Analytics giving the beautiful game a healthy dose of science at World Cup
It may not look it watching Saudi Arabia play, but there’s a whole lot of analytics being applied on those Russian pitches during the World Cup.
It’s thought by some that analytics, while useful in baseball, football and basketball, aren’t of much use in fluid sports such as soccer or hockey, where goals are few and possession switches back and forth quickly.
But that couldn’t be farther from the truth, a Simon Fraser University professor says. European soccer, in particular, has been using analytics for quite awhile, Peter ChowWhite said.
“European countries, New Zealand, the Australians, they’ve used analytics for a number of decades now,” Chow-White, who does the analytics for the national women’s team, said.
On this side of the ocean, John Herdman, who guided Canada’s women to soccer bronzes at the London and Rio Olympics, and who now coaches the national men’s team, brought analytics with him from his native England.
“John Herdman is probably one of the global leaders on this,” Chow-White said.
If no team sports existed, analytics probably would have invented baseball. It’s perfect for collecting big data. During every pitch so much is going on between the players on the field. Whether it’s day or night can affect play; so can the wind. Football has stoppages after every play. Basketball has set plays and like football is a possession game.
Analytics seemed to intuitively come more natural to those sports and their, using the jargon of the analytics’ world, catalytic events.
“(With) sports like soccer, like hockey, where major events are very infrequent, like a goal, there is a whole different set of things to deal with,” Herdman said. “But the technology has changed, the science has changed. Of course with that, adoption has risen. But unevenly.
“Sports is a space where you’re colliding the eggheads with the jocks.”
Chow-White is the director of SFU’s school of communication, and also the director of GeNA Lab (Genomics and Networks Analysis), which investigates how blockchains and big data affect society.
Sports, he said, is the perfect activity to analyze. It’s like a closed experiment. There are boundaries, rules, stoppages, time limits, unlike the unruly real world out there.
“All analytics is is what science does,” he said. “It’s looking for patterns within activities. Sport is beautiful for natural experiment.”