Cracking the sports code

A British company helping teams prepare for this reality is Soccernomics, which advises clubs on the smartest picks and undervalued players.

"We're introducing biomechanical and neuromechanical pre-season tests to help with injury detection and to tell when players should be dropped or rested," says Soccernomics general manager Ben Lyttleton.

"That's another way clubs lose huge money, say, when a striker is injured and for the time he's out they're paying his wages of up to £100,000 (A$164,60) a week and he's not benefiting the team."

Lyttleton says the company uses data to analyse when players are being rushed back too quickly or come back too slowly.

"They say they need six weeks to get match fitness whereas specialised training systems can be set up to replace the explosive elements after injury. They need that explosiveness to be at the top of their game and we have biomechanical sports scientists that can set up a bespoke training system to restore that."

Soccernomics' maths whizzes use tools such as regression analysis to wade through the data such as that captured by British software company Prozone to identify trends overlooked by the clubs.

"It's not necessarily the team that runs the most kilometres that wins the most games. Clubs are just starting to get the gist of [using] stats correctly.

"But there's lots of ways where [statistics are] not always used correctly and that's what we're trying to eliminate. Instead of the stat where the most kilometres are run is analysed, the number of sprints run in the final third of the games is the stat that's more important."

Soccernomics data analysis is strengthening rosters off the field, too, by cutting down on unnecessary transfers of players. For instance, Tottenham Hotspurs sold three players in a short time only to buy them back again recently under different management.

"That smacks of short-term planning and one man being in control of the transfer strategy. It shouldn't happen because they're wasting money on agents' fees and perhaps these players shouldn't have been sold in the first place," Lyttleton says.

He says an error that recruiters and armchair experts make is often looking at the wrong performance indicators in a transfer candidate.

"One of the biggest mistakes a club makes in the transfer market is buying a player based on their last three top results. Because a player scored a hat trick in a World Cup game doesn't mean he'll score a hat trick in every game," says Lyttleton.

Goal scoring is dependant on variables such as the state of the pitch and time of the season, for instance. Embarrassingly, he says, clubs such as Newcastle United bought players by looking at Youtube videos, which was "substandard scouting", he says.

Competitive analysis is another area ripe for exploitation: knowing your opponent's tendencies is essential in a competition that is won by fractions of degrees and hundredths of a second.

One of Soccernomics first engagements was helping Chelsea improve its penalty kick performance. It called in London School of Economics professor Ignacio Palasios-Huerta before the 2008 final to do a game theory analysis, identifying patterns and preferences of Manchester United's goal keeper in penalty shootouts.

Using data from Dutch goalie Edwin Van der Sar's past 10 years showed he dived 80 percent of the time to the kicker's natural side. The Chelsea players tried to throw him off balance by kicking to the opposite side, Lyttleton says.

"We're not saying this will win you the World Cup or every penalty shootout but it can give you a huge advantage to know what the opposition's preferences are," he says.

"When trophies are handed out on the shootout it makes the tiny advantage that could make the difference."

Ocean racing is another area where small, incremental changes have profound effects. Maxi YouZuu skipper Ludde Ingvall says that tacking a fraction of a degree one way, even if it's a longer route, to capture a favourable current or avoid a squall is the difference between winning the Sydney to Hobart and coming second.

And in the high-profile sport of maxi yacht racing, such tactical advantages play directly into the PR battle to get money for the next race, he says.

Ingvall's first brush with IT as a professional yachtsman was in the ‘80s when Steve Jobs of Apple Computer donated an Apple II to help the skipper race from South Africa to South America.

Back then, applications which optimised the ship's course were held on floppies because hard drives couldn't sustain the G-forces of the open seas.

About 10 years ago the team shifted to Dell hardware, which it uses in its Sydney to Hobart campaign, he says.
"We now have come to the point where computers like Dell's ruggedised computer, particularly using SSDs, allows us to use the machines very efficiently with no failures on board," Ingvall says.

The computers are used for route optimisation, velocity prediction and communications.

"And they all interact," Ingvall says. Data is downloaded during the course of the race using Next G wireless networks at up to 3Mbps, 40 nautical miles out to sea.

"We use that to communicate with the media so we can keep contact with press and sponsors, which is crucial for us so we can get money," says Ingvall. The data links failover to satellite when outside this zone.

The communications software feeds weather forecasts, grid files and other data to systems on board. "It allows you to get a picture of how the winds are going to change in the defined area hour by hour over seven days. And that is a very, very important tactical and strategic tool. That is one of the key inputs to my route-optimisation program."

He contrasts route optimisation to walking over mountains: "You just sit down and say you want to avoid climbing but everything is static; nothing is static at sea.

"One of the key ingredients is to know how weather will change over time. In the old days, we would get weather faxes with isobars and draw in our own wind bars and in a seat-of-the-pants way we would decide how to take advantage of a wind shift - now we get it as a 3D file in time and space."

The professional sailor is torn between following his head and gut and keeping close enough to the competition "in case you are wrong, but you want to position yourself on the most beneficial side of your competition".

"It's made (sailing) more interesting because we get to a higher level of decision making."

Even before Ingvall and his 20 crew stepped on board YuuZoo, number-crunching computers were behind its construction. The radical datacentric philosophy that saw another professional sailor wrench the America's Cup from the New York Yacht Club in 1983 is now the norm in world racing of all stripes.

YuuZoo was designed in velocity-prediction software to determine how it would theoretically react during expected weather conditions taking into account wind and wave patterns.

Once he had his boat, Ingvall took it out to test those assumptions.

"The first stage in sea trials will be a verification stage to test the boat in angles and strengths and see if you are on the mark. Then create a velocity-prediction database that verifies or disputes theoretical data. Then you can start testing whether one sail is better than another when you need to decrease power and so on.

"When you have a reasonable performance-based database you can sit down with designers again and fine tune the boat to achieve the desired objective."

Data capture and delivery has again revolutionised the experience for stay-at-home skippers sailing their fantasy yachts from the comfort of their sofas. Rather like Max from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are - if he had a notebook or iPhone.

"Telemetry has a very big impact because it gives people more immediacy and the feeling they are part of the adventure," Ingvall says.

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