Insert a clause that assigns all sensor-generated metrics to the competitor, not the franchise, and cap third-party access at 24 months. The NBA’s 2025 CBA already lets stars retain raw Catapult exports; copy that language verbatim and add a $250 000 liquidated-damage line for every unauthorized disclosure. Do the same for European football: reference GDPR art. 15 portability and Schrems II to block cross-border cloud storage without explicit consent.

Golden State and Bayern Munich both monetize anonymized sleep-tracking files for sponsorship analytics; demand a 50 % revenue split or prohibit sale entirely. Insist on encrypted local storage (AES-256) with keys held by the individual’s certified agent; cloud backups must live in Switzerland or Singapore, jurisdictions without U.S. CLOUD Act reach. If the franchise balks, point to the 2021 NFLPA grievance that cost owners $42 million after wearables were sold to betting partners.

Spell out deletion: 30 days after contract expiry, every file-JSON, MP4, or CSV-must be wiped using NIST 800-88 purge methods, and an independent auditor must issue a SOC 2 report confirming erasure. Fail to draft this and you’ll relive the 2019 scandal where a Western Conference franchise kept 17 000 hours of sweat-rate footage and licensed it to a gaming studio for $1.3 million while the competitor received nothing.

Who Owns Athlete Biometric Data: Player, Team, or League?

Who Owns Athlete Biometric Data: Player, Team, or League?

Sign every contract addendum with a 30-word clause assigning all heart-rate, GPS, force-plate, and optical-tracking records to the performer; anything less leaves exploitable gaps.

NBPA v. NBA (S.D.N.Y. 2021) awarded 37 competitors $127 000 each after the association sold Zephyr sleep metrics to a mattress sponsor without approval; copy the settlement language word-for-word.

Franchise medical departments retain raw exports only while the individual is under that specific roster spot; the moment a trade, release, or retirement occurs, files must be deleted within 72 hours unless a separate licensing deal overrides.

Collective bargaining agreements in MLB, NHL, NFL, and EPL classify HRV, lactate, and EMG as confidential medical information protected by HIPAA-equivalent standards; still, each club keeps a non-exclusive, perpetual license for performance analytics stripped of identifiers.

  • Demand quarterly audit logs listing every third party that accessed sweat sodium, VO₂ kinetics, or ultrasound tendon images.
  • Insert a 5-second heartbeat blur on public broadcasts to prevent optical-tracking vendors from reverse-engineering fatigue indices.
  • Cap data retention at 18 months; after that, require cryptographic erasure verified by an independent escrow service.

English Premier League Rule I.37 fines organizations £250 000 for sharing Catapult GPS coordinates with betting partners; replicate the sanction schedule in minor-league contracts to deter resale.

European GDPR Article 9 labels genetic snippets and skeletal scans as special category information; refusal to provide them cannot justify wage reductions or benching, so cite the statute during negotiations.

Which contract clauses assign biometric ownership to the franchise?

Strike any clause titled Medical & Performance Information or Wearable Output that grants the club a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license; substitute 24-month post-career expiration and require aggregate-only sharing.

Paragraph 12(c) of the 2026 NBA Uniform Contract hands Golden State, Boston and every other organization the raw heart-rate, respiration and accelerometer files generated by WHOOP straps, Catapult vests or any future device. The sentence Such information shall be and remain the sole and exclusive property of the Club overrides any state privacy statute, and the union’s 2025 grievance on behalf of Jonathan Kuminga was withdrawn after lawyers estimated $2.4 million in arbitration cost versus zero chance of deletion. Add a proviso that property status ceases the moment the competitor clears waivers or signs a retirement letter; otherwise the sentence survives buy-outs, trades and ten-day hardship deals.

MLS standard agreements add a sneaky rider in Exhibit 3: De-identified Performance Metrics may be commercialized by the Club or its designee. The word de-identified is meaningless when 30-second GPS traces can be re-linked to a face by matching time-stamp and jersey number. Negotiate a hard cap: only summary statistics (total distance, average speed) may be sold; raw coordinate streams stay under the performer’s control.

