Sports Analytics Conference

This is a quick post as most of the content is contained in the video below. As I mentioned on the site a few weeks back, there is a conference held every year in MIT in the US covering the area of Sports Analytics. What is so great about this conference is that the videos are all recorded and then uploaded to the site. Although there is nothing like being at a conference and interacting with other experts being able to see the videos comes in a fantastic second place.

Click here to check out all the other videos.

There are loads of talks and they are being uploaded all the time. I have included the Football (Soccer) one below but I would encourage you to check out as many of the talks as you can. Remember you can learn so much from how other sports do it.

Here are my top 5 take-away’s from the Soccer discussion.

#1 It is so important that there is buy-in to analytics from the whole organisation. Owner – Manager – Analyst.

#2 The next big area of development is scouting. How could can clubs get at predicting future performance? From 8 – 18.

#3 Just because football is a free-flowing fluid game and hard to analyze doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and analyze as much as possible.

#4 Gathering data is only the start – everyone must strive to find the useful data among the mass of information. Quality not Quantity.

#5 What the media portray as important is not important. Total distance covered / pass completion % – these are good for TV but not KPI

Panel for the Soccer talk;

Blake Wooster – ProZone Sports

Ian Graham – Decision Technology

Bruno Aziza – Microsoft

Stephen Heuston – Chelsea FC

Gavin Fleig – Manchester City