There are people and there is leadership, but numbers are becoming ever more influential in assessing performances and deciding who truly is the best of the best.
Speed, distances, heart rate, VO2 max aerobic capacity tests, biomechanics, injury risk, sleep, mood, stress, positions, heat maps, formations – it is too much for most of us to contemplate.
“Football is the hardest sport. You know, fundamentally, it’s hard to analyse because there are not many goals,” says Ian Graham, founder and CEO of analytics company Ludonautics.
“I was director of research at Liverpool Football Club for 11 years. In the Premier League, certainly every move is analysed.
“For every game, you get this data, which is this list of what happened, where and who did it. Most leagues now have something called tracking data, where you see 25 frames per second, the positions of all of the players. That tells you something about the off-ball impacts of players.”
It does not come cheap, though. Graham says it will cost anything from £1.5m to £3.5m for clubs such as Liverpool, Arsenal, Brighton and Brentford, who are known to be invested in the numbers.
Then again, in football at least, that is a steal if you are paying £100m for a player.
Data will tell anybody with knowledge of how to use it an awful lot, but can athletes understand it themselves?
Certainly – just ask English golfer Lottie Woad, who recently won the Scottish Open aged 21, a week after turning professional in a sport which demands accuracy.
“I love data, so that’s kind of how my brain works,” Woad says.
“I record stats from each round and put them in a system called Upgame – it’ll tell you everything about your round, strokes gained and stuff like that.
“And then in my practice using launch monitors, showing you all the stuff you need for your technique as well as looking at ball flight, spin rates, stuff like that. It’s helped a lot.”
Incremental improvement is the name of the game, but there’s a more sophisticated phenomenon on the horizon which could change elite sport forever and needs a scientist, not a sports star, to explain.
“Artificial intelligence is a form of computer science. So it uses systems that can perform tasks which mirror human intelligence, such as the likes of problem-solving, decision-making and learning,” says the Open University’s Mark Antrobus.
“The real benefits of it is it can be used to collect and streamline data and data collection processes really quickly. We can identify patterns, and make predictions just like humans do through experience.”
