1) Sports teams use analytics and data visualization across various areas like scouting, player fitness, development, game strategy, evaluation, ticketing, and merchandising to gain competitive advantages and maximize revenue. 2) Data is collected on players' performance, health, training, as well as fan behavior and sales to optimize decisions around roster selection, in-game tactics, staffing, and marketing. 3) Visualizing data in dashboards allows coaches and management to quickly analyze trends and scenarios to improve outcomes on and off the field.

1. 7 Ways Sports Teams
Win With Analytics

2. The Path to
Victory Starts
with Data

3. Scouting
Player
Fitness
Player
Development
Game-Day
Strategy
Player
Evaluation
Ticketing Merchandising
There’s more to winning than training hard
and scoring points
From media contracts to licensing deals, ticketing and merchandising, and even how many beats per minute a
player’s heart pumps on game day, data has essential information for strategic decision making.
Here are seven key ways the global sports industry is maximizing data:

4. FPO
SCOUTING
Any successful pro sports franchise knows that the competition
starts with scouting. It’s critical for scouts to be able to quickly
spot potential value in a sea of prospective players.
Cut performance review times by transforming large volumes of
data into interactive visualizations.

5. Evaluate NFL Prospects with Key Metrics
Player comparisons are instantly visible in this
dashboard, which showcases top college
football prospects at the NFL Combine. Scouts
can compare current and past recruits’ power
and speed.
Coaches can:
• Sort by position and year to see additional
stats
• Explore the rankings of all attendees on a
chosen metric
• Make decisions 10-100 times faster than
with old-school business intelligence.

6. FPOPLAYER FITNESS
Need to know who to bench and who play? How valuable is each
player at any given time? Who performs better under stress, or in
the 18th minute of the game?
Tracking player status, training, improvements, and game-day
performance is all possible with data.

7. Seattle Sounders Improve Player Fitness
with Wearable Technology
With wearable technology, the Seattle
Sounders track players’ every move. From
sleep patterns to GPS positioning on the field,
data is used to minimize injury and optimize
performance in the grueling 90-plus-minute
matches. With this data, coaches can:
• Personalize practice schedules, down to the
drill, to target each player’s stamina and
speed
• Identify which activities exhaust players to
help keep teams fresh for the entire period
of play
• Understand habitual behaviors, which can
then be used to predict reaction time

8. FPO
PLAYER DEVELOPMENT
On-field wins often translates into a team’s financial success, so developing talent
and adding new players adds obvious value to a club. Teams gather huge
amounts of data on players to track multiple metrics such as training intensity,
game performance, recovery time, and injuries.
Whole-team intelligence is important too. How are players working together? Are
there patterns of play? Do various actions on the field make a difference in the
final score?
Visualizing this data allows tech-averse coaches to interpret immediate needs at a
glance.

9. Liverpool Analyzes Data on In-Game
Actions
The Liverpool Football Club leverages data to
improve game performance. This dashboard
visualizes a critical metric: the difference
between winning and losing. Hovering over the
scatterplot, coaches see how different in-game
actions affected game outcomes.

10. FPO
GAME-DAY STRATEGY
Data visualizations don’t just capture what happened in last week’s game;
they can provide insight while the ball is still in play.
Dashboards help coaches predict outcomes with what-if scenarios by
combining live data with historical data.
Should a team go for a touchdown on the fourth down? What usually
happens in each scenario? Dashboards with historical data can give
coaches a way to make game-winning decisions in light of past outcomes.

11. 4th Down Decision Making
This dashboard makes use of historical data
for tough calls.
Coaches can:
• Change the parameter to specify quarter,
yards to go, or position on the field.
• Drill down by choosing the team to control
and situation to evaluate.

12. FPO
PLAYER EVALUATION
Visual dashboards are a powerful tool for accurate individual player
evaluation. How is a player performing relative to last year? Last
week?
Last game? Are trends emerging in an athlete’s play that need be
addressed?
This data-driven evaluation clues coaches into who’s likely to play
well and who may be heading for a slump. Coaches can adjust game-
day lineups accordingly.

13. New York Mets Evaluate Player
Performance
This dashboard is an individual performance
evaluation for the New York Mets’ first
baseman, Ike Davis. Hovering on the data
points shows Davis’s relative success in 2010
vs. 2011.

14. FPO
TICKETING
Professional sports teams depend on ticket sales for their financial
health. It’s not always about people in seats; decision-makers need a
360-degree view of fan behavior, from the initial ticket purchase all the
way through the final point on the board.

15. The Texas Rangers Make Real-Time
Staffing Decisions
Nothing spoils a day at the ballpark like rain—
for fans and for the team. Rain sops revenue.
Because the Texas Rangers front office
monitors ticket data in real-time, they can see
down to the minute when rain delays stall ticket
sales. With this need-to-know info, staffing
managers can decided to close 75% of their
windows to cut costs: a bright spot for the team
on a loser weather day.

16. FPO
MERCHANDISNG
The home-team hat and jersey, beer, and bobble heads—what are people buying
once they're inside?
With merchandising and retail data visualizations, retailers can adjust inventory on the
fly when specific item revenue starts to dip.
Merchandise sales also reveal where a team’s fans live. Data can help identify new
areas of the country, or the world, to concentrate sales efforts.

17. Cowboys Find Far-Away Fans
Who knew New York was Cowboy country?
This dashboard shows where Cowboys are
selling merchandise in the U.S. By knowing fan
geography, Cowboys retailers can push
advertising and marketing dollars in those
areas.

18. Tableau offers a revolutionary new approach to business intelligence for sports analytics that will
allow you to quickly connect to, visualize, and share data dashboards with a seamless experience
from the PC to the iPad.
Tableau solutions generate fast, visual, easy-to-use self-service visualizations with no
programming skills required. See how Tableau can help your sports organization by downloading
the free trial at www.tableau.com/trial.
About Tableau