Latest Update: For detailed info, please check out our latest SAP Unlocking Value Paper for Sport Analytics The Super Bowl has been around since 1967 and is definitely one the most exciting events worldwide so whether you’re in it for the game or the commercials, you are not alone. With the ongoing pandemic, although people might prefer staying home and tuning in, rather than going to sports bars or big gatherings, nothing can dampen the spirit of the 'big game' fans! Venue for SuperBowl 2022 - SoFi Stadium, Southern California With the 2022 edition, the game day is scheduled to be kicked off at SoFi Stadium in Southern California on February 13, just a few days away, let us now look at some statistics that make SuperBowl, So Super ! According to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the SuperBowl Sunday in February is the second-highest day of food consumption in the US, just behind Thanksgiving. As per National Chicken Council, Americans eat a record-breaking 1.4 billion chicken wings over Super Bowl weekend. Advertisers invest a lot of research, money, and creativity to come up with extraordinary ideas that aim to wow millions of people during a short 30-second spot. As per Bloomberg, these 30 secs ads can go as high as 6.5Mn$. The ads sold last year for 5.6Mn$, that's an increase of 16%. Talking of viewership, the game boasts an average of 100Mn viewers worldwide. As per NFL, the most-watched Super Bowl was in 2015. The New England-Seattle game drew 114.4 million viewers while last year the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' rout of the Kansas City Chiefs drew a total audience of 96.4 million viewers. All that excitement produces a mountain of data. While data has been collected on and around football games since the very beginning of the game, today’s collection techniques are smarter, real-time data is the new standard. Let us now showcase to you one such example of how SAP is helping an American professional football team to provide a WOW experience to their fans. SAP's Connected Stadium Experience to improve fans experience: Around the world, SAP helps professional sports teams and venues simplify their operations to become more efficient, profitable, and successful. With new sensors around the stadium and even on a players’ pads and helmet collecting real-time data about what is happening on the field, the 'Game Day' means collecting data across many platforms, be it ticketing or stadium parking or listening on social media. Recognizing SAP’s experience helping create connected stadium experiences for FC Bayern Munich, Adler Mannheim, and TSG Hoffenheim, the 49ers collaborated with SAP to turn their challenge into a groundbreaking opportunity. SAP and the 49ers launched a connected stadium system designed to help improve how the 49ers capture, report, and respond to game-day operations in real-time to improve the experience for fans, increase operational efficiency and drive cost savings. San Fransisco 49ers Levi’s Stadium fan feedback survey (Source: SAP News Link) This enables all fans to enter the stadium as fast as possible with the assistance of the staff.  Delighting the fans with customized offers The personalized offerings include discounts on food and drinks and are sent straight to the fan’s smartphone or smartwatch. Based on fan history, SAP informs the stadium operator of the fans preferences, for example, which food and drink a fan particularly likes and which refreshments he or she has already consumed. In such a way, the stadium manager can make additional sales and the fans’ waiting times to exit the parking garage can be reduced. SAP software, therefore, helps ensure a unique and complete fan experience – on the way to the stadium, during the match, and on the way home. This is our first blog in our SAP - Sports Data Analytics Series. Stay tuned for more insights on major Sports events - Champions League, World Cup, Olympics & so much more to come. We will also present to you more use cases on how SAP helps sports teams across the globe run better! ... View more

Having worked as a consultant in sports project for several months, I found many interesting things that cannot be recognized if I still learn in school or labs. Therefore, in this blog, I want to share some experiences about the differences between research and practice. I hope this experience can help someone who has joined or will join the sports project. When I work in labs, we always want to reflect some sports performance through accurate index and values as precise as possible. Thus, many biochemical or physiological index could be found to reflect a certain sports performance. For example, we can use CK, urine protein, morning pulse, and others to evaluate a player’s fatigue. And then, we would compare those indexes and prove someone is better than others to evaluate a certain performance. After then, the chosen one could be taken as the Golden Standard and any other index discovered in the future should be compared with the golden standards to prove the new one is reasonable. figure 1 As shown in figure 1, dots with different colors represent different indexes. Then, we try to build the liner relationship between those indexes and performance. Finally, the best one (blue one) will be picked out. (the higher the r’s value, the higher the correlation is) In a nutshell, our target is discovering the