Leveraging Analytics for Sports Management
Sports was about playing a game for winning or losing until a few decades ago. Analytics has rapidly integrated into the sports industry, making sports more predictable and engaging. The necessity to identify attributes like the athletes’ fitness or performance for a particular season, who is the strongest player, and who is the weakest has prompted data analytics to make a ripple in the sports industry.
What is Sports Analytics?
Sports analytics is a blanket term used for incorporating data and statistics to facilitate game decision-making. The data includes analysis of various components of sports, such as player performance, business operations, and recruitment, which benefits the players and teams playing the sports and the sports organizations managing them.
The Need for Sports Analytics
When focused on gaining competitive edge, an athlete needs to know his/her strengths and weaknesses. Sports analytics allows teams and clubs to become their best version through interpreting and analyzing statistics gained from practice sessions and actual games.
For instance, The American Basketball champions, Golden State Warriors have been using Sports Analytics to improve player performance. Data analysis is credited with strengthening the team’s ball shooting performance. In addition, NBA players use wearable technology to collect data on sleep and fatigue levels for injury prevention during games.
As technology and resources are progressing for data collection, sports analytics is a growing field, and teams are looking for a competitive advantage against their opponents. The game is rooted in tactics, strategy, and details, so studying these aspects is inherent for sports coaching and building teams.
An integrated SaaS platform offers a custom array of solutions and analytics for sports organizations to help them tackle their challenges from the most basic to complex.
Leveraging Sports Analytics Data
Modern-day sports analysis techniques have given us the luxury of detail: the ability to evaluate, measure and analyze the performance in far greater depths. Here are the various areas where sports analytics can be a game-changer for coaches, players, and sports management:
Fitness of athletes: The hyper-quantification of athletes provides efficient training, improves competitiveness, and increases the likelihood that high-performing athletes stay healthy.
Professional athletes like Olympic sprinter Gabby Thomas, Olympic golfer Nelly Korda and PGA golfer Nick Watney use WHOOP’s wearable device to track physical metrics like active/inactive heart rate, sleep cycle, and respiratory rate. The device aims to help athletes better understand when to push their training and when to rest.
Game-day strategy: With data visualization, apart from game data of the previous events, match day data is also provided when the ball is actually on the pitch. This helps coaches to decide on different scenarios.
Soccer: Should our goalkeeper pass out of the back against our next opponent? Or continue to play longer?
Hockey: When is the minimal optimal time to pull our goalie?
Football: In what situations should we go for it on 4th down?
Cricket: Should we send a spin bowler for a left-hand batsman in the last over?
For instance, SportVU has six cameras in each NBA arena which gather data on the movements of each player movements of the basketball twenty-five times per second.
Player Evaluation: Data on the player evaluation provides clues to coaches on which player is likely to perform well and which one is likely to slump. Based on this data, coaches can adjust game-day lineups. Popularized through the movie and book Moneyball (2011) that documented Oakland Athletics, NFL coaches are now using analytics to assess player talent and situational performance.
Ticketing: Data Analytics brings in the stadium crowd and improves fan engagement. Analyzing past performance to determine optimal pricing strategies and setting ticket prices on demand. The staffing managers at the American professional baseball team, Texas Rangers, use real-time ticket data monitoring to close 75% of ticket sales on a bad-weather day.
Scouting: Sports analytics uses sports-related data and information from expert scouts to build predictive models around this data. The scouts can compare current and previous players’ power and speed with data models. Most American football performance companies use data extraction technologies to help football clubs identify the best-performing players. Using performance information, a coach can validate if a process to increase player potential is effective or not.
The bottom line
From predicting the game score to going for it on the fourth down, Sports data Analytics is a game-enhancing ingredient. As sports management focuses on gaining a competitive edge over the others, they can leverage an integrated SaaS platform to gain actionable insights to drive positive outcomes.
Enhancing Sports Experience via Social Media Integration
Social media is an indispensable tool in creating awareness and building a loyal customer base. The sports industry relies on integrated sports software to create and distribute online tickets, encouraging collaboration from the sponsors and enhancing communication between sports personnel and teams.
The population of social media users has increased dramatically over the past years. According to a report by Research now, the latest figures show that there are expected to be about 3.96 billion social media users worldwide in 2022.
The rising use of social media by sports celebrities bridges the gap between the teams and fans, enabling better communication between players and fans. Sports athletes represent some of the most-followed accounts across social media. It is not about the sports organizations, but brands associated with the sports industry promote their products with purpose-led products. They are associating themselves with social causes to make a major breakthrough.
