“If any other team wins I congratulate him. They’ll have champagne, give them their rings. But if we win on our budget, with this team we will have changed the game. And that’s what I want. I want it to mean something.” Bill Beane, the phrase’s owner, and the Oakland Athletics of major league baseball (MLB) in the United States did not make them champions. However, the team’s shocking comeback, which went from mediocre to one of the toughest despite a tight budget, and earned a record 20 consecutive victories, caused a real transformation in the sport. And he made Beane a legend. Such was the case that Brad Pitt took on the role of athletic manager in the film Moneyball (“The Game of Fortune”), in which Jonas Hill plays the young economist and “brain” who uses statistics to provoke a revolution in the team and in MLB. Moneyball is based on the novel Michael Lewis (Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game). That is, Beane became a film and a book that they do only tell a true story that many teams began to imitate over time: the use of Big Data and the analysis of a significant volume of statistical data to modify the construction of a team and a sport. The question falls by decanting… what is Big Data? “It is the management of large volumes of data in such a way that it allows us to extract valuable information when making decisions,” explains Diego Vilches, a specialist in software engineering and a master’s degree in sports big data, in dialogue with Filo News. He says: “Data is obtained from internal and external sources. We have so-called GPS that provide information about the external loads of athletes or optical tracking through which we can have physical and tactical data. These sources can provide us with millions of records in a training session or in a match. Also, we have data on psychological and technical-tactical aspects that can be uploaded by technical staff members, playing fields, ambient temperature and social networks that can be obtained from external sources.”
Photo: The Atlantic
The data revolution transcended baseball and was installed in the rest of the sports. For example, it has a strong roots in the NBA, NFL and NHL, and is also used in tennis, volleyball, motorsport, cycling, among other disciplines. And while football took time to open the door to these tools, for some time now he began to see them as an ally from which to gain sporting and economic benefits to build campuses and achieve better yields.” It can help reduce the amount of injuries, buy and sell better or better analyze our team or rival. The improvement in the quality of information you may have to prepare a match and train, can be the difference between coming out champion or not, entering a cup or avoiding relegation,” says the computer scientist. In the 2020 Exhibition Experience Endeavor, Emanuel Ginóbili recounted that Big Data changed the NBA paradigm. “Around 2015, with the arrival of the Warriors or the new era of the Rockets, Big Data reached the NBA. It began to understand which place on the court it was most effective to pull, who had better percentages, at what distances, (had) sensors that tell you any data you could think of. There came a point where the important thing was to hire whoever found the data that made a difference because they were there to spare,” he said.
On the cover of Sports Illustrated they predicted the Houston Astros championship, which were enshrined in 2017. Photo: Sports Illustrated
Another exemplifying story is that of The Houston Astros, a team of the MLB heap, who in 2017 won the World Series for the first time after beating the Los Angeles Dodgers. How did you do that? In 2011, the franchise changed ownership and Jim Crane arrived, who decided to break player hiring schemes. Then, together with analysts Jeff Lunhow and Sig Mejdal, he created a computer center and assembled a knurled team thanks to the analyses that allow the management of large volumes of data. The most curious thing is that in 2014, Sports Illustrated magazine published on its cover that, with this system, the Astros would be champions. Three years later, the vaticinium was fulfilled. Yet there are those who today are reluctant to consider that the use of metrics come to replace the experience and intuition of men and women. As if threatening to “dehumanize” the game. However, Big Data only provides a wealth of information for analysis and action by secretariats and technical bodies according to your needs and play styles. I mean, the last word will always have human value. And the data will pay off depending on how you interpret it and use it better. In this sense, Vilches warns that “if the data is taken as an end in itself rather than one more tool at the service of those who decide – whether technical secretaries or technical bodies – we can take actions that are not the most appropriate.”
In Argentina, Big Data is gaining ground
In our country, most football clubs continue to work in a “handcrafted” way, Vilches says. Analysts watch the videos generated by the same club and, through the platforms they hire, make the reports requested by the technical bodies.” Some technical secretariats are aware that data are, on the one hand, an asset of clubs, and on the other hand, a possible source of information to make a differential when making decisions. For example, to evaluate potential reinforcements or player performance to try to determine if you are at your peak performance or are about to start a decline. This would allow us to buy and sell better,” the specialist describes. Different is what happens in the big clubs of the world, where they use the data to analyze the game of their own and that of the rivals, as well as being a channel to quickly find strengths or fallacious that would otherwise take many hours of analysis. An exponent of how to use the data for this is the Seville of Spain, which through its technical secretariat put together a research and development department that allows you to have algorithms that help you buy and sell in the best way and make an important differential.
Although in Argentina the use of metrics is not yet 100 percent installed in football, this season, Vilches together with specialist Laura Fava and her team, joined the agency Athena (dedicated to data analytics applied to match analysis, scouting and player development) to provide data-driven reports to the clubs of the Professional League and the First National League. “This first step is important to grow in match analysis and improve our championships,” explains the computer scientist on the project involving specialists in sports big data, business intelligence, full stack developers, mobile, infrastructure and computer security specialists, as well as technical directors, video and data analysts. Technology came to the sport to stay. To deny it is to make a mistake. And, probably, it’s also giving the upper hand.
