Scientification in Sports

Management: Scientifaction in Sports

by Leon Michael Caesarius and Jukka Hohenthal

Mercury Magazine 2014, Summer/Autumn (Special Issue on Sustainability),

Issue 7-8, pp. 024-025.

Mercury Magazine issue No. 7/8, [Summer/Autumn] 2014. Copyright © 2014, The Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the printed magazine in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. Mercury Magazine ISSN 2001-3272 is published by the Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. This reprint is available for free at www.fek.uu.se/mercury. Annual printed subscription rates for non-alumni and non-students at the Department are 399 SEK, Euro 50, $60, £35. To subscribe please email your order to info@fek.uu.se.

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STEPS FORWARD

Head of Department Leena Avotie on recognizing the importance of sustainability, not least in education.

016

Lars Engwall on the contrasting development of the pharmaceutical industry in Sweden and in Denmark.

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Successful entrepreneurs are characterized by understanding the concept of balance, argues Ivo Zander.

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Hans Dalborg, Honorary Chairman of Nordea, illuminates a key concept in corporate governance.

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’THE SECOND MACHINE AGE’

A review of the acclaimed new book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

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The field of sports is one of many frontiers of ongoing scientification argue Leon Michael Caesarius and Jukka Hohenthal.

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Lena Zander portraits Magnús Scheving [cover] - a social sustainability

entrepreneur in the entertainment industry.

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Carin Eriksson Lindvall identifies four factors that seem to contribute to the creation of intrinsic motivation.

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Bo Edvardsson explains what you need to consider in order to improve service productivity in your organization.

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EMOTIONAL CONTAGION

Are users being treated as guinea pigs when Facebook’s data science team carries out experiments?

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Daniel Nyberg and Christopher Wright argue that the nature of the corporate world’s responses to climate change hitherto can best be described as myths.

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Preferential treatment may be unwise, argues Magnus Söderlund.

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Leon Michael Caesarius and Jukka Hohenthal investigate if MOOCs will help redefine the higher education landscape.

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COMMUNICATION LITERACY

Josef Pallas is not convinced about the PR-industry’s alleged merits. Instead he tries to answer the question: when is it time to fire the PR-consultant?

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Professor and Managing Director turned rock star — Henrik Bäckström is the renaissance man.

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Torkild Thanem shows how monstrous leaders constitute a new leadership category and how you can avoid becoming such a leader.

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Political and economic systems are often deemed as fiascos, but when are we going to make a similar evaluation of financial capitalism, asks Göran Nilsson.

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The essence of sensemaking occupies Henrik Bäckström's mind.

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Ivo Zander paints a picture of the future of the well-established multinational corporation.

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Staffan Movin calls for cooperation between society, academia and business.

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When you calculate customer profitability, ask not if your company makes money of customers but if your company helps your customers to make money, says Torkel Strömsten.

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Magnus Frostenson focuses on the hard predicament of sustainability.

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Frank G. H. Hartmann draws on experimental studies to increase our understanding of controllers' conflict of interest.

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Göran Nilsson explains why financial incentives sometimes fail.

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One area where we see a lot of scientification is in sports. Michel Lewis gives us a good example of that in his book Moneyball, was later made into a movie with Brad Pitt in the leading part. Here we had the statis- tics obsessed sport baseball portrayed as a game where one could gain advantages by using analytics. The team Oakland Athletics managed to do better than their slim budget would have merited by basing their scouting on analytics instead of the common wisdom of the scouts and baseball teams. Other teams in the sport followed suit and when the richer teams combined analytics with financial muscles it was basically game over for the Oakland Athletics.

Other sports have followed, and more and more data is collected during games. In the NBA we now have videodata from games that makes it possible to analyze what is going on in the field. So how much does proximity between defender and attacking player mean for how difficult it is to score a field goal? According to sports analyst Sandy Green there is an effect, but the number of defenders in the proximity is more important in hindering field goals.

Wearable technology, like GPS trackers in the clothes of footballers makes it possible to analyze how far each player moves during a game (usually somewhere between 9000 and 12000 meters) and also how the

than dump-and-chase play does. In ice hockey we still do not have the automated tracking systems that we find in for example basketball and thus tracking has to be done manually. This limits the amount of data available, but RFID tagging of puck and sticks has been proposed and this would dramatically increase the amount of data available for analysis. According to hockey analyst Eric Tulsky, the game will be increas- ingly influenced by quants in the future as more data become available.

As demonstrated in Moneyball and as we see in other sports, there is a reluctance in teams to go from traditional techniques and intuition to data driven sports management. The demand for data and analytics is still less than the supply of data in many teams, and it takes the success of competitors for teams to give in and start using the available data. If the data is available for all, the gains of using scientification in sports are short lived as they are easily copied, but staying ahead of the game by developing proprietary tracking systems and new analytic models might be a sustainable model. Even the best quants are still cheaper to hire than Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and for the teams that cannot afford the big stars this might be one way to compete.

players and teams move. Other metrics can be used to predict the success of teams as sports analyst James Grayson has shown. According to him the proportion of shots on goal by a team is a good predictor of how well the team will do in the future. With the recent firing of Manchester United head coach David Moyes we can use analytics to look into the role of the coach in the team and thus get an understanding of how well ManU was actually doing under his leadership.

The difference between the season 11/12, the last for Fergusson, and the season 12/13, the first for Moyes, are of course dramatic as the team won the championship in 12/13 and are trailing in 6th/7th/8th place in the end of this years’ season. This means that the team will miss the lucrative Champions League for the first time since 1995. But if we look at the statistics that James Grayson claim is a robust predictor of success we see that the team did worse already in the 11/12 season. Manchester United was only 8th out of 20 teams in the premier league in proportion of shots. Grayson thus predicted a decline for the team already in that season – which turned out to be a year too early.

So why did they win in the 11/12 season – but perform in line with the predictive statistics in 12/13? The team did score a larger percentage of their shots in the 11/12 season. According to Grayson Manchester United were lucky in that season in a way that was not sustainable. When they ran out of luck in the 12/13 season and started performing according to the predictive statistics, they came in 7th place in the Premier League.

We have seen a similar trend in ice hockey where things like how the puck is taken into the offensive zone and where goals are scored, have had an impact on the way the game is played. It turns out that carrying the puck into the offensive zone leads to more than twice as many shots and goals

The field of sports is one of many frontiers of ongoing scientification, argue Leon Michael Caesarius and Jukka Hohenthal.

MANAGEMENT

n an earlier issue of Mercury (issue 5/6) we claimed that scientification is conquering the world. Scientification is the use of scien- tific methods to gather data and test hypoth- eses in management of organizations, activities and our personal lives. We see self-quantifi- cation through devices like bracelets and mobile phones, algorithms helping us find a partner in online dating services and other al- gorithms helping companies personalize their marketing toward us.