The History of Sports Analysis

In Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player (1861) it is stated that, ‘in order to obtain an accurate estimate of a player’s skill, an analysis, both of his play at the bat and in the field, should be made, inclusive of the way in which he was put out’. Further to…

In the Lawn Tennis Manual (1885), in a section entitled ‘Hints for Scoring’, the writer advocates the use of a detailed scoring system, ‘which records the character of every played ball, whether it be a fault, a served ball, a returned ball, a volleyed return, together with the number of…

In the January 1900 edition OUting, a comprehensive statistical analysis of University Football (Gridiron) was presented for the games between Yale and Princeton, and Yale and Harvard, showing not only the frequency of key events, but also estimated distances for rushing and punts.

In 1910, David F. Barrett, a reporter for the St Loui Star, presented an article on association football, expressing concern that, ‘all that the average soccer fan pays attention to in the game is the number of goals scored and who scores them. He pays no attention whatsoever to the…

Perhaps the first sports data company Elias was founded by brother Al and Walter Munro. Then in his 40’s he wanted to see if he could make a living keeping and selling his baseball statistics. Although the company got off to a slow start in 1917 the Associated Press signed…

This paper, Messersmith, L L & Corey, S 1931, ‘The Distance Traversed by a Basketball Player’, Research Quarterly, II, 2, pp. 57-60. is one of a number Messersmith et al., would go on to publish between 1931-1944. There is a wonderful paper written about Messersmith’s career and contribution to Notational Analysis…

Jurryt’s post shares a record of shots taken in the Western Europe v Central Europe football game played to celebrate Olympic Day in the Netherlands on 20 June 1937. He asks if this is the first example of a record of shots taken in association football.

It was in 1947 that Mr. Roth, a native of Montreal who had worked as a statistician for the Canadiens and the National Hockey League, approached Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, with a proposition that would transform somewhat how the game was played. Wouldn’t it help a manager,…

Salam Qureishi grew up in India and knew nothing about football — or America. And yet in the early 1960s, Qureishi, a computer programmer and statistician, helped the Dallas Cowboys overhaul their scouting system, replacing hunches with hard numbers. The result: five Super Bowl appearances and two titles. FiveThirtyEight and…

Charles Reep’s first published paper produced the finding that the structure of soccer is determined by near constants (Reep and Benjamin, 1968) and his work is thought to have influenced many researchers and football coaches e.g. Charles Hughes, who was the Assistant Director of Coaching for the Football Association (Hughes, 1987);…

Two brothers rented time on an IBM 1620 mainframe to pick a knot that had confounded baseball fans for generations, and still does: just what a “clutch” player is, and how that can be measured. The Mills brothers published their approach in a thin, Reader’s Digest-sized book title, Player Win…

Editors considered James’s pieces so unusual that few believed them suitable for their readers. In an effort to reach a wider audience, James self-published an annual book titled The Bill James Baseball Abstract beginning in 1977. The first edition of the book presented 80 pages of in-depth statistics compiled from…

The acronym STATS stands for Sports Team Analysis & Tracking System. The Oakland A’s (not for the last time in their history would be ahead of the curve) became STATS first customer. They signed a $75,000 deal before STATS had a computer programme. The final system, built for the Apple…

The CPA was established in 1992, with an initial vision to provide support services for the flourishing of elite Welsh sport. The diversity of clients serviced by the CPA attests to the success of extending services to the United Kingdom as a whole and internationally. Within a short time the…

Infostrada Sports was founded by Philip Hennemann and partners in the Netherlands in 1995. The initial aim was to collect data on all sports in order to build up and maintain the ultimate historical archive and provide services to media and professional sports organisations. The first contract with the International…

The Opta brand is first associated with the Premier League through the launch of a ranking system, The Opta Index.  This was seen on Sky Sports Monday Night Football. In 2002; Aidan Cooney’s Sportingstatz business purchases the assets of Opta from BSkyB.  Current senior members of the operational management team…

Prozone Sports is founded in 1998, promising to Changing the way you Think About Sport. Prozone are one of the first companies to offer tracking of physical performance through a camera system.

Sportstec is Founded

SportVU was created in 2005 by Israeli scientists, Gal Oz and Miky Tamir, who had a background in missile tracking and advanced optical recognition. They had previously used some of that same science to track soccer matches in Israel. SportVU was featured at national trade shows NAB 2007, in Las…

Dartfish was founded in 1999 as InMotion Technologies, Ltd to commercially develop SimulCam and other digital imaging applications. In 2005 They were an Emmy winner for The George Wensel Outstanding Innovative Technical Achievement Award