Recently I was approached by someone looking for a system to track instance-based metrics for a soccer organization. Soccer is a fantastic sport and (obviously) has a huge global audience. While soccer hasn’t quite “caught on” here in the states, I’ve traveled enough overseas to see first-hand how passionate soccer fans can be. I also realized that my past postings have mostly been focused on American football – my apologies to all soccer, hockey, basketball, etc fans that may be reading this. Performance, instance-based metrics are alive and well and extremely valid in the world on what I call “continuous” sports.
Let me explain that last part very quickly. American football, baseball, even rugby can be considered what I call “play” based sports. A play is initiated, certain actions are taken, results occur, play stops and then the process is repeated. For something like soccer or basketball the game is much more of a “possession” based event with continuous action (with the exception of events like out-of-bounds or injuries).
There are exceptions to these classifications of course. Take for example a soccer match with a corner kick. A player kicks the ball from the corner position, usually to the middle of the field where several, dynamic things may occur. Players from different teams can be interacting with the ball through a series of actions – headers, kicks, catching (goalie only of course), etc. So how do you differentiate a “possession” or a “play” in a so-called continuous sport?
Well, it’s quite easy actually. Every single player on the field, regardless of whether or not they are interacting with the ball, is performing some action for almost every second of the game. Players are jockeying for position, the goalie is setting up his defense and positioning himself (or herself), the kicker is setting up the offensive players, etc. There are some cases (again exceptions) where this is not valid. For example, the opposing goalie may not be doing a whole heck of a lot during a corner kick on the other end of the field. But, for the most part everyone is doing something. Each of these actions is measurable. Just like in the business world where top-tier organizations examine each and every transaction for actionable metrics, every action during a game can be observed and graded.
To put it mildly, what might seem “normal” or even “boring” to the untrained eye is anything but (baseball is another great example, but we’ll save that discussion for another day).
As you can also imagine, watching every single player involved in the action, over tens or possibly hundreds of skills needed to perform at the top level and doing that for an entire match is going to generate a very, very large amount of raw data. Now, imagine that same raw data being gathered for both teams for every game they play.
Well, I’ve already talked a lot about the capabilities of Real Sports Analytics and its expansive data handling capabilities.
Is YOUR organization ready to take performance to the next level?
