Mark Boddy is one of the lesser-known members of Sunderland's backroom team - but he's charged with helping keep the Black Cats one step ahead of the rest.

He is the club's video analyst, responsible for working with the Prozone analysis system to provide the players, manager and coaching staff with all the information and insight they need.

Boddy saw his own playing career cut short by injury at the age of just 19.  A promising midfielder on the books at Reading, the native north-easterner was forced to retire while still an apprentice after picking up a serious knee injury.

Forced to consider his future while spending long periods on the sidelines, Boddy was handed an opportunity to stay in the game by then- Royals boss Alan Pardew and his assistant Kevin Dillon, recently appointed manager at Aldershot.

"Funnily enough I was at Sunderland for seven years from the ages of 9 to 16," reflected Boddy in his office at the Academy of Light, part of a suite of rooms occupied by the coaching staff and manager Steve Bruce.

"Then I moved down to Reading but got injured at 17 and a half and ended up having to retire. Fortunately Alan and Kevin gave me the opportunity to get involved with the video analysis side for them.

"Kevin's a local lad - he's from Washington - and I got involved there and stayed for a year doing the same job I do here at Sunderland now.

"I then moved back home and at the time getting the job here wasn't concrete, but fortunately things just worked out for me and I'm in my fifth season at Sunderland now.

"I'm very fortunate. The best job in football is playing but the second-best is staying involved in the game. I didn't really think about it when I was playing."

The Prozone system is used by 15 clubs in the Barclays Premier League as well as a handful at lower levels in England and some of the giants of the European and world game.

It is based on a network of 10 video cameras installed around each ground, which record information on all aspects of the game whilst it is in progress. Once the game is over, the data is fed back to Prozone's HQ before being uploaded into the system for club use.

The package is scalable to suit the needs and resources of various clubs, with a number of add-ons available. Boddy works with Prozone 3, currently Prozone's best available analysis package.  The company are constantly developing new software to keep pace with the insatiable appetite for information.

Since its introduction back in the late Nineties, Prozone has become a valuable weapon on the armoury of the modern manager. Its real-time interface allows users to view the whole of any given fixture on a Football Manager-style graphical display alongside the traditional camera angles.

Each player has their movements and actions individually tracked to produce hundreds of different statistics, customisable at every turn.  At one point Boddy uses the graphical interface to remove the entire Arsenal team barring Cesc Fabregas, to show how effectively Jordan Henderson marked the midfielder.

Incidentally, the Prozone stats show Henderson ran the furthest distance of any player during the Arsenal win, clocking up around 13 kilometres during the game.

Further displays show a player's range of passing throughout a game, the team's average shape when the ball is in a particular area of the pitch and more with players moving in real time.  Every incident is instantly accessible.

The infinitely customisable nature of the data provided by Prozone means Boddy is often inundated with requests from the coaching staff on a weekly basis.

"After I've fed the data provided by Prozone into the system following a game I will produce a report for each member of Steve's coaching team, plus one for the manager himself," he said.

"That will give them the info they need to know about the game. Then they will sometimes come to me and ask for specifics. I have to carefully select what I give to them because a full report of all the stats would run into hundreds of pages."

Boddy is also called into action on a game day to provide on-demand video analysis for the manager, "both at half time if necessary and then again after the game."

He can be seen at every single home and away fixture, as well as all first-team friendlies. Boddy travelled with the team on the pre-season tour to Portugal and Amsterdam and provided tactical and technical support to Bruce, assistant manager Eric Black and the rest of the staff.

"I use a different system to take in the broadcaster's feed and then clip up all the different incidents in real time," he explained.  "The manager can then take a look at any incidents straight after the game in the dressing room if he needs to, and again while the team are travelling home.

"That ties in with Prozone to ensure we have all the information we need at our fingertips at any one time."

Away from matchdays, Boddy lays on analysis sessions for the players with Black, guiding those involved in the game through key incidents and highlighting important stats combined with the video evidence.

"Eric is quite a technical coach and we often use the facilities in the Academy to put sessions on for the players where we will use Prozone to review games, show them positive clips and say what worked and how we can improve.

"If the coaches want to watch a game the footage is customised to cut out all the time the ball is out of play.  That's very efficient as a game can now be viewed from start to finish in around 50 minutes.

"The scouts can use it as well - if they're coming back with information on opposition but missed an incident or want a second opinion we can call it up on the system and take a look at that easily.

"Quite a few of the lads ask for DVDs of their clips from particular games, such as Darren Bent who always wants a DVD every Monday morning after a Saturday game.  We work with a number of players on an individual basis, as well as the goalkeepers.

"It's non-stop. In the run-up to a game I will be working on preparing for that, then after the game's finished it's all about getting the analysis done and presented before moving on to the next one.  Then there are tasks like looking at upcoming opposition or dealing with any other games which we want to take a look at using the system."

Boddy has established himself as a key member of the backroom team and he thinks the video analysis side of football is only going to become more advanced as the game moves forward. 

Of course, he intends to keep Sunderland at the very forefront.

"A lot more clubs are getting involved now than when I first started out. It's a lot more intense - things used to be very basic but it's constantly improving and you'll find managers talking about it in the press.

"The players are buying into it too as the young players starting in the Academy are brought up with it and know what the system is about, as opposed to the older pros who didn't have Prozone when they were starting.  I can only see this side of the game getting bigger."