By now everyone knows that the English Premier League has signed a blockbuster deal for broadcasting rights in the United Kingdom. The pact with Sky and BT will bring the 20 lucky clubs about £1.7 billion annually for three years starting after next season. It’s a huge sum – more than any other league earns – and an increase of more than 70 percent over the last three-year package. It’s also a windfall, since the clubs don’t have to change their operations or incur additional costs in order to get it. So where will all that money go, and how…
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Month: May 2015
Real Madrid takes on Big Data – and crowdsourced analytics?
Tomorrow Real Madrid and Microsoft will launch a new app to connect fans to the club and to each other. The app will offer extra content during matches, including video from multiple camera angles, as well as games and competitions for users. But it will also give fans access to about 250 series of match data in real time… and that’s what caught my eye. Today I asked José Ángel Sánchez, the club’s director-general, and Orlando Ayala of Microsoft just how they were going to make all that information available. For example, would fans be able to download the data…
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What is your metric telling you?
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Bloomberg Sports about the common traits of ideal soccer/football metrics. Given the recent proliferation of metrics for players and teams, I think it’s worth adding a few ideas about what makes some metrics valuable and others almost worthless. Winning versus style. The biggest question about metrics is whether they measure something that leads to winning. If a metric isn’t correlated with results, then it’s probably answering a question about style. Style can be important – some teams are known for a certain style of play and want to maintain it – but…
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