When 80,000 fans pack MetLife Stadium each time the Giants and the Jets play this season, they are unlikely to notice the 22 new radio receivers placed discreetly around the building. Nor will they see the radio frequency chips embedded in every player’s shoulder pads.

But with this gear, fans watching on television and following on the Internet will be able to see how fast and far players are running, how far offensive players are from their defenders and other statistics and data-driven graphics.

Like Major League Baseball, the N.B.A. and other sports leagues, the N.F.L. is trying to feed the seemingly insatiable desire of hard-core fans for in-depth information about the game. The league has long made its statistics available to video game developers, fantasy football league providers and television broadcasters looking for new and more authentic ways to illustrate games.

But several years ago, the N.F.L. tried to find a way to track players more precisely during games, not unlike how the M.L.B. tracks every pitch and the N.B.A. uses cameras to catalog every play. After a technology bake-off, the league last year signed a deal with Zebra Technologies, which uses radio-frequency technology to help companies monitor their merchandise, fleets and other assets.

Zebra put thumb-size battery-powered beacons in every player’s shoulder pads that emit 12 pings a second. Receivers installed in about half the stadiums in the league picked up the signals. The data was sent to servers in the press box, where each player’s X, Y and Z coordinates were mapped on a computer and shared with broadcasters. Zebra employees also cataloged every play.

“It’s a new way to quantify and analyze the game, and we think it can really revolutionize the N.F.L. ecosystem,” said Vishal Shah, the league’s vice president of media strategy and business development. “You’re going to see pretty in-depth uses. Who’s on the field and what are the matchups?”

This summer, Zebra installed its receivers and other equipment in the remaining N.F.L. stadiums, as well as in Wembley Stadium in London, which will host three regular-season games, and Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, where the Pro Bowl will be played. The league also signed a deal with Sportradar to distribute the data to the league’s broadcasters as well as to NFL.com and potentially other websites.

Eric Petrosinelli, a general manager in the sports division at Zebra, said the three-week installation at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., included hanging shoebox-size receivers in equidistant spots around the lower part of the stadium bowl, running cables from the receivers to the servers in the press box and testing the equipment to ensure it was properly calibrated.

“We’re creating geometry, creating triangles,” Petrosinelli said.

When players are in a pile, algorithms are used to estimate where each player is on the field, he added.

To free up equipment managers and extend each beacon’s battery life, Zebra installed a device above the doors of both locker rooms that automatically turns on every player’s beacons when he leaves and turns them off when he returns.

“We don’t want to get in the way of the flow of the locker room, so we look for ways to automate,” said Matt Seltz, who oversaw the installation at MetLife for Zebra.

While Zebra has shown it can properly collect the data, the broadcasters are still learning how best to use it. Fred Gaudelli, the producer of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” said the data helped the network show how far Jordy Nelson, the Green Bay Packers wide receiver, was from his nearest Chicago Bears defender on two touchdown receptions. In the Super Bowl, the data illustrated that linebacker Jamie Collins was the only New England Patriots player who played every defensive down, he said.

But the increasing number of teams that use hurry-up offenses leaves Gaudelli’s crew with less time to use Zebra’s statistics, he said. More fundamentally, some data, like a player’s speed or the total miles he runs during a game, was not captivating.

“The jury is out on how compelling the data that comes off those chips can be in the form of a live football game,” Gaudelli said. “There are some nice things it did, but it wasn’t a game changer.”

While broadcasters are allowed to use the data only during games, the real opportunity is for it to be used during pregame and halftime shows, when analysts have more time to sift through it to find patterns, Gaudelli said.

Ultimately, the N.F.L. hopes to share its in-game data with coaches, general managers and player personnel. (The league’s competition committee is evaluating the system.) But teams already use global positioning systems and other technology at their practice sites to track players. The N.F.L. does not force teams to use Zebra’s equipment, though the Detroit Lions, the New Orleans Saints and the San Francisco 49ers do so. The Seattle Seahawks and another 17 teams use technology provided by the Australian company Catapult.

Sam Ramsden, the Seahawks’ director of player health and performance, said that he used the data to see if his players might be tired or injured based on how fast they are running, how quickly they are accelerating and so on.

“I look at it more as segue to have a conversation with the player,” he said. “The data is basically saying, ‘Looks like you weren’t cutting as hard today — is there something going on?’ ”

Ramsden said each position had its own characteristics and each coach had his own techniques, and as more data was collected, he would be able to set benchmarks for how hard to push players in practice without injuring them. But that will take time, partly because only about half of his players volunteer to be tracked.

In time, the league and teams expect that the player-positioning data will become ubiquitous to the next generation of fans who follow the N.F.L. in increasingly varied ways.

“That’s the future of sports,” said Ulrich Harmuth, the managing director for corporate strategy at Sportradar, which distributes Zebra’s tracking data. “You’re not relying on one device, but multiple devices, and the tracking data is a whole new set of data.”