Inspired by one of the biggest sporting events to occupy our annual calendar, March Madness, I wanted to explore how AI is impacting the world of sports. The global AI industry in sports is expected to grow almost 3-fold in the next 5 years ballooning to a little less than $3 billion by 2030. There are minimally 8 areas, across all sports, that Generative AI is being applied: Player Performance, Team Strategy, Fan Engagement, Sponsorship and Marketing, Broadcasting and Content Personalization, Virtual Training, Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation, Ticket Pricing Optimization.

AI is turning the sports industry on its head by enabling smarter decision making by organizations both on and off the field, creating immersive fan experiences and improving athlete performance and coaching actions. This article will focus on the influence of AI on Player-Team Performance Analysis and Team Strategy and Tactics.

Player – Team Performance Analysis

While there is a lot happening in this space with the integration of wearable technologies like smart watches and helmets informing the potency of individual and team performance, the advent of video technology is making significant inroads into creating safer spaces for athletes to perform their craft. The NFL’s “Digital Athlete” uses AI to analyze practice and game footage, running simulations to determine when athletes are at their highest risk of injury. Smart Helmet Technology detects location and severity of impacts to a player’s head, helping to correct techniques, improve equipment design and change rules of the game to achieve specific safety outcomes.

The implication of adopting technology is significant. In my last year of coaching Women’s Soccer in College, the administration approved the purchase of wearable GPS technology to monitor player performance and reduce injury risk. The impact was almost immediate. After 5 games into our season, we noticed two things; we were experiencing a higher than usual occurrence of specific injuries and for some reason we had a tendency of giving up early goals (within 10 minutes).

Analysis of the GPS data suggested that our warmup in those first 5 games insufficiently addressed the needs of our players to stretch sufficiently or prepare our players for the demands of the game. A new format and structure to warmups was instituted and measured by the GPS system, significantly reducing injuries sustained by players and resulting in the team not being scored on in the first 10 minutes for the remainder of the season. Continued monitoring of player activity in practice and games would further enhance load management and allow for players to stay fresh and sustain individual and team performance throughout the season.

These types of technologies are being applied in every sport, at the highest levels by some of the biggest companies in the world. It is the proliferation of these technologies, their availability and accessibility to grassroots programs and athletes that will make interacting with them common place. The commensurate impact to the evolution of the athlete and their athletic expression in the sport is almost certain to follow at a rate potentially never seen.

Team Strategy and Tactics

In the early years of Women’s College Soccer, the legendary Anson Dorrance, Head Coach of the UNC Tarheels, on his way to winning 21 National NCAA Division 1 championships, was an early promoter of accumulating and analyzing game data to influence training focus and tactical preparation. The standing joke at the time was, who could afford having 12 statisticians on staff to replicate Anson’s brilliance.

Today the advent of AI essentially gives you as large of a staff as you need to analyze every aspect of the game. AI algorithms process meaningful insights from historical data to recognize team formations, player behaviors, personnel groupings and match outcomes. The use of neural networks ensures large swaths of data, video chronicling player movement, speed, passing patterns can all be analyzed to influence preparation and strategy. These deep learning models can go so far as to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of opponent’s defenses and how optimal personnel, movements and counter formations might be able to expose vulnerabilities.

Purists may lament that the art of coaching might be surpassed by the actual science influencing coaching. This, however, is the reality of sports and the implications of AI. The scope of possibilities made available by technology will only make the spectacle of sport bigger, stronger, faster, more entertaining, profitable, accessible and safer in every way.

Yet, I hold out hope that the people engaging with the AI will always have a place of importance, even if prominence is unlikely into the future. It is the art of the person’s proficiency and interaction with technology that must beget asking the right question to still get the best answer. This was probably best realized in the early years of wireless chip technology being applied in soccer where key athletic indicators like heart rate, speed, explosion in the air, velocity of a shot could be tabulated.

In an experiment conducted by a European company in collaboration with the US over 25 years ago, soccer players were equipped with chip technology while they performed standing tasks (non -game condition) like sprinting 40 yards, jumping to head a ball, clearing distance of a ball, shooting velocity, etc. Players personal best scores were noted. These same players would then play a highly competitive game of soccer against an opponent and monitors would measure their performance during the game. Astonishingly, players would exceed their personal best times in “standing tests” in speed, explosion, power and velocity in moments just preceding and leading up to a significant moment in the game like scoring a goal or preventing a goal scoring opportunity. The improvement in scores was significant and athlete performance improved significantly in key categories compared to their scores in non-game situations.

The takeaway and application of this information was influenced, in part, by perspective, culture, bias, history and experience in the sport. The analysis at the time seemed to favor either athletic prowess and dynamism (US focus at the time) versus intellectual understanding and recognition (European focus). Those favoring recognition and decision making pursued additional lines of research consistent with helping athletes identify more consequential moments in the game. While those favoring optimal physical performance looked at ways to compounding impact in this category

The outcome leading into the next World Cup for the team that choose to focus on athletic performance was disastrous while the group that choose to focus on recognition of moments would have their most historic run. The truth today is both are important, and both can be simultaneously researched and applied with the assistance of AI. But AI’s ability to chronicle moments and to suggest ways in which to create those moments more frequently is significantly impacting team strategy and tactics in soccer.

Continuing evolution and influence

AI is evolving how “the game” is played. The proliferation of 3-point shooting in basketball is not just influenced by Steph Curry but the analysis AI provides to coaches suggests that a certain % of 3 pointers need to be taken and made in the game against a specific opponent or you will likely lose the game. The movie Moneyball chronicles the change theorized by Bill James whose application of Sabermetrics to evaluate baseball talent changed how front offices structured recruitment and player salaries in the game. Today, more sophisticated AI modeling is building on the work done by James in baseball and other sports.

Yet, in each of these instances, it is the specific interaction of people and their brilliance in utilizing AI, in posing the right questions, in evaluating the data correctly, in forming the right approach, in communicating the best plan, that ultimately determines its successful adoption and implementation. I am optimistic that people are still important and will always be important in the journey of AI and sports. My hope remains that the quality of the collaboration between the person and the technology will ultimately determine the competitive advantage of one opponent over another. Winning the game may start with the planning and preparation influenced by AI but at the end of the day, people will still have to execute on the field, pitch or court. The romance associated with that uncertainty and lack of predictability will always add drama and intrigue to the spectacle and thank goodness for that!