In 2014, sports analytics was a $125 million market. By 2021, its value is expected to balloon to $4.7 billion. But this market wasn’t always so lucrative or widely accepted.
Back in 2002, the Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane earned a trip to the Major League Baseball playoffs despite having a payroll of just over $40 million — $80 million less than major market teams like the New York Yankees. The key to the A’s success? Not just their scouts’ intuition, but sabermetric principles and rigorous – though at the time, overlooked – statistical analysis.
“Moneyball” changed the way front offices across the sports world conducted business. From baseball to hockey and football to basketball, general managers are increasingly relying on analytics to make smarter decisions when scouting, drafting and trading players. They are now using data to build the very best possible teams.
But a team’s success depends on more than compiling a roster of skilled players, it requires putting the best combination of talent into the game – and that means keeping players healthy. In an industry fixated on numbers, biometric measurements and workload metrics can offer just as much insight as the box score.
At least that’s what companies like Kitman Labs and founder Stephen Smith believe. Building on his experience as a strength & conditioning coach for Leinster Rugby and a thesis on injury risk, Stephen created Kitman Labs’ Profiler tool in 2012 to highlight, manage and reduce the risk of injury in professional athletes.
He believes analytics can be used to not only draft the best players, but maximize that investment by keeping them healthy.
At Experian, we’re fascinated by the idea of using data to manage risks and maximize investments – in sports, but more importantly, in business.
As a company, we are intimately familiar with the many ways Big Data is being used to solve strategic marketing and risk-management problems through an advanced data analysis process, research and development. Thereby, helping us utilize data as a force for good.
In fact, every day, we are compiling, analyzing and transforming massive amounts of information into actionable insights.
Whether those insights can help consumers secure an affordable loan, understand their credit score, or protect their identity; or for a business to manage risk, help prevent fraudulent transactions, and to ensure they are marketing their products and services to the right consumers at the right time and across the right channels.
So we took a moment to sit down with Stephen and Kitman Labs to hear more about their work, compare the worlds of sports and business, share insights and examine what the future might have in store for both industries.
Here are the highlights and takeaways from our conversation:
What’s your mission at Kitman Labs?
Our mission, quite simply, is to create competitive advantages through technology and analytics. We sell to professional and college sports organizations. Our clients are some of the most elite in sports.
Our goal is to use our sports science backgrounds to help them win. As you may know, the movement to use analytics in sports has been enormous over the past 15 years, especially with data related things like Moneyball and statistical analysis. Our work is in this tradition, but a lot more components go into it.
Risk management is a key focus for us at Experian, would this be an example of such a component?
Yes. Risk management is exactly what we do in the world of sports. Our platform is designed to identify injury risks and help players stay on the field.
Because anyone who follows sports will tell you injuries are an enormous problem. Every single year, teams lose player performances and huge amounts of money because of injuries. If there was a company out there that could help solve this issue, in a quantifiable way – that would be huge. We believe that’s what we’re building here.
So how does it work?
There are a number of different components. We have a screening tool that we use to run diagnostic tests on athletes as frequently as possible. That goes into our database system, called Profiler.
We’ve taken our years of sports science and engineering experience to develop a system that pulls together all data points tracked by a team to objectively inform us of all stressors placed on athletes and how they are responding to these stressors. Using this information we can identify when certain players are at a higher risk of injury.
As far as we’re concerned, this is the next frontier in sports analytics – this is the vanguard of sports technology helping teams to win.
Is there one sport in particular that you’ve seen this take off in?
As far as the United States goes, we are talking to teams in every sport, and have worked with such a wide variety of data and analyze it all uniquely.
Our system can analyze enormous datasets in real time and process this information to find the slightest important variation outside the realm of normality, that coaches just do not have time to find themselves.
But this isn’t a problem confined to sports. We’re solving a human problem. We’re in the business of human optimization and we are committed to delving into the minute details to help revolutionize the way this industry looks at these issues.
At Experian we’re seeing first-hand the many ways data and insights can solve real life challenges for businesses and people alike. How are you seeing the data that you’re collecting transform your industry, with relation to sports science and sports medicine?
Essentially, we’re turning that data into actionable insights that can be used every day.
We’re giving the practitioners that work with these teams, the ability to make better, more informed, data-driven decisions to help improve the welfare of their teams, and ultimately, their performance. So what we’re doing in sports right now is no different than the majority of Big Data companies like Experian
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We, of course, wholeheartedly agreed with Stephen’s final point. The cutting-edge work being done at Kitman Labs is exactly in line with what we’re doing at Experian.
Today, we are turning data into actionable insights to help consumers, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, automotive companies, retailers and governmental organizations make more informed and effective decisions.
For example, our DataLabs team provides a safe and secure environment to partner with our clients to enable breakthrough data experimentation and innovation.
In our labs, we’re able to combine Experian’s data assets with those of our clients to present a larger picture and to experiment with new and innovative ways of analyzing that data to deliver greater competitive advantages.
Just like Kitman Labs is using analytics to help sports teams make better decisions to manage risks around training, improve player and team performance and extend careers, Experian is using Big Data for good to help individual consumers and businesses make informed decisions, grow the economy and improve society.