Sport Performance Analysis

Matt Egan is a First Team Performance Analyst at Bath Rugby focusing on Attack and Backs. He previously worked for the England RFU and Leicester Tigers. Matt tells us about his experiences and what it is like to be an analyst at Bath Rugby. Tell us about your background. What made you want to become a Performance Analyst? I am from Northamptonshire, a small town called Corby. I went to Loughborough University and ended up doing a Sport Science degree there. When I was at Loughborough, the university had a mentorship programme at Leicester Tigers, so for my Performance Analysis module I would go work at Leicester Tigers with Simon Barbour, who was my first boss. He was unbelievable, one of the top in Performance Analysis in Rugby Union. ...

Alex Scanlon is a Men’s Performance Analyst at The Football Association, where he has been working with development groups since 2017. Alex joined The FA as part of the 2016 initiative to invest in winning England teams by significantly expanding the technical groups that support the various squads. Prior to that, he was a Performance Analyst for Everton’s first team before spending three and a half years working across most age groups in West Bromwich Albion’s academy. Alex tells us about his pathway to become a Performance Analyst for England. ...

Dr Patrick Lucey is the Chief Scientist at Stats Perform and has over 20 years of experience working in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular face recognition and audio visual speech recognition technology. He also worked at Disney Research (owners of ESPN) where he developed an automatic sports broadcasting system that tracked players in real-time by moving a robotic camera to capture their movements. Patrick recently talked about the use of Artificial Intelligence in sports, what that means and how we can use AI to help coaches and analysts make better decisions in sport. Artificial Intelligence refers to technology that emulates human tasks, often using machine learning as the method to learn from data how to emulate these tasks. His talk emphasised on the importance of sports data, and provided an overview on the different types of sports data that exist today. Patrick explained what is meant by AI and why is AI needed in sport. ...

Tom Johnson is currently the First Team Performance Analyst at Crystal Palace FC. He joined the club 4 years ago as the Head of Academy Performance Analysis, having previously been a Senior Academy Analyst at Derby County FC, where he started his career as an intern. Apart from being an analyst, he is also an under 13s coach. Tom tells us all about his journey in Performance Analysis and what it is like to work in a Premier League club. ...

Javier Martin Buldu is an expert on the analysis of non-linear systems and the understanding of how complex systems organise themselves, adapt and evolve. He focuses on the application of network science and complex systems theory in the analysis of sports. Buldu’s work is based on the principle that teams are far more than the simple aggregation of their individual players. By collaborating with organisations such as the Centre of Biomedical Technology in Madrid, La Liga, ESADE Business School, IFISC research institute and the ARAID Foundation, he has been able to combine elements of graph theory, non-linear dynamics, statistical physics, big data and neuroscience to construct various networks using positional tracking data of a football match. These networks are then able to explain what happens on the pitch beyond conventional ways of assessing the performance of individual players to understand team behaviours. ...

Dr Manuel Stein has spent over 7 years researching and analysing player movement using detailed positional football data. His work has focused on the investigation of real-time skeleton extraction to perform match analysis of player movement with the aim of fostering the understanding of comparative and competitive behaviours in football. He has revolutionised the way match and tactical analysis is performed by teaching computers how to measure key playing aspects of the sport, such as team dominance or a player’s control of space derived directly from video footage. Stein has developed an automatic and dynamic model that takes into account the contextual factors that influence the movement and behaviour of players during a match. This novel player detection system automatically is able to display complex and advanced 5-D visualisations that are superimposed on original video footage. ...

Michael Lopez, the Director of Data and Analytics at the NFL, recently discussed at the FC Barcelona Sports Tomorrow conference the way that his Football Operations team and the wider NFL analytics teams leverage a large community of NFL data enthusiasts to obtain a better understanding of the game of American Football. In his talk, Michael walked through the journey that the NFL took to develop expected rushing yards, a concept that began as an initial idea within their Football Operations group and ended up making its way up to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats Group and the media. ...

Performance Analysts are responsible for producing quantitative information that allows coaches to quickly identify areas requiring attention. This information is primarily delivered through the provision of objective statistical and visual feedback. It involves the selection of video clips that coaches can use to engage in detailed discussions with players, identifying performance areas that need improvement and making training decisions. Video feedback technology has become a major resource as more coaches now rely on video highlights as a guide to enhance training of their players. The introduction of technology in these informative and constructive interactions in recent years has made the role of the performance analysis field a critical part in coach-athlete communication. ...

Types Of Roles In Performance Analysis Depending on the size and organisational structure of the sporting club or institution, the range of responsibilities and job title of a Performance Analyst may vary significantly. Most Performance Analysis roles, particularly in smaller teams or lower divisions, continue to encompass a generic list of responsibilities across the different areas that make up the discipline, from handling filming equipment to performing data analytics and managing databases. These roles, usually titled Performance Analyst, often provide the analyst with a great level of autonomy by relying on them to effectively manage all processes, equipment and communication related to the analysis of performance within team. In these roles, often supervised by senior peers or team leads, the Performance Analyst is responsible for successfully executing the existing filming, data collection and analysis delivery processes already in place at the club but also for helping to shape and improve the practices of the team in respect to the analysis of team and player performance. ...

What Is Web Scraping? Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting data and collecting information from the web. It could be described as a way of replacing the time-consuming, often tedious exercise of manually copy-pasting website information into a document with a method that is quick, scalable and automated. Web scraping enables you to collect larger amounts of data from one or various websites faster. The process of scraping a website for data often consists on writing a piece of code that runs automatic tasks on our behalf. This code can either be written by yourself or executed through a specialised web scraping program. For example, by simply writing a few basic lines of code, you can tell your computer to open a browser window, navigate to a certain web page, load the HTML code of the page, and create a CSV file with the information you want to retrieve, such as a data table. ...