What Businesses Can Learn From Sports Analytics

摘要

Sports analytics are all the rage now. The Moneyball story about the Oakland A's use of analytics has made its way into the collective consciousness, and the appetite for more knowledge about the field has steadily increased year by year. The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, for example, has grown from about 175 attendees in its first year in 2007 to more than 2,000 in 2014. Called the "Super Bowl of sports analytics" and "TED talks in cleats," the conference has catalyzed academics, professional and college teams, and the press to focus much more heavily on analytics to understand various aspects of sports performance and business. Almost every professional baseball team now has at least one professional quantitative analyst on staff, and many basketball, football and soccer teams do, too. Even some high school teams now employ quantitative analysts.