Lionel Messi’s appearance for Argentina last month in a friendly game against Nigeria was a little different to usual. But it wasn’t to do with his role on the field, for he played in his famous striker position, receiving the ball in deep positions and weaving in between defenders. Nor was it to do with his performance, which was typically brilliant and resulted in two assisted goals. What was different, however, was what he wore on his feet.

For the entire game, the superstar striker played in a pair of Adidas F50 miCoach, the first pair of football boots to contain an electronic chip inside its soles. While Messi ran around the helpless Nigerian defenders, the device recorded every piece of information about his speed, work rate and distance travelled. At the final whistle, a rich bank of data had been created that explained his performance over the whole ninety minutes. The player even uploaded this information to his personal website later on for anyone to download and view.

This might all sound like a football match from the future, but it’s just the latest development in technology that is gradually telling us more about how sports people fare out on the field. And it’s all been possible thanks to technological advancements, according to Dr Marco Cardinale, the Head of Sports Science and Research of the British Olympic Association. ‘The miniaturisation of batteries, GPS, magnetometer, gyroscopes and accelerometers in the last few years has meant an increase in the use of tracking devices aimed at quantifying and characterising motion patters in athletes,’ says Cardinal.

So why haven’t we heard about chipped athletes before? The reason, says Cardinale, is that this technology has mostly been reserved for the training field. ‘It’s become so prevalent in training that there’s now as many decisions made on numbers and data as on intuition and feel,’ says Cardinale. ‘Technology applied to equipment is a new addition to this. Now we can have real time information and can visualise what happens, just like in Formula 1.’

Measuring basic body responses such as blood pressure heart rate is nothing new. Heart rate monitors have been available on the market for several years. But what’s more recent is the ability to measure several different performance variables. Ken Clark, a Phd student at the Locomotor Performance Laboratory at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the US, says that many Universities, for instance, have now added complex instrumentation to weights rooms.