Big data and world cup
Even I teach and conduct research on Big Data analytics, I would never imagine that Big data can also be used in sports, especially in the 2014 World Cup. Last night I read a newspaper article about the use of Big data analytics in sports and how it gave essential role in winning the championship for Germany.
According to the Wall Street Journal article, Big data is considered the “twelfth member” of the German team in the 2014 World Cup. Several months earlier, the Germany team coach worked with SAP Company to create special software called “Match Insights” to collect and analyze the statistics of the skills of individual players and the whole team. Based on statistics and facts, the software created a solution to optimize team allocation, improve its playing capability, and find the way to destroy its opponents in soccer matches by analyzing the statistics of the adversary teams. They used cameras to capture the running speed, position, the time of members keeping the ball, defense movement details, and transformed them into a database where Big data analytics tool calculated every movement, speed and statistics then organized them into special information for the coach.
According to the software, the key focus for German team this year is speed. Based on analysis of “Match Insights”, the German team was able to change its average ball possession time from 3.4 seconds to about 1.1 seconds that means no player could keep the ball for more than 3 seconds. That style of faster play gave Germany 7-1 victory over Brazil, which included three goals scored within 179 seconds. Although Brazil controlled the ball for 52% of the game, but it had no chance because Germany passed the ball at full speed to create holes in the defense and took advantage. A Brazilian player admitted: “We were good at control the ball by playing our style of sophisticated maneuvering but they were too fast; German player never kept the ball long enough for us to control them. That is why we are destroyed by their faster speed.”
When it comes to positioning on the field, “Match Insights” mapped out a “virtual defensive line” that showed how much area a player can protect with his own body, and helped them to exploit the weakness of the opponent’s setup. That was why even the best Argentina team could not penetrate the Germany‘s defense line. A German team member explained: “Instead of playing the typical soccer game like anybody, we have a clear direction from the coach on what to do base on the instructions based on statistics and data analytics. When not practice, we watched videos on the performance of our competitors where the software showed us their weaknesses as well as what each player used to do. Based on these data, we knew how Cristiano Ronaldo often moves or how Messi like to do and the software explained to us how to counter that. For example, before the game against France, the software showed that the French were very concentrated in the middle but often left spaces on the left side because their full-backs did not run fast enough so we target that area and won.”
According to the article, soccer is among the growing list of sports being transformed by Big Data. The use of data and statistics to gain a competitive advantage has grown across a wide range of sports including basketball, and tennis. At this time, the “Match Insights” big data tool is exclusive to the German team, but SAP has plans to sell it more broadly in the future. Of course, Big data analytics can improve a game winning statistics but cannot replace humans. When every team knows it and uses it then the chance would be more level and it is up to players to perform.
However, many people are concerned now as the use of Big data could increase the chance to win when people bet on sport games. A gambler explained: “Until every gambler know how to use Big data, at this time only few know how to use it and they are going to win very big in every sport.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
