Discussing the significance of Historical sports data

When we say, Historical Data what comes to your mind? Multiple questions are formed, what it is? What importance does it hold and why do we need to discuss it?

To make things simple first let's jump into the meaning of the term ‘Historical data’ as the word suggests it is nothing but information related to past events and can be related to a specific subject matter. Now it could have been collected by organizations in the past manually now, the whole process may have shifted to mechanically collecting historical data depending on the industry.

What is the significance of historical data?

Gathering day-to-day information can uncover trends and patterns and help in understanding how the current circumstance in a better manner. And over a period of time, it could even be used to predict the future.

While historical data has played an important role in analytics it is quite difficult to collect relevant data and at the same time ensure it is of good quality. Historical APIs have thus provided a solution as developers can easily add the historical data to their projects. Using an API would help companies conduct more fruitful historical data research.

Let us take the example of the sports industry, where historical data is viewed as an asset it is. Multiple organizations and companies are heavily dependent on historical data of past played games and the team members run their own projections on the data.

More specifically, fantasy sports and sports betting apps and websites benefit from historical data. The range of data could be from years, decades, or in other industries, even century old data might still be relevant in research.

How can one use APIs to get access to such sports data?

Developers have access to API key which is provided by the data providers in our example it would be sports data providers who offer the API service. By sending and receiving requests through endpoints, developers are given the ability to add the endpoints to their apps. JSON is mainly used to format the responses.

While live streaming and current data may be more enticing to users but events of the past have their own story to tell as well and are equally as important in engaging the viewers now. Still, Confused? We will uncover two examples where historical sports data is playing a significant role in the industry.

The big picture is built on historical data feeds the data spans from previous seasons’ key match-ups and top performers to who was making headlines ten years back in the particular sport and why. It adds value to the pre-game analysis organization run before the live events and tries to paint the picture of what will happen with sports data and future build their analysis on it.

Historical data has proved that history does matter, from Head2Head stats a detailed analysis of team and/or players before a match. With a rich historical sports database, one can engage true fans of the sports with pre-match build-up and make logical predictions on facts.

One great example where historical data is of great use is performance analysis. For any analysts and coaches player or team performance is of utmost importance on the field and off-field and the most effective way of examining the performance would be with a wide range of data points. Even with the data, it needs to be a specific combination of historical and live data to run analysis on. For example, in order to examine the performance of goal-oriented offensive players, one would evaluate their performance with different attributes to that of a creative midfielders or defenders.

Keep in mind some of the elements might not be quantifiable as well thus the analysis even though run on quality data would need to be scrutinized carefully by the coaches and then acted upon but as the sport grows heaps of data are created and fed into the database to get quantifiable results.

All the data could even be used to identify patterns in opponents’ game of play their strengths and even flaws could be identified using Artificial Intelligence and a robust historical sports database.

Historical sports data’s significance does not stop here, data could also be used to map out the potential a player could hold in the future before the teams invest in the player. AI would utilize historical data to run an analysis on the player market value before acquiring new talent. This helps the team build a better team as well as avoid losses and falling prey to faulty valuations.

Clubs might be more interested in the match, teams, and players but they have soon realized that historical data to analyze fans’ purchasing behaviors and use that to segment them and build targeted personalized experience for each demographic to engage them. This was further explored by Robert Easley, the John W. Berry Sr. Department Chair and Professor of Information Technology, Analytics and Operations at the University of Notre Dame, and OvuncYilmaz, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who published a study for “Data-Driven Sports Ticket Pricing for Multiple Sales Channels with Heterogeneous Customers”. Easley went on to say “There are insights that arise from the data that you would not know by simply looking at a diagram of seating,”.

Data Sports Group offers a robust database for historical data spanning over 50 years and offers live sports data feed solutions as well. Never compromise with quality and trustworthiness of the database with the dependable team of Data Sports Group and partner with the best sports data provider.