A Dutch tech company, SciSports has been using data analysis to help teams scout and train football teams. In the 2018 World Cup, SciSports helped the Belgian national team analyse their opponents. The concept for SciSports originated 7 years ago while Giels Brouwer and fellow students at the Netherlands’ University of Twente were playing a sports video game called Football Manager. The game involves takinging the role of a director of a football club. “I thought it would be nice to do this in real life” said Brouwer. This idea become more of a reality when Brouwer realized that football scouting relied primarily on gut feeling. “We felt our idea could add efficiency to this process, so our starting point was to focus on data that could help teams make better decisions” said Brouwer. Brouwer interned at Dutch football club FC Twente, where he analyzed players and matches using various datasets. This helped him develop the platform SciSports uses today.
Today, the platform contains data on 90,000 football players worldwide. This helps clubs find the right kind of players they are looking for more efficiently. Brouwer said “If you, as a club want to have the greatest talents from Slovenia, for example, you have to send a scout there for at least two months to watch all kinds of matches and players.” This leads to viewing many players that aren’t what you are looking for. SciSports data adds more focus to this process and helps narrow down their search for players. Their database contains a variety of variables, making it easy to search for players who meet certain criteria.
SciSports buys data from an Italian company who employs many people who manually collect data from almost all professional matches. These people record from where to where a pass was made, a cross was made, and what movement leads to a goal attempt, and so on. SciSports then builds algorithms on top of this data to gain insight. They compare a particular pass to millions of similar passes to get a prediction of the impact of particular kinds of passes. In 2015, Brouwer started the company BallJames, whose goal is to convert camera video into 3D data. Although this technology is in its infancy, it will add to the depth of data the SciSports platform employs.
There are those that worry that these kind of data analysis techniques will lead to sports being “analyzed to death”. I think this comes from a fear of new ideas. Analysis can’t capture the emotions and passion that encapsulate sports, but what analysis can do is add to the the game. At the end of the day, a team that doesn’t begin to use analysis will lose the opportunity to gain insight and efficiency.
Source – Dutch tech firm transforms real-life football through video game concept, by Kim Loohuis. Found at – https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252478751/Dutch-tech-firm-transforms-real-life-football-through-video-game-concept
LIS 4022 Spring 2020 