The priorities within the sports arena have shifted immensely with more weightage being given to the business side of the sports rather than to the athletes. The sports data and content solutions provider’s dependence on data are now not only for improving athletes' performance but also to have a better understanding of the fans which would in turn contribute to building revenue.
Winning games is something clubs have perfected over the years now their outlook has shifted towards winning customers. While statistics and professional athletics have gone hand in hand for a while now, data analytics has broken barriers by applying advanced metrics in the field of sports. Now after honing the data analytics skills on the field, clubs and sports organizations have adopted an analytics positive approach in their business operations as well.
Some would think it would be an easy enough switch for the organization in the sports industry off the field, the industry is facing the same challenges that are being faced by business leaders in other sectors. A 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference took a deep dive into how the clubs and leagues have relied on analytics to grow revenue?
The first step in the process is KYC- Know your customer. With the rapid growth of technology and the digital footprint of the customers, the teams are better equipped to pinpoint their true customers in live events. They can now truly 
differentiate between an individual who bought the ticket just to enjoy and the fan who showcased his dedication to the team and players and attended the match live and support the team. The team have come up with innovative ways to interact with just fans, the most famous method is the adoption of a loyalty program, for example, Magic Money which is what NBA’s Orlando Magic awards its fans when they purchase a ticket. The credit awards can be used to upgrade the ticket or make merchandise purchases through the team’s app.
Not only that they have made progress in predicting fans' behavior as well, applying predictive analytics to forecast the no. of spectators who would be attending the match and also find out how many ticket holders might even miss the match. How would it be useful? The team can target the customers specifically and let them know the process of transferring their tickets to someone else, it would add side income for the team through the parking or concession-stand revenues which would have been zero otherwise with the no-show.
Further with the use of analytics now, teams are trying to identify the hardcore fans as well who are termed as ‘verified fans’ and they are being targeted with high-demand tickets so that they would attend the show and have to indulge in illegal practices and buy a higher-priced ticket from opportunists. This is possible as the ticket buying process has shifted online and the fans are being forced to register there, now comes the fun part, as a scoring algorithm that would point out brokers and bots. With such tech-savvy apps, the fans would have to verify themselves through a code before they buy the tickets.
Mostly we discussed the ways to lure in fans in the pre-purchasing phase, in the post-purchase phase, while the fans are attending the match live, some of the clubs and leagues have heavily depended on eye-tracking and heart-rate sensing scanners that would map out their emotional state throughout the match which can be used to quantify their reaction as per the live events of the game and use that to predict their behaviors and companies can monetize on it.
With multiple ways to reach sports fanatics, teams and sports organizations have multiple ways to target customers and engage them. Mobile technology specifically has played a big role in engagement, fans now have unlimited data-sharing capabilities, from tweets to live feeds, comments, more and more data is being generated, if we look back to the 2014 World Cup only, during the match spectator bandwidth crossed 12.6 TB and over 73,531 spectators during the final match shared one-minute HD videos of the event. Clubs and teams can leverage this to engage with fans and create their own apps and social hubs to provide a platform to their fans and use analytics to search for new revenue-making opportunities.
Sports data services have thus been the driving factor for the teams, first, it was used to increase player performance and optimize player recruitment and injury prevention, now data is playing a more significant role to boost fan engagement and use that to improve the business side of the sports. If you are looking for live sports data and content solutions Data Sports Group is the best live sports data provider in the market currently. Get in touch today, to get access to unparalleled sports data which would leave your customers wanting more.
