Everyone loves a good stat, particularly when it comes to sport.
We use them to prove whatever point it is we’re trying to make - identifying the greatest of all time is a popular one for sports fans - and they often throw petrol on those particularly fiery pub conversations.
Inside the sports industry, statistics - or more correctly, data analysis - has become big business. Professional teams and athletes often employ large rosters of staff to analyse their performance and break it down into the smallest details.
A few years ago the mysterious ‘stats-man’ (these stattos were invariably men) started to appear at the side of pitches in this country with a clipboard, pen and a look of concentration on their faces.
5.5 - Chelsea are averaging a goal every 5.5 shots this season compared to one every 7.2 in 2013-14. Upgrade. pic.twitter.com/fDq5y0qmuk
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) April 1, 2015Before long they moved upstairs into the stands, their work aided by advancing technology. They never liked the 'stats-man' term and now they are more often referred to by their preferred title, 'performance analysts'.
“My background is sports science and I wouldn’t consider myself a stats guy. I work with the coach and performance analysis is a useful tool,” explains Alan Swanton, who is employed by the Irish Institute of Sport.
Amongst others, Swanton works with the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA). He was part of the team at the hugely successful London 2012 Olympic Games, which yielded Katie Taylor’s gold along with a silver and two bronze medals for John Joe Nevin, Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlan respectively.
“We collect performance-related analysis - data and numbers. It’s about breaking a sport down into pieces. If you can improve one of these pieces, the performance of the athlete will improve,” he notes.
“Even Olympic medallists might have ten things that they can work on. They can try to work on all ten of those, but that isn’t going to be helpful. If they can work on one and improve that, then they can improve their performance.
“We watch the video and take the important pieces of information: punch accuracy, feint to punch ratio, scoring punches and so on. There are key variables that we consider important and it’s all in the context of where that boxer is at any particular time.”
A single nine-minute fight can take as long as nine hours to break down and then there’s a further two hours to go through it with the boxer in question.
Analysts boil down reams of numbers and turn them into something that coaches can use.
Man of the Match performance from Sergio Aguero. He's been everywhere http://t.co/GnFDNyzSiT pic.twitter.com/JQQ1l6VhPd
— Match Zone (@MailMatchZone) May 10, 2015During matches we’ll marvel at heat maps and charts showing the distance players have run. But are these of any use to coaches and players? Well, yes and no is the answer.
These are statistics. Raw numbers. Without context and analysis they will never be anything more than that.
“Video is the core piece,” said Swanton. “It happens regularly where someone takes key stats at a match their team is playing in - ratio of chances to scores and so on. But without video these aren’t of much use; the video helps to understand why these things happened.”
The types of data gathered varies from sport to sport. In snooker, pot success ratio is an important metric, while in golf it is greens in regulation.
In other sports, the numbers harvested in training can be just as important as those in competition.
In soccer, once a player has covered his maximum distance, a number known from their training, it’s time to take them off. Rugby players are often substituted once they have made a certain number of tackles because that’s all they have in them.
Ireland’s leading triathlete Aileen Reid knows just how hard she can push herself thanks to what she has learned from those countless hours she has logged on the track, on the bike and in the pool.
“From forever ago people were using data - measuring how long each lap took to run, how long it took them to climb up a hill,” says the Derry woman, who is now up to seventh in the World Triathlon Series rankings and looking good for Rio 2016 Olympic qualification.
“It’s more sophisticated now . We have power metres, cadence metres, strides per minute… Whatever data is useful to high performance we will use. We constantly want to know what we can do better. Is the left foot different to the right foot, can I generate more watts more efficiently on the bike and so on . With all of these things numbers are helpful.”
Like most endurance athletes, Reid measures the lactate she produces in her blood, taking samples regularly during sessions in order to know how hard she is working. She wears a heart-rate monitor so that she can know when she’s at maximum exertion, while previous analysis will tell her how long she can remain in that red zone.
The level of analysis at a professional level doesn’t come cheap. A state-of-the-art set of Global Positioning System (GPS) packs for a squad of 30 players will cost the bones of €100,000 - and then there’s either employing or training someone to crunch the numbers and the software required to come up with something the coaches can work with.
Former Hurler of the Year and current Kilkenny star Michael Fennelly lectures in nutrition, fitness, coaching and conditioning at Limerick IT, having done his masters thesis on the use of GPS in hurling.
Fennelly would love to see further resources being put behind such research in Gaelic games, though points out that there are many things coaches can do to aid performance without splashing out the big bucks.
Jump mats, where a player or athlete squats and then jumps straight up, and questionnaires are useful in helping find out if they are fatigued, in danger of suffering an injury and in need of a break.
“You squat and jump straight up and it measures the height you reach. If you have a game and you get measured on a jump mat the following day you aren’t likely to jump as high. So you test the athlete over a period of time and get their norms,” said Fennelly.
“If they still aren’t jumping to their norm a few days after a game, are they fatigued? Questionnaires and player feedback are also very important . How do you feel on a scale of one to ten? Have you any pain? How did you sleep? All of these questions can throw up very valid information. If a player is fatigued, pull them out of a session. If it goes on for two or three days, it needs to be looked at.”
One of the worldwide market leaders in sports analysis is an Irish company based in Dundalk started just seven years ago. STATSport works with clients such as Barcelona, Manchester United, Chicago Bulls and the Irish rugby teams and have offices across the globe.
They shortly plan to roll out a consumer level package that non-professional teams will be able to work with, meaning that this field will no longer be the preserve of the elite.
“From a science point of view it is nearly more important to monitor players in training because you can’t control what happens in games,” said STATSport’s Nigel Stanley.
“In training, this is where you effectively mark out what you should be doing each day - if it’s a day before a game it’s going to be a light session and if it’s three days before a game it will be more intense.
“And everyone trains at different intensities to get the max out of ourselves. It’s all about making sure you’re doing just enough to be 100%, or as near as possible, on game day.”
