Bruce Schoenfeld (W. W. Norton)
THE professional athletes who charge up and down playing fields for the public鈥檚 entertainment in the world鈥檚 biggest sports leagues seem a world away from scientists and mathematicians. At first glance, the two seem to come from different worlds with different aims, and the old stereotype of sporty teenagers stuffing their science-loving peers into school lockers endures to this day.
Yet in the past two decades, sports and science have come together in a big way. This unfolding story is told in Bruce Schoenfeld鈥檚 latest book, Game of Edges: The analytics revolution and the future of professional sports.
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This tale of how statistics has turned sports into even bigger business than it already was feels like a successor to Michael Lewis鈥檚 Moneyball, and Schoenfeld refers to it throughout his new book. Published in 2003, Moneyball looked at how the Oakland Athletics baseball team engineered success for a middling team by following the statistics and playing based on mathematical rigour, rather than sporting maxims or hunches.
But where Lewis left off with the Oakland Athletics, Schoenfeld shows a sports industry starting to recognise the power of layering analytics into all aspects of its operations, on and off the field, and of using data to find that extra edge.
This is a heavily US-focused book (understandable, given the author鈥檚 nationality and self-styled status as a 鈥渂aseball dad鈥�) and it privileges the national games of basketball, baseball and American football. Aside from a brief segue into soccer through the ownership of Liverpool Football Club by US businessman John W. Henry, we learn comparatively little about how this statistically led outlook can affect other sports worldwide.
For those who are interested in US sports, the overview will hold your attention. But you may find yourself drifting as you meet the fourth or fifth entrepreneur to take over a team and inject quantifiable metrics into how sport works.
We do get some of the big picture, though, as Game of Edges is a more business-oriented book than Moneyball. Where Lewis focused mainly on how Oakland Athletics extracted that extra few per cent on the field by looking beyond received wisdom and at big data, Schoenfeld reveals how this permeated the industry. We learn, for example, how introducing real-time betting during major league baseball games at the Wrigley Field stadium in Chicago, Illinois, helped improve cohesion in one club鈥檚 fanbase, as those with tickets spent more time in the stadium betting, while those without still went to the betting location and soaked up the atmosphere of the game.
Game of Edges can occasionally feel like an extended case study in a Harvard MBA course 鈥� particularly as we learn how the width of seats at stadiums can help improve the fans鈥� loyalty to a club. But there are also some truly fascinating insights.
Take the case of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, which managed to drive up ticket sales during one season by sending out physical mail to a small number of people living within a small radius of its stadium, who fitted its target audience. Bewildered by receiving a marketing message that didn鈥檛 arrive via email, the fans shelled out over $600,000 in season ticket sales from a postal campaign costing a mere $25,000.
Schoenfeld is a canny storyteller, and his portraits of the big beasts (and the almost-rans) are vivid. I loved his outline of Will Spearman, a high-energy physicist who packed in a job at the CERN particle physics lab to work for Liverpool Football Club. He becomes the expert who knows all the data about the team鈥檚 star players, yet is ignored by them in the canteen over breakfast.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
