Stuart Webber doesn’t have time for a four-page analytics report.
In a recent article for Training Ground Guru, the 41-year-old sporting director talks extensively about the evolution of his career in sports, his break from English football, and what he’s learned over the past year exploring different industries and even climbing Mount Everest. One key takeaway: While data is critical, its presentation is far too complex.
Webber’s perspective comes from a visit to the Red Bull Formula One team in Milton Keynes. “They were talking about data and how many simulations they would run through prior to a race,” he told Training Ground Guru. “It was literally billions of data points. It blows your mind.”
His big question: “How do you break it down?”
Formula One’s answer was a three- to four-page report handed out to drivers, race engineers, and the sporting director.
“That isn’t going in, let alone with the emotion of 50,000 people around you,” Webber said in response. “The best clubs are doing it, where the data takes you to a one-pager of the why. That’s the secret sauce.”
Webber makes a strong point: Sports is a split-second industry. Decisions are made on a dime, and information has to be accessible to add value. A one-page report is certainly better than a four-page one. But it’s still not good enough.
Right now in the world of sports, translating metrics into meaningful information takes time and money – typically involving a team of people whose painstaking work results in lengthy reports that require time and energy to digest. For key decision-makers, both those resources are in extremely short supply and often busy with other either ad-hoc or long-term projects.
Webber’s instincts, then, were spot on: As a sporting director, he knows he needs access to information fast. So his solution is to get bare bones on the reporting side – to break it down to its most essential, actionable pieces so that he and his staff can make smarter decisions in minutes, not hours.
In reality, the industry can – and should – do even more than that.
It’s no secret that sports have been slow to embrace the technological revolution that has transformed just about every other industry. We are making progress, but it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day routine and take the shortest route to pain relief rather than explore robust solutions. The article on Webber gives us an excellent case-in-point. Webber is a visionary and driven leader. He can see the issues inherent in how insights are translated and shared.
But building the best possible solution is more complex than cutting down page count.
Let’s look at it specifically from the perspective of a sporting director like Webber, whose core focus is on squad planning. To make sound strategic decisions, a sporting director needs to consider advanced player stats, scouting reports, and other key insights, which are scattered across multiple silos and therefore require time-consuming, manual organization and processing. The end result is usually something like that four-page report, which does little to help a sporting director contextualize insights, pivot quickly when needed, and act with precision. As with most manual processes, it also increases the risk of missed opportunities and costly mistakes.
Put simply, the entire process needs an upgrade.
This is where technology can be a tremendous asset, allowing Sporting Directors/GMs, owners, and scouts to centralize and synthesize all information sources in one location and empowering them to dive deep into player insights more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Technology can allow these leaders to put AI-driven insights into context, making them more actionable and relevant in a fast-changing environment. This can all be combined into an interactive and mobile user interface, putting mission-critical insights into the hands of the people who need them most. Time-to-value via user experience is a competitive advantage, and in sports, the first movers can often stay ahead of late adopters for a decade.
This is the kind of shift the industry needs. We need dynamic intelligence, not static reports. We need accessibility and speed. To get there, we need to innovate.
Let’s start now.
