One of the most striking cases of Data Analysis is Moneyballthe film that tells the story of the Oakland Athletics baseball team.
In 2001 the General Manager of the team Billy Beane develops an innovative method for the transfer campaign: selecting athletes based almost exclusively on the percentage that indicates the number of times the player conquers a base without the aid of penalties.
This affair contributed to revolutionize the way player performance is measured: Traditional experience and intuition are integrated into a data-driven approach.
Progressively other NFL teams begin to adopt this vision and the method also spreads to other sports such as NBA, Formula 1 and football.
The application of technologies that provide data has reached impressive levels of detailand the examples are different and transversal: all the NBA franchises have installed 6 cameras in the catwalks of the arenas to track the movements of each individual player and the ball at a speed of 25 times per second.
On the other side of the ocean, the Anglo-Saxon world is also driving innovation.
Il Manchester City has added four astrophysicists to its analyst staff.
The rival, the Liverpoolwhich has attracted talents with a background completely opposite to the sporting one, hiring physicists and neuroscientists.
In the training sessions preceding the Champions League final, the team of Klopp he used gods sensors applied to the athletes’ heads with the aim of collecting data on how brain circuits react.
If football is trying to increase the amount of data available to it, there is another sport that generates more every weekend than a club produces in a season: Formula 1. Each F1 car contains 300 sensors that move 1.1 million telemetry data per second transmitted from the cars to the pits.
During each race weekend 160 terabytes of data are sent between the remote circuit and the Formula 1 multimedia and technology center.
Sports teams that need continuous access to their data are starting to seek flexible and sustainable cloud solutions to improve their data storage capabilities.
“Adopting a pure data integration methodology is extremely advantageous even in the case of the sports sector“, continues Borraccino.
“To avoid corporate silos, in which data resides isolated from the surrounding world, data integration platforms play a strategic role, such as the one with which Primeur makes data travel in a safe, reliable way and decoupling those who produce the data from those who consume them. .
The pure data integration methodology allows us to divide the business flow into three phases: data collection from sensors or applications, data aggregation or processing with artificial intelligence algorithms and finally delivery of derived data to other applications, where domain experts (mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, mathematicians, etc.) will be able to further analyze them to provide indications, for example to pilots, for a winning strategy“adds Francesco Borraccino.
To be able to seamlessly access data in the cloud to collect useful information from the various sources at the right time, to know how to transform and aggregate them correctly so that the experts can carry out their analyzes, can make the difference between a victory and a defeat for some sports teams.
The Big Data revolution it does not only involve the clubs internally but also has an impact on the broadcast offer, on the choices of the referees and on the methods of engaging fans.
In Qatar, during the 2022 World Cup, the semi-automatic offside.
This tool has 12 tracking cameras and 29 data collection points for each individual player, calculating their position on the pitch 50 times per second and dissecting every part of the body that could be offside.
A sensor will be placed inside the balloon that will send signals to the control room 500 times per second, thus being fundamental in millimeter cases.
The last decision, however, is always up to the human being: before reporting the infringement, the VAR will manually check the data received and after a few seconds they will be able to inform the referee.
F1, on the other hand, is using cloud computing also to bring fans into the racing experience in a new way through F1 Insightsproposing the data coming from the sensors together with the videos of the on-board cameras to broadcasts around the world.
These insights help fans understand the decisions and race strategies made by drivers or teams in a split second, which greatly influence the outcome of a race.
