From building unicorns to saving lives: How analytics is making a mark across sectors
“Four years ago, I was just a football fan watching and being passionate about the match,” says Giels Brouwer.
Brouwer, who was a student then at the University of Twente, says one of his professors told him how NASA had selected astronauts using a combination of algorithms.
He and his roommate thought they could use the same strategy with choosing the top football players.
They came up with their own analytics which they used at a football championship. They thought of building a game for managers so they can understand in real-time the game and analyse the potential of all players.
Today, Brouwer is CEO of SciSports, which advises and builds solutions to determine the influence of individual players on team results, track player development, determine potential market value for a player, and predict game results.
With football contracts being signed at upwards of US$50 million, it is important that agents and clubs understand as much about a player as possible.
Brouwer says last summer alone, the system they developed helped with 40 transfers of players. We had more than 80 clients on our platform and they include big clubs, says Brouwer. “It is wonderful they see the real value of data right now.”
“It was pretty bizarre,” says Brouwer, as he describes the growth of the company, at a panel discussion at the 2017 Analytics Experience in Amsterdam.
“This is cutting edge stuff,” says Oliver Schabenberger, chief technology officer at SAS, who is working with SciSports in developing the system that is used to predict the future performance of players.
“We want to push deep learning decision-making on images, take complex stuff to the edge,” says Schabenberger. “That is a lot of fun, that is revolutionary.”
Schabenberger says the European Union has named SciSports as one of the ‘next unicorns’, referring to startups that are valued at over $1 billion.
SAS and SciSports are now in a development partnership. “We wanted to build solutions that were never built before,” says Brouwer on the importance of this partnership.
The companies are using SAS Viya capabilities and SciSport’s BallJames camera system.
