What businesses can learn from the use of analytics in sports
Get ahead of the game
Whilst the hype around the power of ‘big data’ has only just started to seep into oak-panelled boardrooms and onto the pages of the corporate executive agenda, sporting organisations have been at the forefront of exploiting data to gain a competitive advantage for years.
From Formula 1™ to football, data has been at the heart of developing strategy, understanding the factors behind success and failure, assessing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and measuring the impact of tactical changes. In the rarefied world of elite sport, even the tiniest of margins can make a difference, so data analysis – getting to the heart of what drives performance – has become critical. And as Lord Coe is reputed to have said “If you don’t know why you failed, how can you improve? If you don’t know why you succeeded, it must be an accident.”
This point of view aims to highlight the lessons that business can learn from the way that sporting organisations have used data to derive a competitive advantage. This is not akin to a lazy after-dinner speaker trying to draw a tenuous link between success in business and what goes on in the inside of a scrum.
Data analysis and data-driven thinking are fields in which sporting organisations have genuinely led the way over the last decade, and it is no coincidence that those who have enjoyed success on the field of play, also happen to be the at the forefront of data exploitation.
Through interviews with experts from the world of football, cricket, athletics, rugby, cycling and Formula 1™, and through the work we have done with sporting clients, we have identified the secrets of their data‑driven success.