Digitalization has brought significant changes in every industry, including sports. Today, it is not a novelty that sports events are supported by various computer programs useful for sports analysts and coaches. In addition, some high-tech solutions disclose new opportunities for athletes to improve their physical activity and enhance their careers. Sergey Kartashov (Sergejs Kartasovs), the Senior Partner at IT company Roosh, spoke about the benefits of Artificial Intelligence in the sports industry.
People’s attitude to sports has changed completely. Exemplifying the Olympic games, the youth of decades ago accepted it as a high-profile event. Sports was something people were escaping from reality and daily issues. ?s Sergey Kartashov comments, back then, every person chose a kind of sports they found suitable: boxing, football, chess or orienteering. But the generation changes together with the outer world’s demand changes. Thus, IT integration into human life has discovered new avenues for growth and improvement, including sports as one of the major aspects.
Today, the built-in algorithmic solutions to holding sports events gather millions of people worldwide. AI applications have become indispensable assistants to sports players, coaches, and sports analysts. Sergey Kartashov shares some innovations implemented in the sports area.
VAR
VAR, or video assistant referee, is one of the latest IT achievements implemented in matches in 2018. Its concept involves displaying every controversial episode of the game. It helps the chief referee recheck the episode and make a decision. This technology has been used in hokey for a long time. Also, it has an analog in rugby called TMO (a television match official).
StatsBomb
Thi service is well-known among Spanish players. It helps to round up extensive information on Barcelona players and the clubs in the Spanish league. They often post the latest radar of particular players on Twitter. But it cannot be used for the top championships as it doesn’t provide enough aggregated statistics.
Fbref
Fbref is a freely available service that offers pre-calculated game metrics based on event data. Since the 2017-2018 sports season, it has been possible to get aggregated metrics for all the biggest championships.
VAEP
VAEP stands for Valuing Actions by Estimating Probabilities. This metric was presented at the international conference on data analysis KDD-2019 by scientists from the University of Leuven (Belgium), together with employees of Scisports. Football analysts consider it valuable as it allows them to estimate players’ performance on the field. This metric has an embedded machine learning algorithm that estimates players’ field actions and measures the game outcome in case of perfect action. In addition, VAEP incorporates the SPADL technology (Soccer Player Action Description Language)— a language for describing the players’ actions.
The heat map
This digital innovation is a great assistant that displays the general picture of the game, determining the effectiveness of each player separately or the whole team. It provides visualization in the form of fractals—multi-colored geometric shapes. Although it is very useful for sports analysts, it still needs human interaction in the process: an analyst monitors the match broadcast and captures the activity of a particular team. This service is available to use through the professional WyScout platform.
There are other digital innovations that are extremely helpful in enhancing the training process and collecting data on players in sports. Sergey Kartashov notes that developed technological devices, data services, and more AI solutions are changing the sporting world for the better.
