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The Data Story

The ability to interpret analytics that chronicle the game-day journey of fans is a coveted skill for sports properties.

Imagine you’re on the data and analytics team for a football franchise and after the season’s first few games you receive alarming ticketing data: The bulk of the crowd is entering your stadium an average of only 23 minutes before kickoff.

While possessing that data is important, it’s irrelevant if you’re not able to understand why it’s distressing and enlist other departments to help implement corrective strategies. Is pregame traffic a particular pain point? Are certain gates more prone to bottlenecking? What initiatives should be explored involving pregame in-venue eateries, team stores and overall entertainment to pull more fans into the stadium much earlier?

Data on fans’ habits and desires has never been more plentiful and accessible for teams and leagues, with the Golden State Warriors even noting peak decibel levels during in-game entertainment at Chase Center as yet another data point that indicates what fans like. But what distinguishes some organizations’ analysts are not their technical chops but rather soft interpersonal skills that enable them to interpret clean data, incorporate other departments and use insights to recommend strategies. Those who can use data to tell the story of a fan’s game-day journey — and why they may be entering the stadium gates just 23 minutes before kickoff — are coveted. 

“It’s very unusual to have someone who has a technology slant and also the ability to interpret it,” said Jessica Gelman, the CEO of the forward-thinking Kraft Analytics Group and co-founder of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which begins Friday. “That’s a hard person to find and hire. People are like, ‘I have all this data.’ Yeah, OK, but what are you going to do with it? How are you going to use it to drive change? Data and analytics can be scary words to some people. Translating it is a really important skill.” 

Interviews with more than a dozen industry leaders paint a portrait of the sports data and analytics world in this new decade, with some executives half-joking that teams are now drowning in business-side data. The level of sophistication among teams varies greatly because of priorities, resources and willingness. And one element that elevates the more sophisticated is the number of those in data and analytics roles equipped with the skills to interpret, translate and efficiently drive data-informed change. 

“It’s a little bit of art and science,” said Neda Tabatabaie, vice president, business analytics and technology for the San Jose Sharks. “How do you translate data with the realities of everything going on with the team and provide analysis that makes sense for the business? It’s not necessarily, ‘Oh, this is what my regression analysis says’ and then close your eyes to everything else going on.”

The Boston Red Sox rely on their business intelligence analysts to know what questions to ask different fan segments.getty images

When hiring for data and analytics roles, Tabatabaie receives lots of impressive résumés from those with Ph.D.s, but during the interview processes they sometimes “can’t break down a problem or provide you with different steps that they might take to find a solution.” The industry, she said, is still plagued by outside stereotypes that data and analytics team members — exact titles often vary — are a “bunch of people sitting behind computers running fancy analysis, and they don’t talk to anyone.”

Valuable soft skills include pinpointing insights others don’t see; working in concert with other departments on strategies; and at times clearly articulating to top-level executives recommendations that may run counter to conventional wisdom or established philosophy.

In the example where the bulk of fans enter a stadium 23 minutes before kickoff, the soft skills would prompt an analyst to use the data to consider and question all possible scenarios, said Brendan McGeehan, director of SPAN-360 at Spectra Analytics. He calls explaining the data the connective tissue in the process.

“You can hire folks with a strictly technical background who can code in 20 different languages, but without any sort of a business or industry background, then that coding can only take you so far,” McGeehan said. “There also needs to be some level of soft skills involved. If you actually want the intersection of all of those skill sets, it’s pretty hard to find.”

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WHERE TO FIND ANSWERS

The Boston Red Sox have gone to great lengths in recent years to tailor ticketing efforts to different subgroups of fans. College-age fans, for example, respond differently than young families to some efforts because they are more likely to attend games on a whim. Adam Grossman, the Red Sox’s chief marketing officer, said knowing what questions to ask while interpreting data is as critical as having the data sources behind it.

“I’m not on the data science side, but when we think about our marketing efforts, they are sitting sidecar with us,” Grossman said. “They give us the guidance and direction of where our efforts can and should be targeted, but it just doesn’t end there. It helps from the diversity of skill-set perspective to have enough people in the room to be able to have those important discussions to be able to utilize the data we have to be as efficient as possible.”

