Welcome
Good morning, afternoon or evening, everyone! We are starting this blog with great enthusiasm, hoping you will like it and that we can all learn about this world that excites us: Big Data in the world of football. As football fans, we will tell stories about signings, teams, the player market… based on objective information. As data enthusiasts, we will talk about technology, methodologies, tools, artificial intelligence… from a football perspective. For all of this, we will have the best possible collaborators and specialists. You will meet them soon.
Let’s get started! And it could not be any other way, trying to explain the meaning of Big Data in the industry of the king of sports. The football sector is the last guest to arrive at a party that has been going on for some time. And when you arrive late to a party, you try to make up for lost time by getting in tune with the rest of the guests. Markets such as banking, retail, insurance and telecoms have been working with data-processing technologies for years and have a lot of experience. They have gone through a long and arduous process of technological and digital transformation. Football has arrived to find the table laid and an all-you-can-eat buffet; the hard part is choosing well.
All these sectors already take it for granted that practically all their actions are justified by conclusions based on data. When data analysis becomes strategy within a company, that company is said to be a Data Driven company. It is time for football to start down this road.
What is behind “Big data”
Behind the simple words Big Data there is really a set of technologies that can be anything but simple to understand. Big data, above all in football, is a euphemism widely misused to simplify or sweeten other, less friendly terms such as distributed databases, mathematical algorithms or machine learning. When all is said and done, it is a term that sums up all the technologies, disciplines and tools to do with the extraction, processing, exploitation and interpretation of data.
When people talk about Big Data, they throw into the bag many other things that, technically, cannot be considered Big Data. When this term is used, many others are really being referred to: Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing or Artificial Intelligence can be some examples. It is not just a question of volume. They are closely related terms within the data analysis ecosystem, but it is good to know how to tell them apart.
The players in the market — clubs, sporting directors, coaches, analysts — have welcomed this new technological wave with enthusiasm, but sometimes that enthusiasm soon turns into scepticism. The reasons? We believe there are mainly two, and they are not exclusive to football:
- The ever-present fear of change. It is a general tendency in many areas of life to see the changes on the horizon as a threat to the status quo. Technology does not come to change or remove people, it does not cancel any knowledge acquired, it does not destroy what has been built. But, in a way, it takes a little humility and breadth of vision to accept this change and to know that the change will be profound.
- The avalanche of concepts. Football still has a traditional market philosophy, very focused on the essence of its existence: the ball. It is unable to take on and assimilate this tsunami of technological change all at once. It has the advantage of having the table laid, the technology is mature, but adapting is complex.
A profound change
Football clubs, the different players in the game, have to accept that, if they want to compete, this change is not an option, it is an obligation. It is a change that affects every facet of the club and which, therefore, is a structural change that has to stay inside the club. It is important to understand that it is not just a matter of acquiring one or two pieces of software. It is a profound change that implies changes in the working culture, in the organisation chart, in technical resources but, above all, human ones, in training and in attracting talent.
The improvements brought by this technology are obvious (we will go into them in another article), but the use cases are not so clear. There is no doubt about the benefits that can be achieved by making decisions based on data; we can sum them up as: revenue optimisation, greater productivity and risk minimisation. The applications are mainly focused on scouting and match analytics, but the range can be much wider: physical performance, marketing, sales, member loyalty, e-commerce, revenue, and so on. All this shows the cross-cutting nature and breadth of implementing this new way of working. It will be a great success to plan the development of this technology bearing in mind the reach it can have.
For better or for worse, football turned into a business a long time ago, the club into a company and data into the raw material. The club that starts to understand these changes in this new scenario, to behave like a talented and innovative company, will have won plenty of points and will move into another league, a league of winning teams. Betting on data will be the most important signing of the next decade. A signing within everyone’s reach!