Statistics, damn statistics and facts
IF Rio Ferdinand was an unlikely presence at this week’s Web Summit in Dublin’s RDS, he was a more unlikely advocate for the place of humans in sport.
That sounds dramatic, but there were times during debates and presentations at the Sports Summit, one of the off-shoots of the main event, when one wondered if there was any space left in sport for variables like courage and instinct. The Sports Summit was a good idea; at the very least it brought interesting thinkers like Bill James (champion of sabermetrics, the statistical study of baseball) and writer David Epstein into an Irish orbit.
There were times when the attempts to link the concept to the general Web Summit strained, though, and the result was a heavy concentration on the use of data in sport. If some of the speakers and sellers of technology were to be believed, sporting endeavour can be whittled down to lines of numbers charting an athlete’s proficiency. It was Ferdinand who raised one of the few voices of dissent from the stage.
‘At the end of the day, can you get a ball from A to B?’ he asked. It reads as a cliché of the first order, but in fact it was an argument for virtues that cannot be recorded by a piece of plastic worn by a player.
Strikers have to be able to score goals, argued Ferdinand, and every player must be able to pass accurately to a teammate. Not every ability can be recorded. It was a relieving counterargument.
Statistics are important and they are lucrative, too, but they should not be sold as the answer to all of sport’s mysteries.