Businesses across the industries are increasingly dependent on data be it about the company's performance, or a customer's behavior pattern, but data-driven decision-making is at the forefront. Such a decision-making process is thought to be very logical and has a proven record of resulting in more successful results as well. It is thus only logical even in the sports industry the powerhouse of data would put this process to test.

The industry has even pioneered performance analytics which has been prevalent in the industry since the 1970s and went global when Moneyball was published by Michael Lewis. The book was centered around the statistical analysis of baseball records and how it was used for decision-making with in creating dependence of data in sport. Decisions about the player were made based on the data-driven insights and resulted in success for the team. Sports analytics as a market is worth almost around $4 billion now and professional sports teams invest huge amounts of money to meticulously analyze every aspect affecting player performance

Even National Football League has been tracking individual player performance and taking advantage of sports analytics and data to make decisions and has been successful in their approach in the past few seasons. NFL first pinned small sensors in players’ shoulder pads, then created a rich database but tracking their performance during the game throughout the season. Then all the data were made available to the clubs as well to drive competition. Now even the competitors has access to the player performance and can evaluate strengths and weaknesses and make strategies according to that.

Wimbledon on the other hand took advantage of video footage as well and has been consistently been tracking individual tennis players for years now. The same data is used by coaches and helps them better guide the players. IBM Wimbledon client executive Sam Seddon once commented that “We have over 150 staff on the premises and we capture over 3.2 million data points throughout the course of the Championships,”.The data is collected from the courtside from speed, serve location, and rally count all of that is inputted in.

A similar type of observation is made in Basketball and F1 as well. In basketball 3D trackers are deployed to track shots and give insights into shooting accuracy and patterns. Coaches use trackers to keep a tab on the players and their accuracy on the court. Sports analytics use in F1 has made the car even more intelligent. With hundreds of sensors to measure a number of things in the car, the lap time, the G-force, engine, and tyre and brake temperatures all this data is used to drive decisions and help the teams devise a pitting strategy

Winning an F1 race is not just in the hands of the driver anymore, teams play a major role as well a well-trained crew, including the engineers, mechanics, and analysts are all involved while it is the driver that takes the chequered flag and celebrates with the champagne bottles at the end of the race.

The performance of the crew is so important that back in 2016 Williams put biometric sensors to analyze and optimize the crew’s fitness training in the hopes to improve the team’s performance in the competitive sport where every second matters. Back in 2022 during the US Grand Prix in the Michael Schumacher dominated era, Rubens Barrichello took down his Ferrari team-mate Schumacher by mere 0.11s

The data is also used to develop the car further for the next race. F1 has multiple such applications of data analytics and in the future would be more reliant on cloud computing, predictive analytics and intelligence, ML, and prescriptive intelligence.

While the main star of sports is the teams and players but sports organizations have not discounted the sports fans. Understanding the behavior pattern of sports fans gives the teams unique insights behind the screen, the organizations can track what kind of content is preferred more by the fans, it decided their digital engagement plan and the data pattern analysis from online sports viewing, app logins, and online video arms them with more data to take fan engagement strategies to the next level. It improves the overall experience of the fans and even brings in better revenue.

Data Sports Group one of the well-known sports data providers has helped many companies unlock the next growth phase with the relevant sports data that is essential to keep in mind when we talk about customer engagement. First and foremost the viewers would consume the sports data and then move on to the experience phase. With Data Sports Group companies can forget about the data needs and leave them in our hands with the knowledge that consistent, rich quality data would be delivered straight to their platform.