Ball Gazing: Looking to The Future of Big Data and Sport

This article is presented in partnership with Draftstars

When it comes to team sports like AFL, it's been several years since big data analysis began to significantly change the game, both on the field and in the stands. With these kind of invasion games lending themselves well to effective number crunching, data science has now merged with, and maybe even eclipsed, gut feeling and intuition.

Some say this is taking away from the true spirit of sporting endeavour, that professional sport might become more about an off-field battle between analysts rather than those who physically play the game.

"In life we have two main pursuits: those that appeal to the heart and those that appeal to the head," Adam Ferrier—one of the world's leading consumer psychologists, author, and sometimes Gruen Transfer panelist—tells VICE Sports. "In sport, whether you're a spectator, a participant or a stakeholder of any kind, it's true that big data is in some ways moving the game away from the heart and more into the head."

"Everything is becoming more analytical and decisions are being made with rational information rather than by gut feel or instinct," he says. "But the enjoyment you used to have of simply watching your team play is now being amplified by a slightly headier enjoyment as big data allows us to have a more sophisticated relationship with sport."

So what exactly does this relationship look like—and what does the future for big data and sport hold?

Ross Dawson—chief futurist at Rh7thm, an innovations agency who have recently been working in the space of big data and sport—sees it touching three main areas: audience engagement; player performance; and adjudication.

When talking about how big data affects audience engagement, Dawson references the Alert Shirt. An experiment in wearable technology, the jersey was released in a limited run in 2014, and allowed fans to physically experience what players felt in real-time as it happened during the game. How? Game data was transmitted via a Bluetooth app to the electronics inside the jersey, which converted into various sensations for the couch spectator. It might sound sci-fi, but as Dawson rightly points out "it certainly adds to the thrill of impact sports." Watching a crunching tackle on TV could take on a whole new meaning in the future if immersive pieces of wearable tech like this were to take off.

Shifting to player performance, Dawson raises the potential of 3D player modelling. This is where multiple cameras would constantly track players at a very high frame rate, allowing for a real-time 3D model of every move they made. "There are many applications for this, but it's most significant in terms of performance," he says. "We could see if a player fumbled a ball just because their thumb wasn't in the right place; it will be down to that degree of detail."

3D modelling could also improve refereeing. "You do some real-time 3D modelling of what's actually happened in a particular contest," Dawson says, "and then you put that against a database of what's been assessed before—and you will absolutely get better refereeing decisions."

The aggregate of these huge amounts of information is where things start to get really interesting. Dawson makes the correlation to DNA data. "With massive sets of data, we will be able to see what is common to a player's successful movements and what is different, which may potentially show us how someone has mastered a particular act," he says. "We can then study that to see how they do it and then start to teach it to others."

When it comes to big data's application to the area of adjudication, Dawson thinks that human referees as we know them may eventually be replaced by artificial intelligence. "Part of the point here is that you can't really draw a line between big data and artificial intelligence. This is because when you get a very deep data set, the only thing that can do something useful with it requires machine learning," he explains. "So when we talk about sports and big data, we're also talking about artificial intelligence. I believe that it's feasible we will move to the point where sports referees will be entirely replaced by artificial intelligence—simply because they have the data."

"Of course, some of the fun of sport is to be able to rant and rave about a referee's decision. If it's purely impartial, that goes away."

This brings us back to Ferrier's thoughts regarding the basic human pursuits of head versus heart. "It's a major point," Dawson agrees. "If you're looking at big data and how it applies across human domains, one of the uncertainties about how it plays out is the degree to which people want to hold on to human decision-making, even when, demonstrably, artificial intelligence makes better decisions."

But Dawson also understands there are some areas of sport, like coaching, where the human element remains intrinsic. "A coach can be supported by data, but not supplanted by it. No machine will ever be able to motivate a human to do their best, to work together as a team, to strive for a goal," he says, adding, "at least for the foreseeable future."

This article is presented in partnership with Draftstars