Some teams may have the insights they seek but not realize it. Don White, co-founder of the artificial intelligence-powered engagement platform Satisfi Labs, said that if a fan asks in an Apple Business Chat about parking options, for instance, sometimes that data is categorized and sent to customer service instead of the ticketing department. In order to gain insights, one needs to know where to find relevant data.

“So I think the big ‘aha! moment’ is going to be as teams get more equipped at seeing everything, they are going find that there were insights layered all across the organization everywhere that really should have been narrowed to different places,” White said. “But they didn’t see it because they didn’t have a high-level view of it.”

Soft skills are especially valuable if one is encouraged within the organization’s culture to derive bold strategies from data. AJ Maestas, founder and CEO of Navigate Research, said organizational leadership is often too conservative and too rarely encourages risk-taking. “It’s too easy to make excuses for why something can’t be done or why something isn’t a priority,” he said. “Our industry tends to think very near-term — perhaps because there’s so much job movement — and implementing change usually requires near-term risks for long-term gains. If our neighbors aren’t doing it, we crawl, walk, and only then run to our future once we see someone else is ahead of us.”

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TELLING THE STORY

For some, soft skills are a luxury. For others, they are a necessity. 

After each game at Chase Center, the Warriors provide their 75-member leadership team with a 15-page report. The report provides data on everything from sales to attendance to food and beverage to decibel levels during various entertainment moments of the game-day experience. 

Brandon Schneider, the team’s CRO, said they don’t make any decision that isn’t informed by data. That culture of analytics fluency is established at the top, with owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, and extending to Rick Welts, team president and COO, and beyond. Data is the foundation from which to articulate the rationale. 

“If I go to Joe and talk about any decision — ticket prices for next year — and I don’t have the data to walk through how to get to that answer, I’m going to be thrown out of his office,” Schneider said. “It’s never happened because we wouldn’t do that.”

Echoing that sentiment is Russell Scibetti, the New York Giants vice president, strategy and business intelligence, who stressed that data often doesn’t give you an answer but rather several different questions. The communication element is critical, he said, because “you may have the best model in the world, but you need to communicate why, especially if your model says we should do something differently than maybe leadership would want to do. You need to make sure why this is the case and the right direction.”

The change in the decibel level at Chase Center during various entertainment or fan engagement moments is a metric regularly tracked by the Golden State Warriors. getty images

Traditionally when one thinks of research and analytics, a mathematical background and a Ph.D. in economics are viewed as preferred credentials, said Jeff Eccleston, the global head of insights and analytics at CAA Brand Consulting. That’s not necessarily the case anymore, he said, adding that “we’re looking for people that are analytical and inquisitive and can tell a story with data. At the end of the day, the insights coming out of it are more important.”

If you’re looking for the future of data and analytics, a window into esports can be instructive. Inside the performance center for Complexity Gaming — majority owned by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and real estate developer  John Goff — across the street from the Cowboys’ sprawling campus at The Star in Frisco, Texas, CMO Cam Kelly explained how virtually everyone on this team is fluent in analytics. 

In esports, there is less a distinction between data examining audience behavior and data assessing player performance. Kelly will toggle between looking at how to grow an audience on TikTok to looking at enhancing player performance in a particular game. In esports, the industry comprises a generation dependent on understanding metrics.

“If you’re in the entertainment and sports industry and you don’t have people with the ability to analyze statistics and make informed decisions, that’s a code red,” said Kelly, struck by the suggestion that some traditional sports executives joke that they are drowning in data. “We look at it as something that is fun to swim in, not something that is frightening that you’ll drown in.”

Kelly said that if you can’t recognize how data and insights tell a story of how to shift habits and create change, you’re probably in the wrong business. It’s about using data to articulate a fan’s journey and strategizing how to enhance and personalize that journey. A coveted skill set: storytelling through data. 

“But nonfiction,” Kelly said, laughing. 

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