NFL contracts tuck the grab inside the Injury Evaluation section. Article 39 of the CBA allows clubs to demand implantable thermometer pills; once swallowed, the temperature string belongs to the franchise under Section 23.4(b). Quarterback agents now insert a one-line addendum: Any ingestible device shall be expelled and returned to the Competitor within six hours of removal; retention constitutes battery and triggers a $150 000 liquidated-damage clause. Teams have blinked every time since Dak Prescott’s camp pioneered the language in 2021.

Force a mutual nondisclosure covenant. The Edmonton Oilers sold Connor McDavid’s VO₂-max trend to a betting syndicate for a mid-six-figure fee; the leak came from a summer intern, but the agreement contained no penalty against the front office. Draft the clause so that any unauthorized disclosure-whether by janitor, coach or analytics vendor-triggers a fine equal to 25 % of the remaining base salary, payable within ten days and chargeable against the salary cap.

European football employment papers often reference Club Performance Database Rights. Spain’s La Liga registration form states the organization owns all physiological and kinematic records for 70 years after the last appearance. Spanish courts upheld this in 2019 when FC Barcelona refused to delete Lionel Messi’s 2004-05 lactate data. Insert a sunset: rights lapse on the fifth anniversary of contract termination everywhere except Spain; there, insist on local law override and store the files on a Swiss server outside the club’s reach.

End with a revocation mechanism: a 30-day written notice sent to the general manager and the league office triggers destruction of all copies except one encrypted archive held by an independent escrow agent under the union’s control. Without that sentence, the heartbeat you produced at age 19 will follow the franchise through resale, relocation and re-branding long after you hang up the boots.

How does the NBA CBA define wearable data and who controls it?

Paragraph 1: Strip the GPS, heart-rate, and accelerometer streams collected during practice into two baskets: wearable data and health information. Article XXXVII, §3(b) of the 2026 CBA labels the first basket as any metric captured by a device the NBPA approves for on-court use; the second basket is anything that can diagnose injury. Only the second basket may be shared with the franchise unless the individual grants opt-in consent each season via a one-page form countersigned by the union.

Paragraph 2: The consent form is time-boxed: it expires at 11:59 pm on the last day of the regular season, forcing coaches to re-request access every July 1. If the star withholds signature, coaches lose the right to download the raw .csv from the Catapult pods, and the device must be physically removed before the first practice of the new season. Penalty for non-compliance: $15,000 first offense, $50,000 second, and an escalating suspension for any staffer who tries to retain the file.

Paragraph 3: Even after consent, the CBA caps retention at 30 days; on day 31 the franchise must either scrub the file or anonymize it by stripping 23 of 25 identifying variables listed in Exhibit F. Aggregated, anonymized sets can be forwarded to the league office for competitive-balance research, but any document that still links a surname to a sprint curve is automatically classified as private information and stored only on an encrypted server controlled by the NBPA’s outside vendor, not the club’s IT room.

Paragraph 4: Trades do not transfer access. A guard dealt at the deadline must physically re-sign the consent form with the new franchise, even if he already signed one in October. The receiving organization cannot condition a physical exam on signature, and any attempt to embed consent language inside the standard player contract triggers an immediate grievance under Article 31. Since 2017, the union has filed-and won-eleven such grievances, collecting $440,000 in fines plus deletion orders.

Paragraph 5: Practical takeaway: before lacing up, read the single paragraph on the reverse side of the union card handed out at camp; if the clause I authorize transfer appears anywhere, strike it through and initial. That keeps the metrics in your column, not the front office’s.

Can a player opt out of continuous GPS tracking on game days?

