Coaches and sports managers make extensive use of big data, a practice known as sports analytics ("sports analysis"). This application of statistics originated in baseball, where it gave rise to sabermetrics. One of its leading figures is Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland Athletics; his story is told, in particular, in the film Le Stratège, starring Brad Pitt (Bennett Miller, 2011). Sabermetrics—its name derives from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research—uses statistics to produce objective knowledge about baseball, based on reliable metrics for evaluating talent and performance. Its success has led to its adoption in other sports, including basketball, soccer and hockey.
Big data in sport
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Sports analytics has become a business, with companies such as IBM developing statistical visualization technologies and advanced models based on these data to analyze or predict match results. Such modelling is complex: in tennis, for example, the points in a match are not independent and identically distributed. Consequently, the outcome of a match always remains uncertain—and therein lies the beauty of the game. Data collection is no longer confined to professionals: amateur athletes also have access to a range of statistics on their activities, via a smartwatch, for example.
