Big Data & Data Analysis in Sports: Changing the Dynamics Forever
If you haven’t heard the term “big data” yet, then don’t worry; it’s still a relatively new term to most pure sports fans, although this does depend on how far these technologies have begun to change your favorite sports so far. As we will discuss below, the NHL and soccer are two of the games in which these techniques are being openly discussed, but there seems little doubt that big data is being used behind the scenes in almost ever sport.
The creators of “Worldwide Soccer Manager 2022” (also known as Football Manager 2022) made a huge deal this year of how their game supposedly allows players to use the very same data analysis techniques using large data sets to help making decisions about their starting line-up and formation against different teams, when to make substitutions, and other such critical decisions.
We’ve heard a lot from those involved in preparing the US and Canadian hockey teams too, about how these same techniques are being used to help with their own decisions regarding who to take with them to Beijing for the forthcoming Winter Olympic Games, based on both individual and paired player performance.
With laws permitting online sports betting popping up in every corner of the United States. On the first of January 2021, the first online betting site in IA went live, leading many to ask, once again – where do online sportsbooks (and indeed, all sportsbooks) get their odds from?
The truth answer is becoming and more complex all the time; in areas where many bookmakers operate on the same patch, such as in the United Kingdom, a kind of “cartel” situation arose, where all of the major names would trade data on what bets had been placed with them, allowing each of the members to adjust their odds accordingly.
When the bookmakers were called out on this practice, their answer was to combine into a smaller number of big names – you can’t be indicted for sharing information with your competitors once you and your competitors become parts of the same company, after all.
Today, analysis of previous seasons is combined with incredibly intricate data – not just that published in the league tables, but also very deep-level player analysis and a minute-by-minute evaluation and re-evaluation of previous games.
All this data is used to create models which, once again, are fostering competition across the betting industry – whoever’s analysis turns out to be the best will make the most money. This is exactly how it should be in a free-market economy such as the United States.