For instance, Adidas created a Women’s Campaign earlier this year to create new possibilities for women in Sports. Accelerated by the attitude of Impossible is Nothing, Adidas powered its mission to make a change for women in sport.
Sports and Social Media: A Good Match
Sports and social media go hand in hand while both have one thing in common – human attention. When sports and social media are paired together, it creates a synergy, a new and amplified experience for the viewers.
Social media integration is crucial for sports organizations to help grow powerful customer relationships, create brand identity, and also to diversify their audience. With sports software allowing social media integration, sports organizations can track activities and receive informational content about user activities to strategize better business decisions
In a recent YPulse Report, it is reported that 70% of sports fans with ages between 13 to 37 years don’t watch sports events live to keep up with their favorite teams and leagues, but follow them on social media.
Perks of Social Media integration on sports
Social Media integration helps with tracking where the club stands and can be used to improve brand identity. It can turn audience into fans, and it can also level up coaches as brand ambassadors. Social media integration can help sports clubs and teams in tasks associated with management as well. Here are some of perk of social media integration mentioned:
Improved On-Field Strategies
Be it the recent trends in augmented reality or the sports data analytics to assess player performance, new trends are changing the way in which athletes improve performance. Besides being able to assess on-field performance, it is also a powerful tool for sports marketing. The American football team, Dallas Cowboys, recently enabled an AR photo kiosk to engage their fans to take pictures with their favorite players.
Live updates on social media
Blending social media with sports makes it fun and interactive, where fans can react to sports events in real-time. For instance, live-tweeting has become a popular way for teams to keep the audience engaged on social media
Live-streaming of events
Platforms like YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Hulu are on the rise with sports organizations broadcasting real-time sports events on social media. They offer the audience what they want: the ability to watch conveniently. Online live video streaming has the ability to reach fans on any screen across the globe. Between the ticket costs to live events, parking, and food, many fans opt to stay home to watch NBA games, which is a key reason why the NBA’s online streaming has increased over the years.
Brand identity for your sports clubs
With the rise of sports popularity amongst consumers, businesses are sponsoring teams and events and endorsing popular sports athletes and teams to influence people around the world to tune in to their brands.
The influence of social media in sports marketing can be leveraged by utilizing social strategies in marketing efforts. With social media platforms constantly evolving and adding more features, the opportunities for brands, athletes, and sports teams are ever increasing.
The exceptional bandwidth and increased accessibility to view sports events through live streaming and a surge of popularity in mobile devices will certainly increase the likelihood of adopting an all-in-one Sports Management Software for innovative and customized experiences.
Tackling the top four challenges faced by the sports organizations
What do you love most about sports? The tumultuous cheering for your favorite team on a Sunday morning, with the smell of mud and fresh-cut grass? Sounds interesting, but there’s more work to managing a sports team or a sports club than enjoying one. It’s time decision-makers in sports organizations leveraged an integrated SaaS platform for Sports Management.
The world of sports management is always changing and faces a lot of challenges. Sports coaches are diligent in bringing up the best sports team.
Here are the top four challenges of sports organizations:
Meeting the registration issues of players: Managing the players, and the teams, and registering them with all the required details can be a herculean task.
Imagine the plight of the player who misses registering within the deadline? Doesn’t he waste his entire season? The sports organizers may not run through all the errands with the required details during the registration process. And thereby missing crucial details.
Managing all the teams together in one place: Not all organizations have full access to their teams in terms of players taking part in the right game and organizers scheduling the right field, educators providing the best learning resources, and coaches notifying the players about upcoming events. Some organizations face the challenges of providing records in terms of statistics and analytics.
Ineffective payment processing: Payment collection is another major challenge faced by sports organizers. Mostly, sports administrators face issues while collecting payments, deducting commissions, and scheduling payments. Misusing funds can be a major problem without an effective payment system.
Data challenges: Data is big business. Unlike every other industry, data is quintessential for the sports industry. Sports managers and coaches rely on the data to review the team performance, sports teams use data to analyze if their teams have the best performance. Since data also breeds revenue, it is essential to keep a concise and all-time accessible data for the vital survival of the sports organizations
Needless to say, it’s time decision-makers and leaders in sports organizations leveraged an integrated SaaS platform to tackle major challenges in sports management.
