A REAL ADVANTAGE (OUR STORY)
The Moneyball Story sparked a data analytics revolution in sports. Most sports organization both amateur and professional now seek to find statistical trends and advantages that will help not only their teams rise to the top, but also help both their players and managers view their respective games from a myriad of new and unique angles. For example, most Premier League Teams have a department based solely on the data analytics of match performance and training load. University sports department in America rely on analytics companies like Opta and Next Gen who pour out hundreds of pages on both player and team match statistics (e.g. pass completion percentage and 1v1 duels won etc.). The hope is that by calculating and analyzing these statistics, coaches, managers, and team officials will find a winning advantage that will improve match performance.
It is easy to see that there is an obsession across the world with obtaining these statistics, yet the real question is what do coaches, managers, and team officials really do with all of these statistical computations? And that is where the discussion starts to get interesting because we are only in the beginning of this data revolution. The answer is that most sports organizations do not know how to research, organize, and apply the data they are receiving. Better yet, many of the data analytics companies both promise and certify that they measure human performance in sports, yet if one looks closely enough they only measure a few facets of it.
One thing they actually measure is player health and training load, which has its place in sports. Using heat maps and GPS tracking is important for measuring player health and is ultimately a way to avoid issues such as player injury and freshness. The heat maps allow coaches and trainers to see trends and patterns in player movement, but my question is are not a lot of those trends and patterns obvious in a game? Wouldn’t you expect a left back to have a heat map that is mostly on the left side of the field? The other tool that these companies offer is measurements from matches and this is where they come close to measuring actual player performance. Depending on the sport and the team, these companies will measure everything from shots taken to balls defended from crosses. The data compiled is astounding, but again the question here is what is all of this data really measuring? Does computing how many passes your team completed really measure its performance.
Echoing Christoph Bierman’s Football Hacker’s, think back to Germany’s stunning 7-1 victory over Brazil in the World cup Semifinals in 2014. If you looked at all of the simple data without watching the match, you might have thought Brazil won the game. They had more shots and corners, a better passing percentage, and had more possession time on the ball. Brazil looked like the better team from the statistics, but looking at the score they were hardly the dominant team that day. It is not that these statistics don’t measure human performance on some level, it is just that they tend to have a limited and narrow focus. More succinctly, match play is only one facet of the player’s performance.
That is where DSA Laboratories has a comparative advantage against its competitors. We look at human performance across a much broader spectrum. We feel that human performance begins in the day-to-day grind of practice and ends in the matches played. Our analytical tools therefore objectively measure a player’s performance in practices along with the more basic information such as training load. In practice, coaches and trainers can control the environment and it is therefore the ultimate laboratory for and predictor of both performance and development. We developed methods to measure player performance including categories like various players’ decision making, compatibility, and communication. Moreover, we can create a competitive peer ranking amongst the players and we can also create player profiles that confidently project their development over time.
Another clear advantage is that DSA is willing to work alongside coaches and team officials to create their own measurements to fit their vision of performance. We do not believe that there is only one route to developing players and teams, there are many. That is why there are so many successful sport coaches all over the world. Therefore, we feel that the coach becomes an integral part of any analytical tool. He asks the questions, he interprets the data, and he creates the narrative. Our tools at DSA are to help a coach be more effective and objective not replace his wealth of experience. The latter gives life and meaning to the data. Instead, our tools give an objective reference of player performance and development across a much wider spectrum so that an organization can not only make good decisions when creating a lineup, making a substitution, or recruiting a player, but they can also support their players development in real time with data that lays out their strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, coming full circle, we can take the stacks of relevant player performance data from matches and along with the coaches’ input put it to good use for any organization. After several meetings with professional sports organizations and university coaches, we heard over and over how this match analysis data was both “overwhelming” and “ambiguous.” It was clear that these organizations had not found a way to organize, integrate and apply this data. For us, matching it up with the practice data is the key to creating a true player profile and obtaining a reliable measure of player performance over time. It is not that this match analysis is irrelevant, we believe that it is just one piece of both the player and team performance puzzle. In the end, DSA gives any sports organization the ability to really measure and predict human performance over time. A tool that is clearly missing and a major advantage for any team in the midst of this data revolution.