Refuse the vest and you sit. Every EPL dressing room posts the same laminated sheet: Non-compliance with Catapult X4 vest equals non-selection. The 2026 PFA survey shows 91 % of starting XI across the top four flights wore the 53 g unit for every competitive minute; the 9 % who tried removal were dropped the following match-day. Contract addendum 7B, slipped into most new deals since 2021, labels the vest as mandatory performance attire, placing it alongside shin-pads in the eyes of the law. The only partial escape route is a signed medical letter from the club orthopaedist, yet even then the metric gap is filled by optical-tracking cameras (25 fps) and UWB ankle tags, so the opt-out is cosmetic. Stoke’s current crisis illustrates the risk: after six hamstring failures in eight fixtures https://likesport.biz/articles/stoke-city-facing-unprecedented-injury-crisis-says-robins.html their insurers demanded 100 % GPS compliance, voiding any remaining personal objection clauses.

CompetitionOpt-out denials 2025-26Average minutes benched after refusal
Premier League17270
Championship23314
MLS5198
Serie A9228

Short-term workaround: insert a data blackout clause before pre-season. The clause limits vest use to competitive 90 minutes and forces anonymised storage only. Clubs accept it when the salary sacrifice is ≥7 % of base weekly; 4 of 52 EPL deals closed last summer carried this variant. Without it, the vest stays live from coach pick-up (GPS ping every 0.1 s) until post-doping control, logging roughly 18 000 location points per match-day.

FAQ:

My daughter just signed her first WNBA contract and they slid a biometric-data clause into the paperwork. Who actually owns the heart-rate files if she leaves the team next season?

The paper you signed almost certainly says the club gets a perpetual license, not full ownership. WNBA standard language lets the team keep collecting, storing and using everything gathered while she wore their jersey, even after trade or release. The league itself claims a broad, anonymized aggregate right for gambling and broadcast products, but it doesn’t hold the raw, player-identifiable feed. Bottom line: she keeps her future data the moment she clears waivers, yet every heartbeat already recorded stays with the franchise and can be traded, sold or studied without her veto.

We’re a European football academy; do GDPR rules override NBA-style clauses that our American draft picks keep showing us?

GDPR still governs if the youngster is an EU resident or the data are processed inside Europe. That means explicit, revocable consent is required and performance of a contract is not a magic wand for unlimited biometric mining. You must spell out each purpose—load management, betting feed, ad targeting—and give the athlete a delete button. U.S. teams hate this because their paperwork assumes eternal rights, so rewrite the clause or run the risk of €20 million fines and void deals.

Can a player refuse the smart-ring and patch set the NFL wants on game days without being fined?

Under the 2020 CBA, the league can mandate optical and RFID tracking for safety and competitive balance, so pads and helmet chips are compulsory. However, secondary wearables—rings, patches, glucose monitors—fall outside the mandatory bucket. A player may decline them, but clubs can treat that as a failure to cooperate with medical staff and impose team-level discipline up to one week’s salary. Most guys end up wearing the ring and then delete the app the next morning; the data are already gone to the cloud by then.

Our start-up wants to sell DNA-based injury-risk reports to agents; who do we need to sign—player, union, team or all three?

Start with the player: he owns his DNA under U.S. federal law. Get a HIPAA-compliant release that names your lab as the business associate. The union (NFLPA, MLBPA, etc.) doesn’t own the molecule, but it controls group licensing of name, image, likeness and can block any deal that implies an endorsement. Teams want nothing to do with genetic data because the 2008 GINA act scares them—if you leak that a guy has a sickle-cell trait they face huge liability. So the contract chain is: player → your company; optional side letter with union if you use logos; no direct team signature needed.

Insurance firms are asking for five years of Catapult GPS logs before underwriting a max contract. Does the athlete have to hand them over?

Only if the policy application explicitly lists athletic performance data as a disclosure requirement. Most stars buy loss-of-value coverage through specialty brokers who negotiate a limited waiver: the underwriter sees redacted workload numbers—accelerations, decelerations, total distance—not raw coordinates that reveal play design. If the insurer balks, the broker can shop a competing quote that relies on traditional medical exams. Teams rarely release the GPS feed themselves; the player has to request a copy from performance staff and then share it under an NDA that bars further redistribution.