then scored his penalty, before watching his team progress to the next round of a major competition, and I think those events explain the heart rate response more than the flow state.
1 Antonini Philippe, R., Singer, S. M., Jaeger, J. E. E., Biasutti, M., & Sinnett, S. (2022). Achieving Flow: An Exploratory Investigation of Elite College Athletes and Musicians. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 831508. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.831508