Sabermetrics In Invasion Sports

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting” (Orwell, 1945). In this respect the Oakland A’s guerilla warfare like tactics helped achieve their ascendance through the MLB. Bill James’s Sabermetrics was used to accomplish this. It works on the basis of studying player performance data to guide player recruitment, valuation and field tactics. Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland A’s, saw his monetarily weak team in need of regeneration and so adopted the system as a ‘David strategy’ for the A’s (Gray, 2006 cited in Gerrard, 2007). It is argued that atomistic striking and fielding sports are more conducive to this systematic approach, owing to the easily defined contributions of individual players (Gerrard and Howard, 2007). This essay will explore to what extent this form of metric can be applied to invasion sports, in particular football: a free flowing invasion sport and American football: a fragmented invasion sport . It will assess whether technology and concepts have reached the level so data analytics can be used to the same effect to that of atomistic striking games. Finally it will look into the cultural barriers and whether the industry wants to use this form analytics.

Sabermetrics is a systematic approach to management that attempts to increase wins, but lower salary cost per unit, by measuring in-game activity. This form of ratio analysis is said to be applicable to invasion sports and is one of two tools used for performance benchmarking. However due to its bivariate nature it may not be applicable to organisations that use multiple inputs and outputs, unless they themselves are clearly divisible or they can be attached to a standard unit of measurement, often money (Gerrard, 2007). Due to the complex nature of invasio...

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...th of experience in its interpretation. As a result of this, older more traditional managers may struggle to ascertain the validity of this form of metric (Maney, 2013).

It is reasonable that in light of technological advances Sabermetrics is applicable to invasion sports. Much as baseball did a decade ago, invasion sports, particularly football, are going through the early stages of transition from the older style of solely using judgement calls to also using data analyses to strengthen their teams. With rapidly evolving technology and understanding of how best to use the data that it reveals, it is clear this is the direction these sports are heading. Cultural hindrances are currently the biggest barrier to this metric and, much like baseball had Billy Beane, there will arise be a champion that will successfully bring a form of Sabermetrics to invasion sports.