6. Manhattans and Moneyball to Kabaddi: How analytics evolves with sports

Data Chatter

For a lot of people, their first introduction to data and analytics happens through sport. Fans have tracked batting and bowling averages for many decades now. In the 1990s, with the coming of satellite TV in India, cricket fans had their first brush with bar graphs and line graphs, with “manhattans” and “worms” respectively.

In the last two decades, following the publication of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, the field of sports analytics hsa exploded. A couple of months before this podcast was released, it was revealed that footballer Kevin De Bruyne had hired a sports analytics firm in order to better negotiate his contract with Manchester City. And along the way, analytics has entered smaller sports such as kabaddi and volleyball.

Today’s conversation is a double header, featuring the husband-wife duo of Arvind Sivdas and Dhanya P, who are also founders of KabaddiAdda, a Kabaddi platform. They have worked in analytics in cricket, badminton, volleyball and kabaddi, among other sports. We talk about the evolution of sports analytics, how to quantify “continuous sports”, the role of fantasy sport and several other things.

Show Notes

00:02:50 - How they got into sports analytics

00:13:00 - The popularity of “matchups” in sports nowadays

00:20:00 - How Roger Federer used analytics to transform his game

00:25:00 - Why performance analytics has limited impact in (association) football

00:30:30 - The importance of buy-in from the management, and evaluating success

00:32:45 - How Kabaddi has evolved in the last few years

00:37:15 - The parallels between Kabaddi and Basketball

00:46:00 - Analytics in Kabaddi

00:47:00 - Data collection for sports like Kabaddi

00:49:40 - Biomechanics studies in Kabaddi

00:51:30 - How to fund analytics in smaller sports?

00:55:10 - The role of betting and fantasy in developing analytics

00:59:20 - “Moneyball” - where is it being underused, where is it being overused etc.

01:01:00 - Convincing CSK that cricketers peak in their 30s

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Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".
The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies.
You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog