Case Study – Fenerbahçe Beko Istanbul

Founded in 1907, Fenerbahçe won Turkish national basketball championships in 1957, 1959, and 1965. The club beat Tofas to win the Turkish League in 1999 and made it to the EuroBasket Final Eight in 1999. Following the 2006 merger with four-time national championships Ulker, Fenerbahçe qualified for the EuroLeague playoffs in 2008 and won the domestic league and cup in 2010 and 2011.

They reached five straight Final Fours between 2015 and 2019 and three championship games, becoming the first Turkish team to win the EuroLeague in 2017. Fenerbahçe claimed their 10^th Turkish league title in 2022 and made it to the EuroLeague playoffs the next two years.

Collecting Consistent Performance and Injury Data

Before joining Fenerbahçe, Kostas Chatzichristos, the club’s director of performance, spent eight years with CSKA Moscow, helping them win two EuroLeague titles, seven league championships, and seven Russian cups. In 2017, he saw that the club needed a way to keep track of players’ injuries and illnesses, while also providing an overview of their performance.

“We realized that we couldn’t keep using spreadsheets – we needed a system,” Kostas said. “What I liked about AthleteMonitoring was that it met our needs for injury recording, calendaring, and sharing information. Simplicity was also important, and it was customizable. It would allow us to record player data offline when we traveled. We ran a test, and it proved to be reliable too. So we started with just a few features.”

Without the ability to gather, aggregate, and interpret data, it’s difficult for it to inform decision-making for players’ performance and medical care.
“The first challenge is to try and coordinate the whole staff to collect consistent data,” Kostas said. “We travel a lot, players aren’t always available to do what we’d like them to, and we have people coming in at different times, so it’s hard to organize. The second challenge is that there’s a lot of data coming in from different sources. The most common question I’d hear is, ‘Why didn’t I know about that?’ It was difficult to tell everyone what was going on and share information in the right way.”

When Kostas went from CSKA Moscow to Fenerbahçe, he didn’t just bring some staff with him, but also the solution he relied on for injury surveillance and performance management.

“I moved to Fenerbahçe with my physio, and as AthleteMonitoring had become part of our way of working, I told management that we needed to get it. At CSKA, we were using it for recording and analyzing data, so for me, it was a no-brainer. I already had a relationship with the team at AthleteMonitoring and they took care of us.”

Putting Player Information in a Central Hub

It’s hard for most teams to combine information stored on paper, in various databases, and in niche systems, visualize it, and give access to everyone involved in managing athletes’ preparation, treatment, and overall wellness. AthleteMonitoring overcame this issue at Fenerbahçe by consolidating performance and medical data in a single, secure, and centralized platform.

“AthleteMonitoring makes everybody’s lives easier because all the information we need is in one place,” Kostas said. “It gives me the sense of being in control. I’m aware of what’s happening in all corners of the system, and it reduces the number of blind spots.”

In addition to enabling Kostas to plan his day, update coaches on players’ availability, and modify training and treatment, AthleteMonitoring allows him to coordinate with his colleagues more effectively. In many clubs, there are silos between disciplines, but at Fenerbahçe, the entire performance and medical staff has united around a single source of truth.

“We have a place where everybody can go and record their information, retrieve it, and then share it,” Kostas said. “AthleteMonitoring is the main hub that everything goes into, and from there, we make sense of the data. It’s also a great way to communicate and start conversations among us. This is crucial for a team that has such a high pace and a fairly large number of staff members.”

In the seven seasons that Kostas has been utilizing AthleteMonitoring in Russia and Turkey, he has seen its capabilities expand. This has enabled him and his colleagues to extend it to many areas of performance and medical operations.

“Over the years, we’ve used more features,” Kostas said. “The system has evolved based on users’ recommendations and now we’re basically running the whole team with it. Testing, assessments, questionnaires, recording practices, uploading medical records – it’s all done with AthleteMonitoring and it is very central to our practice.”

Reducing Injury Risk

To help get ahead of potential injuries, Kostas and his team combine player assessments from systems such as VALD ForceDecks, self-reported wellness surveys, IMU practice tracking data from KINEXON, and staff reporting in AthleteMonitoring.

“We have an early warning system and anytime a player tells a staff member about a problem, they’re required to log it,” Kostas said. “If someone has calf or knee pain for two days in a row but still plays, we all need to know about it so we can be proactive. These early warnings often turn into injuries, so it’s important to be able to detect those, share that information, and have an algorithm for what to do. Last season we had 21 percent less lost days than in my first season, we’ve seen injury rates decrease, and we’ve got a good handle on return to play. AthleteMonitoring is helping us work more closely together, which has a positive impact on the players.”

If a player gets hurt, they complete an additional daily survey to report on their pain level, how the site of the injury feels, and what they experienced during rehab or modified training sessions. This enables Kostas and his team to see how they’re healing. The AthleteMonitoring system allows Fenerbahçe to manage the entire continuum of care from the moment an athlete is injured until when they’re cleared to return to practice and play, including scheduling appointments with staff members.

“One of the features that we use the most in AthleteMonitoring is the clinical notes,” Kostas said. “For every injury, we open a case and record everything staff members do with that athlete. So if I’m away on a three-day tour and have a player back in Istanbul, I can log in and see their progress. There are also reports like injury incidence and prevalence that let us track injuries. AthleteMonitoring added a feature that lets us see what type of medicine a player is using and how much of it. Over time, the system gets better and better in giving us opportunities to record more things.”

Tracking Player Progress

In addition to providing a daily snapshot in a dashboard – which Kostas said “is a great invention because it lets you see everything”– AthleteMonitoring allows him to assess player progress over time.

“Long-term tracking is valuable because you can spot trends,” Kostas said. “We can see events like practices, games we’ve won or lost, and when we’ve had 100 percent availability or 75 percent. For example, there’s always a big disruption after EuroLeague games and travel. We can tell what’s really happening to the athletes, how these events affect them, and what can we do about it.”

Such monitoring is more difficult at certain times of year. After Fenerbahçe’s season ends in mid-June, senior players compete in international competitions, such as EuroBasket, the Olympics, and the FIBA Basketball World Cup, while younger squad members participate in junior national team tournaments. Others head home to work out with personal trainers and coaches. The team doesn’t reassemble until late August, meaning that the offseason can become what Kostas called “a black box.”

“One of the biggest challenges when the preseason starts is that we need to figure out what condition the players are in because the training camps are short and intense,” Kostas said. “If you have a monitoring system in place that players are comfortable with, you can use it during the summer to have them report as much as they can – from wellness questionnaires to session RPEs. By getting this information, you can have a better training camp and adjust it to the capabilities of your players so you don’t have injuries that can jeopardize the season.”

Improving Relationships with Players and Coaches

Another benefit of utilizing subjective surveys during the summer and competitive season is that they not only inform workload management but provide a frequent touch point between players and Fenerbahçe’s staff. Questionnaire responses are normalized with Z-scores. If they’re within a player’s personalized normal range, a consideration like sleep is color coded green. Yellow means there’s reason for caution, and red is a warning sign.

“By asking these questions every day, we’re opening a communication channel,” Kostas said. “Most players appreciate being asked how they feel, and it builds trust. If someone tells me, ‘It’s all reds today,’ I continue the conversation and find out if they had a bad night, their kid is sick, or they’re stressed.

AthleteMonitoring is helping us build relationships with our players and enables us to manipulate their loads throughout the week.”
Some of Fenerbahçe’s staff – including Kostas, physiotherapists, doctors, and other practitioners – use AthleteMonitoring to provide a detailed view of each player’s medical and performance status. It also offers a simple summary for others.

“The coach doesn’t want to see a lot of reports – he just needs to know how the team is doing physically,” Kostas said. “I have to be ready to tell him who is injured, who is capable of practicing according to our standards, and who needs training to be modified. I share a simple document with each player’s photo and two or three pieces of information. It helps to give a centralized picture of the team that day.”

As significant as the features of an athlete management system are, the human connections between the client and vendor are just as vital to a successful deployment.

“When you have a system that’s a crucial part of your daily function, the relationship with the vendor is important,” Kostas said. “If I have a problem, I don’t want to submit a service ticket, wait two days, and then talk to someone I don’t know. With AthleteMonitoring, if I have an issue, I reach out and hear back from somebody quickly. At the end of the day, we work with people, not with software, and our partners at AthleteMonitoring have become part of our team.”

Quick Facts

Sport: Basketball
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Departments using solution: Performance, medical, coaching
Main product uses: Injury and illness tracking, performance and load monitoring, assessments
Integrations: KINEXON and VALD