Data & Analytics in Sports

Author

Matt Ober
October 17, 2023

Making sense of all of this rich data and information in sports

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We all know how important data is in sports. Moneyball made this famous in MLB. Soccer, NFL & NBA all consume massive amounts of data. Making this data actionable and extracting insights from the data is the key to success…

Gemini Sports Analytics, a company we invested in at Social Leverage, is a full-stack data solution offering machine learning and analytics capabilities to professional teams in leagues across the NFL, NBA, MLS, Soccer leagues around the world, and more. What excited me about Gemini is the opportunity to bring a full stack offering to teams to take all of their internal and external data and bring it into one place to do scenario analysis, make predictions, leverage best-of-breed ML models, understand opportunities across different departments, and help the teams better make sense of the vast amount of data they are consuming that will only grow in the future.

After working in the hedge fund industry for 12 years and spending my early career at Bloomberg, I have seen the power of consuming data at scale. Bloomberg gave me my first taste of what is possible with vast amounts of data combined with rich analytics. They tried in the mid-2000s to build a Bloomberg for Sports, but it never panned out. WorldQuant’s goal from the early years was if we could consume more data than everyone else in the world, we could find more alpha and manage more money. When I joined Third Point we became an early Data Robot user when we were building the data science team and I see a lot of the features from Data Robot integrated into what Gemini is building for sports teams. In this world of information overload, a no-code platform that offers APIs with capabilities to allow teams across professional sports leagues and across the world to harness the data they have been collecting is a potential game changer.

Teams have the ability to make data-driven decisions and take advantage of the cutting-edge technology that is producing all of this new data. Sports data and technology capabilities are only getting more sophisticated and it’s exciting to see how teams are starting to differentiate themselves and compete.