Football clubs are not far behind in assimilating analytics within their scope and quite a few companies have understood that here is a wonderful opportunity to open itself up to a brave new world. STATS, a Chicago based company thriving on sports analytics has done just that. It takes game videos and use computer vision to analyse it, while the performance data aggregation uses AI to discover issues with the players in the presence of analysts.
STATS has an application called Edge which assists coaches and scouts to browse through video clips using a unique combination of computer vision and machine learning, so that the effect is that of a natural language filter. Their data science team is doing tremendous work by cutting across infinite variations of data points and churning complex information to produce insights that could change the future of a club.
Efficiency goes up a few notches
The fantastic bit of work from the data science has helped clubs to ensure that everything they employ function with maximum efficiency despite the complexity of the overall process. So, the pre-match preparations, the tactical analysis and the performance are completely in sync thanks to STATS and moreover, they are producing the best results due to the finest decisions coming through a combined effort of analysts and coaches. Analysts, however, want more data from Champions League as well as other top leagues of Europe.
As a result, they will have to deal with six million data points and their variations. Edge, however, was only built on three teams from premier league so as to understand what problems bothered them. However, it has expanded itself over the years significantly and now, the potential is tremendous. Combining some of the newest technologies in the field, STATS have proved to be the leader in sports analytics.
Finding a common channel
The aim of edge is to become a common channel for every single premier league team where they must come and through which they must go to get inside the various aspects of sports data. It must perform all functions for various figures like coaches, academy trainers and boards so that there is a seamless communication across various layers of the structure.
So, if your team suffered because of poor counter-attacking strategy, then edge will retrieve the associated data and plan your game more tactfully. Scouts can use edge to predict which player will be the most valuable in the years to come and when it would be the perfect moment for a club to buy that player. In short, edge has changed the very way football is played and thought.
No sample size limits
Before edge announced its revolutionary technology, everyone used to focus on the last five games played and that would be the defining data for every bit of decision. Surely, that is too small a sample size to derive anything at all. In fact, for players with injury or tiredness, this data may well be misleading. It is here edge intervenes effectively by taking a much larger sample size, resulting in more effective decision-making as well as better evaluation of performances.
STATS are also going towards predictive models so as to predict what other strategies one could take and what would the results be. Currently, the software supports multiple logins and is still developing itself. Despite that, its performance puts sports analytics right at the top of the list of analytics fields developing due to the data explosion. Whether it can bring about a football revolution in the next decade or so is the real question it needs to answer.
