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Data flood brings push, pull on what to share

I n the midst of an unprecedented surge in sports data and analytics, the NFL earlier this year found itself with a difficult question: how best to balance the flow of new player data around the league.

After placing radio frequency identification tags in player shoulder pads in partnership with Zebra Technologies and opening up an array of advanced player performance measures, the league’s competition committee in May ruled that teams during the 2016 season could receive detailed game performance data only on their own players. Game performance data on other teams’ players is available only on a summary basis.

Many within football had long desired this kind of tracking information, such as how fast a wide receiver

Performance data has drawn the most scrutiny, as labor unions want to make sure adequate protections are in place for players.
Photo by: NBA / Getty Images
accelerates and separates from his defender, believing it will open new applications for coaching and generate new content for media partners. But the committee believed that it had not yet fully understood all the potential ramifications of sharing player data leaguewide, and feared it could unintentionally fuel competitive imbalance among teams, particularly with varying analytics staffs from team to team.

“The committee … needed a better understanding of what data was being collected and how it will be used as part of their analysis of potential competitive impact going forward,” Rich McKay, Atlanta Falcons president and chief executive, and co-chairman of the NFL’s competition committee, said this past summer.

The NFL’s decision, which will be revisited after the 2016 season, highlights both an important crossroads for the development of data and analytics in the sports industry, and the unique operational nature of leagues and their teams.

Historic advances in the development of player performance data, such as the NFL’s use of RFID tags, Major League Baseball’s creation of its Statcast system, and the NBA’s leaguewide optical player tracking, have generated huge amounts of information that in many cases wasn’t available even a year or two ago. Advanced fan profiling and lead scoring have created similarly meteoric boosts in business analytics.

But that expansion in the amount of available data in turn has generated crucial questions within each sport about how best to spread and share that data between teams and leagues, entities that are at once colleagues and competitors.

While each league and its member teams have a common goal to grow their sport, create more fans and generate more revenue, local desires to win also have teams seeking their own proprietary, data-fueled competitive advantages.

And in most cases, the rules are not uniformly applied within each sport. Most U.S. pro leagues in recent years have implemented widespread sharing of business-side data, such as ticket, sponsorship and merchandise sales. Such data increasingly lies at the heart of sharing best practices, such as within the NBA’s team marketing and business operations group. But many properties and teams are typically far less collaborative with on-field or on-court information, such as player performance data, and quite often refuse to disclose, either publicly or privately, the vendors they use for player analysis.

“We are such a unique industry,” said Brandon Schneider, Golden State Warriors senior vice president of business development. “For us, there are 29 other companies who do the same thing we do. We compete on the court, but not off the court. We do a lot with TMBO to share data and best practices, and get a lot out of that relationship. … But it’s really very different, essentially the opposite, on the other side of the organization with basketball operations.”

‘Knowing where the guide rails are’

Stephen McArdle, NHL chief administrative officer, describes a similar balancing act, one that also now includes the deep involvement of MLB Advanced Media through a long-term digital partnership. Like other major leagues, the NHL increasingly is developing tools to more deeply study elements such as secondary market ticket sales and merchandise buying patterns. But it also wants to maintain some freedom for individual teams to operate in their local markets where they see fit.

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“It’s about knowing where the guide rails are,” McArdle said. “There is a set of information, particularly fan information, that we are collecting and sharing back to the teams, particularly as it relates to stated team affinities or specific geographies, and certainly best practices. But there are some things in teams’ own analytics that they develop that we would consider to be their proprietary intellectual property.”

That equilibrium is increasingly being tested on two key fronts: a heightened need for speed, and labor considerations.

A current push throughout sports analytics is to make many systems capable of delivering real-time or near-time data, which in turn typically requires rules for control, sharing and access to a particular set of data be determined in advance.

“The trend is definitely toward teams wanting more data and wanting it sooner and sooner,” said Eric Petrosinelli, general manager for sports at Zebra Technologies. “In some cases, teams are wanting data instantaneously. We are obviously in an information age, and we all have that insatiable desire for more data.”

That quest for speed, both internally and externally, also can conflict with league desires to carefully manage the flow of information that is made public.

“One of the biggest things we’ve had to sort through is how data gets distributed, what goes public, what stays private, and how soon that all happens,” said Bob Bowman, MLB president of business and media.

Zebra Technolgies has worked with the NFL to use devices in shoulder pads that can measure such things as acceleration and how much separation receivers get from defenders.
Photo by: Zebra Technologies
MLB, in contrast to NFL, has taken a more open stance thus far with its emerging Statcast data, as each club gets to see the entire suite of player data generated through the system. “But our organizing principle is that data is collected the same and distributed to the clubs the same, and what they ultimately do with that data is going to vary.”

Then there is the additional layer of how all the new data, particularly as it relates to player biometrics, factors into relationships between leagues and their respective players unions. Already, most leagues are seeking to pool injury data to help identify root causes and reduce player time on disabled lists. But many emerging tracking and analytics technologies are not explicitly governed by current labor pacts, and already there have been some union grievances in this area, such as one the NFL Players Association filed last year regarding the use of sensors to monitor some players’ sleep.

Among the potential areas of concern are maintaining players’ personal privacy rights regarding health data and using of biometrics against an athlete in contract negotiations.

“Anything that can help a player enhance their performance, and isn’t a drug, is great,” Michele Roberts, National Basketball Players Association executive director, said earlier this year. “But who owns that information? Can a player refuse to engage? This can be a really good thing, but there are some information protection issues that need to be addressed.”

Providing added value

The formation of the NBA’s TMBO in 2000 as a means to share best business practices long predates the arrival of most of today’s analytics. But data and analysis is now firmly at the core at what the group does.

That evolved mindset, however, in recent years has needed to shift even further as every team now employs at least

Leagues want teams to share data that could establish best practices for ticketing, sponsorship and other key revenue streams.
Photo by: Getty Images
one, and typically multiple, in-house staffers focused solely on analytics.

“There are actually a lot of teams averaging four or five people on staff doing analytics and [customer relationship management],” said Amy Brooks, TMBO’s executive vice president. “So the key for us at the league level is being able to provide added value, and help teams do things more efficiently and have a view into things that they wouldn’t necessarily have on their own. It can’t be duplicative.”

That approach of added value within the NBA has taken the form in aggregating leaguewide business data, particularly in key revenue areas such as ticket sales, to provide lead scoring and retention modeling. Another pooled data output from TMBO is “NBA FICO,” a measure of fan avidity and likelihood to buy tickets named for its similarity to consumer credit ratings. The metric pools data such as age, income, ticket and merchandise buying history, NBA League Pass subscription purchases, home ownership and other information.

“Data really informs every decision we make now, and having a broader view into things is really important,” Schneider said. “So we have seen the value in that TMBO relationship and have happily shared numbers.”

The Warriors are now leaning on TMBO as the team looks to develop a new arena in San Francisco to replace Oracle Arena.

“There is a lot of modeling and benchmarking for new arenas, historical information they have we’re using now that’s been very useful,” Schneider said.

But many within the sports analytics industry predict more bumps ahead in the sharing of data, particularly as the rate of new data creation continues to outpace teams’ and leagues’ ability to understand it and create policies around it.

“We’re still very much in an education process because everything in this space is still so new,” said Brian Kopp, president of Catapult North America, which works with dozens of pro and college teams, particularly around wearable devices. Kopp previously was a key figure in the development of Stats’ SportVU optical tracking system.

“And the rules can be very different for different types of data, even within a single sport or single organization.
Putting something on an athlete’s body, for example, is very different than what you get from optical tracking, and how that’s shared. So this is still going to evolve a lot.”

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