Considering that technology & data have made an impact in so many industries, why should sports be an exception? Welcome to the truly wonderful (and complex) world of Sports Analytics!
“People in both fields operate with beliefs & biases. To the extent you can eliminate both & replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” So said (the original) Michael Lewis, in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”
Just as making use of data to optimize performance is widely used across all industries, the same now applies to sports. All sports.
In this article, we will discuss the ins & outs of Sports Analytics & how technology is driving that practice forward.
What Is Sports Analytics?
Back to Moneyball for a moment, perhaps you’ve only heard about analytics in the context of sports thanks to Brad Pitt. In reality, Sports Analytics has been around ever since the inception of commercial sports. What should be a process of collecting relevant, historical & other statistical data to improve the performance of an individual player or a team, has long been driven by personal judgments & mysterious instincts. The real tricks of the trade were privy to a small subset of the sports world.
The documented history of Sports Analytics goes back to the 19th-century baseball guide, ‘The Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player’ written in 1861. The book states that the analysis of a player’s play in the field is necessary to estimate the player’s skill. Well, that’s exactly what Sports Analytics is all about. As the stakes grew bigger, it became clear that this practice needed a digital boost to deliver predictable impact & turn it into a combination of art & science & that’s the era we are in now.
Fast forward to the 21st century, Sports Analytics has the capability to make use of modern data collection & interpretation tactics from real-time video data capture to powerful algorithms; it can now help interpret the data to create player strategies & game simulations for practice sessions as well as major games.
Global teams playing a variety of sports from the Chicago Cubs & Houston Astros of MLB to Toronto Maple Leafs & Chicago Blackhawks of NHL or San Antonio Spurs of the NBA & several teams of Grand Prix already make active use of Sports Analytics to improve their performance & gain a competitive edge. In fact, the practice is becoming more mainstream by the day & unsurprisingly, NFL teams are now looking to work with solution providers who can provide AI & Data Analytics based support to their operations.
Let’s dig into the specifics of how it’s being used in modern sports:
Deep Insights on Athlete Performance
Well, this one’s just table stakes.
Improving the performance of a team or a player makes use of on-field Sports Analytics where data is collected, interpreted & used for finding gaps in performance & understanding the individual’s shortcomings & hidden strengths.
This dovetails into strength & weakness insights of the team as well as the competitors.
Of course, this would also used for player trading & drafting (Tracking a player’s performance over a period of time & onboarding them to the team). A digital transformation to the Moneyball strategy, if you will.
Analyzing Injury & Predicting Player Health
Making active use of video footage of player performance & can help determine player stamina, active game time & similar metrics to tell a lot about the player’s health. Analyzing previous situations that led to a player injury can help provide intelligence to avoid them in the future.
Improving Revenue from Tickets
The sports industry is big business with high-value business decisions & tremendous economic repercussions even beyond the playing field. Revenues from game events, merchandising, sponsorships, media rights are critical for every team today. Off-field Sports Analytics helps in maximizing these. From finding the sweet spot for ticket prices to predicting the footfall at an event, Sports Analytics can help in streamlining revenue streams. Sports Analytics is also a great way of mapping fan loyalty, gauging the popularity of a player or a team via social media data & trends which can be used to launch merchandise as well as launch products & TV shows.
Betting
Sports Analytics is intricately tied to legal betting, a highly organized industry. Sports Analytics is the backbone of sports gambling as it lays the conditions, terms & odds that drive everything from fantasy leagues to betting on results for bookies & punters. With real-time player stats available readily, sports gambling creates fan interest & loyalty as it becomes a calculated, tactical play.
Of course, making Sports Analytics work isn’t easy. Expert data annotators with the capability to understand the rules, flow & nuances of each sport, are critical to lay the foundation. These data annotators draw & label the bounding boxes, track & record player movements, tag player actions to create a comprehensive record that the algorithms can dig into to deliver impact etc. They produce comprehensive data that sports coaches & expert strategists can dive into to make important decisions.
Sports Analytics is already actively being used across diverse games from soccer, rugby, hockey, ice-hockey, tennis, badminton, baseball, cricket, lacrosse to kick boxing. Needless to say, partnering with the right service providers can be the first step in building a winning strategy for your team.
Let us give you a few free hours in the batting cage. Drop us a line at info@qualitasglobal.com to get a sample game annotated at no cost!