World of Sports

World of Sports
Author: Ben Groundwater
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2021-07-28
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9781741176919

Destination Sport is your guide to one of the world's great obsessions: to the teams, the games, the venues, the histories and the personalities that all come together to form something amazing. Matches that freeze economies. Races that stop nations. Rivalries that stretch back through centuries. This is the world of sport, electrifying and fascinating, thrilling and endlessly revealing. You can't hope to understand a nation without understanding its pastimes and passions, and that, so often, is sport. Organized into sections by world region, Destination Sport features a line-up of sports, events and sporting venues that are both familiar and obscure, from world-famous match-ups to little known quirks. There's also a focus on the world's best stadiums and a calendar of sporting events. This is the ideal book for sports lovers who want to understand the full gamut of sports around the world, watch them all on TV and perhaps even travel to join the locals in their passion. Illustrations by UK artist Paul Reid.

Sports Analytics

Sports Analytics
Author: Benjamin C. Alamar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 023155589X

Data and analytics have the potential to provide sports organizations with a competitive advantage both on and off the field. Yet even as the use of analytics in sports has become commonplace, teams regularly find themselves making big investments without significant payoff. This book is a practical, nontechnical guide to incorporating sports data into decision making, giving leaders the knowledge they need to maximize their organization’s investment in analytics. Benjamin C. Alamar—a leading expert who has built high-performing analytics groups—surveys the current state of the use of data in sports, including both specifics around the tools and how to deploy them most effectively. Sports Analytics offers a clear, easily digestible overview of data management, statistical models, and information systems and a detailed understanding of their vast possibilities. It walks readers through the essentials of understanding the value of different types of data and strategies for building and managing an analytics team. Throughout, Alamar illustrates the value of analytics with real-world examples and case studies from both the sports and business sides. Sports Analytics has guided a range of sports professionals to success since its original publication in 2013. This second edition adds examples and strategies that focus on using data on the business side of a sports organization, provides concrete strategies for incorporating different types of data into decision making, and updates all discussions for the rapid technological developments of the last decade.

Data Analysis in Sport

Data Analysis in Sport
Author: Peter O'Donoghue
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2014-10-24
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1317810384

Making sense of sports performance data can be a challenging task but is nevertheless an essential part of performance analysis investigations. Focusing on techniques used in the analysis of sport performance, this book introduces the fundamental principles of data analysis, explores the most important tools used in data analysis, and offers guidance on the presentation of results. The book covers key topics such as: The purpose of data analysis, from statistical analysis to algorithmic processing Commercial packages for performance and data analysis, including Focus, Sportscode, Dartfish, Prozone, Excel, SPSS and Matlab Effective use of statistical procedures in sport performance analysis Analysing data from manual notation systems, player tracking systems and computerized match analysis systems Creating visually appealing ‘dashboard’ interfaces for presenting data Assessing reliability. The book includes worked examples from real sport, offering clear guidance to the reader and bringing the subject to life. This book is invaluable reading for any student, researcher or analyst working in sport performance or undertaking a sport-related research project or methods course

Winning With Data

Winning With Data
Author: Fiona Green
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351610333

For many years, sports rights owners have had an ‘if you build it, they will come’ attitude, suggesting they take their fans for granted. Combined with advances in broadcasting quality, digital marketing, and social media, this has resulted in diminishing attendances and participation levels. The use of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), BI (Business Intelligence) and Data Analytics has therefore become integral to doing business in sports, emulating the approach used by brands such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify. Technology has made the world a smaller place; clubs and teams can now connect with their fans anywhere in the world, allowing them to grow their marketplace, but they operate in an ‘attention economy’ where there’s too much choice and engagement is key. This book sets out to share the processes and principles the sports industry uses to capitalise on the natural loyalty it creates. Case studies and commentary from around the world are used to demonstrate some of the practices implemented by the world’s leading sports brands including clubs Arsenal and the San Antonio Spurs. the governing bodies of UEFA and Special Olympics International, and the MLS and NHL. With a focus on our unique challenges coupled with the opportunities the use of data creates, this book is essential reading for professionals within the sports industry.

