{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.title}}
{{item.videoDuration}}
Data and tech offer a winning formula for sports
Copy link
Link copied to clipboard
Key takeaways
- Professional sports has a long history of incorporating digital technologies, going back to the mid-20th century.
- Technology such as wearables and digital mapping are improving the way athletes perform and games are scored.
- Data analytics pioneered in the sports arena has been successfully adapted to other areas, such as political forecasting.
One of the earliest digital innovations in professional sport remains one of the most successful. Facing an existential crisis in the mid-1950s, the United States’ NBA basketball league introduced a novel piece of technology to inject speed and excitement into the game: a 24-second digital ‘shot clock’.
Looking like a cross between an all-red traffic light and an oversized toaster, the floor-mounted clock gave the attacking team only 24 seconds to attempt to score, or else hand over the ball to the other team. Before this, teams could keep the ball as long as they wanted.
The impact of this technology tweak was swift. Following the shot clock’s debut, teams scored an average 13 more points compared to the previous season. Thanks in part to digital technology, basketball had evolved into a faster, higher-scoring and overall more exciting game.
This early pairing of sport and technology set the stage for a close relationship that continues to this day. Throughout many of the world’s professional sports leagues and competitions, digital is helping to improve athlete performance and more accurately score and mediate the games themselves.
Ready player one
For several new digital technologies, the hyper-competitive world of professional sports is proving to be an ideal testing ground. The most prominent of these are wearables: worn devices that measure crucial biometric and performance data.
This year, the MLB baseball league approved several wearable devices for use, including sleeves that measure elbow strain and ‘bioharnesses’ that capture heart rates and respiration.
Over in the UK, Leicester City Football Club recently outfitted its players with devices that record a range of performance data, including acceleration, position and the impact of collisions. Capturing more than 800 data points per second, this information can help minimise injury downtime and optimise rest and recovery periods.
However, for those who do get injured, digital technology is again proving useful. In the US, virtual reality has been assisting NFL players on the mend, allowing them to experience 360-degree views of team plays and practice runs without having to step back onto the field too early.
The digital referee
Beyond augmenting athletes and teams, digital technology is improving how games are scored and refereed. Since 2006, professional tennis has embraced the Hawk-Eye ball tracking system, which maps every shot’s trajectory on the court and can measure, with millimetre-accuracy, if a ball is in or out.
Players who wish to challenge the linesman’s call have a limited number of opportunities per match to use the Hawk-Eye system. Since its introduction, up to 30% of human-made line calls have been overturned.
More recently, Rio’s Olympic Games introduced digital scoring technologies to several sports, including submerged lap counters in some swimming events that inform the athlete of their progress through the race, sensor-embedded archery targets and video referee technology for the volleyball events.
One sport that has famously resisted adopting digital referee technology has been soccer. The same technology used in tennis for many years wasn’t tested in football until the 2013 English Premier League, while video replay technology was approved this year and will be phased in by 2018. Their reasoning for the delay? Interrupting the flow of the game, as well as encroaching on football’s global ‘all you need is a ball’ accessibility.
Baseball and the birth of big data
One of the more unexpected intersections of digital technology and sport involves the role of baseball in the rise of data analytics.
Baseball, above almost any other sport, is a naturally data-rich game. A batter’s performance is calculated by dividing the number of successful hits by the total number of pitches faced, with a score of 0.300 – or three hits achieved for every ten pitches – considered a strong performance.
This low certainty of hits per batter combines with other gameplay elements such as pitching styles and lengthy game durations to create a rich area of probability-driven data analysis. So rich, in fact, that baseball data analytics has its own name: sabermetrics.
Data’s date with destiny
Statistical analysis is common in other sports. What does baseball, in particular, have to do with the wider world of data analytics?
In the early 2000s, the statistician Nate Silver began a career in sabermetrics, developing an algorithm that used data to predict the future performance of baseball teams and individual players. As a side project, he started a blog, FiveThirtyEight, which applied similar data models to the world of US politics.
This political modelling would go on to correctly predict the outcomes of both the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections, drawing considerable media attention and helping to popularise a new wave of data-informed journalism. More broadly, Nate’s transition from baseball analytics to political predictions helped bring the term ‘big data’ in the public consciousness.
Of course, a myriad of other elements also assisted in the rise of data analytics. Nevertheless, baseball still played a small and unusual role, adding an important milestone to sport and digital technology’s consistently evolving relationship.
Subscribe
Get the latest in your inbox weekly. Sign up for the Digital Pulse newsletter.
Sign Up
THIS COMPONENT WILL NOT DISPLAY WHEN PUBLISHED
No search results
References
{{filterContent.facetedTitle}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
Related Articles
© 2017 - 2025 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.