Throughout the 1980s, Lyons provided analyses of performance to club and international rugby union teams. In 1991, he was appointed as the notational analyst for the Welsh Rugby Union and attended the Rugby World Cup. A year later, with the help of colleagues in the School of Sport at the Cardiff Institute of Higher Education he established the Centre for Notational Analysis. The Centre was planned as a service to sport with the explicit aim of working with sport organizations to adopt real-time and lapsed-time analyses of performance in training and competition environments. During the 1990s, the clients of the Centre included The Welsh Rugby Union, the Football Association of Wales, the Football Association, Great Britain Hockey, the Welsh Lacrosse Association and the Welsh Canoeing Association. The Centre worked to support the British Lions rugby union tour of South Africa in 1997, provided a video service for the International Federation of Women's Lacrosse Associations at the 1997 World Cup in Japan and serviced the South African football team at the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France.