Analytic Methods in Sports

Analytic Methods in Sports
Author: Thomas A. Severini
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1000050947

One of the greatest changes in the sports world in the past 20 years has been the use of mathematical methods to analyze performances, recognize trends and patterns, and predict results. Analytic Methods in Sports: Using Mathematics and Statistics to Understand Data from Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Other Sports, Second Edition provides a concise yet thorough introduction to the analytic and statistical methods that are useful in studying sports. The book gives you all the tools necessary to answer key questions in sports analysis. It explains how to apply the methods to sports data and interpret the results, demonstrating that the analysis of sports data is often different from standard statistical analyses. The book integrates a large number of motivating sports examples throughout and offers guidance on computation and suggestions for further reading in each chapter. Features Covers numerous statistical procedures for analyzing data based on sports results Presents fundamental methods for describing and summarizing data Describes aspects of probability theory and basic statistical concepts that are necessary to understand and deal with the randomness inherent in sports data Explains the statistical reasoning underlying the methods Illustrates the methods using real data drawn from a wide variety of sports Offers many of the datasets on the author’s website, enabling you to replicate the analyses or conduct related analyses New to the Second Edition R code included for all calculations A new chapter discussing several more advanced methods, such as binary response models, random effects, multilevel models, spline methods, and principal components analysis, and more Exercises added to the end of each chapter, to enable use for courses and self-study

Sports Analytics and Data Science

Sports Analytics and Data Science
Author: Thomas W. Miller
Publisher: FT Press
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2015-11-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0133887413

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. This up-to-the-minute reference will help you master all three facets of sports analytics — and use it to win! Sports Analytics and Data Science is the most accessible and practical guide to sports analytics for everyone who cares about winning and everyone who is interested in data science. You’ll discover how successful sports analytics blends business and sports savvy, modern information technology, and sophisticated modeling techniques. You’ll master the discipline through realistic sports vignettes and intuitive data visualizations–not complex math. Every chapter focuses on one key sports analytics application. Miller guides you through assessing players and teams, predicting scores and making game-day decisions, crafting brands and marketing messages, increasing revenue and profitability, and much more. Step by step, you’ll learn how analysts transform raw data and analytical models into wins: both on the field and in any sports business.

Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy

Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy
Author: Robert Kissell
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2017-04-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0128052937

Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy provides the sports community—students, professionals, and casual sports fans—with the essential mathematics and statistics required to objectively analyze sports teams, evaluate player performance, and predict game outcomes. These techniques can also be applied to fantasy sports competitions. Readers will learn how to: - Accurately rank sports teams - Compute winning probability - Calculate expected victory margin - Determine the set of factors that are most predictive of team and player performance Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy also illustrates modeling techniques that can be used to decode and demystify the mysterious computer ranking schemes that are often employed by post-season tournament selection committees in college and professional sports. These methods offer readers a verifiable and unbiased approach to evaluate and rank teams, and the proper statistical procedures to test and evaluate the accuracy of different models. Optimal Sports Math, Statistics, and Fantasy delivers a proven best-in-class quantitative modeling framework with numerous applications throughout the sports world. - Statistical approaches to predict winning team, probabilities, and victory margin - Procedures to evaluate the accuracy of different models - Detailed analysis of how mathematics and statistics are used in a variety of different sports - Advanced mathematical applications that can be applied to fantasy sports, player evaluation, salary negotiation, team selection, and Hall of Fame determination

Scorecasting

Scorecasting
Author: Tobias Moskowitz
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-01-17
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0307591808

In Scorecasting, University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz teams up with veteran Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to overturn some of the most cherished truisms of sports, and reveal the hidden forces that shape how basketball, baseball, football, and hockey games are played, won and lost. Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler, the authors look at: the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists; the surprising truth about the universally accepted axiom that defense wins championships; the subtle biases that umpires exhibit in calling balls and strikes in key situations; the unintended consequences of referees' tendencies in every sport to "swallow the whistle," and more. Among the insights that Scorecasting reveals: • Why Tiger Woods is prone to the same mistake in high-pressure putting situations that you and I are • Why professional teams routinely overvalue draft picks • The myth of momentum or the "hot hand" in sports, and why so many fans, coaches, and broadcasters fervently subscribe to it • Why NFL coaches rarely go for a first down on fourth-down situations--even when their reluctance to do so reduces their chances of winning. In an engaging narrative that takes us from the putting greens of Augusta to the grid iron of a small parochial high school in Arkansas, Scorecasting will forever change how you view the game, whatever your favorite sport might be.

Gaming the World

Gaming the World
Author: Andrei S. Markovits
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691162034

The globalizing influence of professional sports Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global—and globalizing—sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.