precisest index, no matter how difficult the measurement looks like. In one word, accuracy is the top priority. While working with football teams and discussing with fitness coaches, I found most teams choose indexes that are easy to get. Comparing with lab research, they need to find a balance between accuracy and measurability. When the easy-index cannot reflect the performance directly, coaches usually trend to make the correlation between the easy-index and performance more relevant through doing many complex calculations with the easy-index, rather than find another index which maybe a little hard to measured. Take fatigue as an example too. Coaches prefer to use some formula with running distance, HR or RPE to reflect players’ fatigue. Such as A/C ratio, training monotony, HRV. Those calculated indexes maybe not as precise as CK, but the HR, distance and RPE are much easy to acquire. figure 2 This layout reflects players’ fatigue by comparing the running distance between the latest week (acute) and previous weeks (chronic). And the dots represent players’ fatigue status. A too high value indicates that players may be in fatigue states. It is much easier to understand than figure 1 for coaches. At first, I didn’t understand this choice. Because some indexes used by coaches are too “simple” and subjective, especially RPE. But the coaches give me an Irrefutable explanation. The main purpose of a team is training and playing matches. So, most of the monitoring cannot disturb training or matches. It means those indexes used for monitoring players must be easy to get and feedback the result rapidly. Therefore, some biochemical indexes especially invasive ones, such as CK and blood lactic, cannot satisfy the team request. Moreover, there is another reason make this choice reasonable. Even if there is an insignificant deviation in those indexes (including the calculated one). when monitoring the same samples, if these deviations keep consistent, we can also judge players' status or performance. After all, in teams, our purpose is merely comparing a player with others or his former states. figure 3   As shown in figure 3, the line represents the precious index (golden standard), and the dots represent the value got by complex calculations with a “simple” index. We can judge the performances through the height of the dot, although every dot is lower than the line. In a word, coaches would like to sacrifice the accuracy for convenience and timeliness. It looks like coaches are very willing to use only one index if this one can reflect all the sports performances through complex calculations. To sum up, I construct a table below to explain the difference in monitoring the players’ performance. labs teams priority accuracy convenience timeliness type of index direct one tend to inner load biochemical or physiology usually need some calculating tend to external load kinematic purpose find and prove golden standard player compare process mechanism level even involves molecular make full use of simple index through tedious calculation And of course, it's not definite. More and more labs are devoted to the research of basic data (“simple index”) and vice versa. This blog is just for reference. When the customer is a football or other sports team, perhaps, our innovation should focus on finding or developing some calculation formulas which can reflect or forecast something with a “simple” index (such as distance, HR, RPE, vertical height, and so on). ... View more

Background In SAP Sports One, a player picture can come from a third data provider, or they can be manually maintained by club staff. Edit Mode Unfortunately, since the download feature is not currently available, you cannot download pictures directly from the system.   Requirement I want to download all the player pictures from the system and save to my local computer.   Solutions There are three possible solutions: Navigate to each player’s main page, make a screenshot and save to your local computer. Navigate to each player’s main page, find the pic URL and open the URL in a new Chrome tab and save the picture to your local computer. Develop a simple Python script, bulk download all the pictures.   No additional dev effort for solution 1 and solution 2 since they are just manual work. Let’s start with solution 3 step by step.   Prerequisite Your Python environment is setup and running well. You have the authorization to access SAP Sports One backend system. Step by step 1.Find the picture URL. Inspect player main page, you could find URL like below: Now you can replace the domain and PICTURE_ID as you want, the final URL would be like below: https:<YourSystemDomain>/sap/sports/fnd/db/services/public/xs/pictures.xsjs?PICTURE_ID=<YourPlayerPictureID> When you open this URL in your browser, if all goes well, you should see the picture. 2.Find the mapping between Player and Picture. In the first step, we know how to get the final picture URL, now we need to know the relationship between Player and Picture. Let’s go to WebIDE->Catalog,find table “sap.sports.fnd.db.schema::PICTURES”. This table stores picture information along with the reference object. Execute below SQL script, we will get all the PlayerID and relevant PictureID. Save the results into xlsx format. SELECT  "PICTURE_ID","OBJECT_ID" FROM "SAP_SPORTS_FND"."sap.sports.fnd.db.schema::PICTURES" where "OBJECT_TYPE" = 'PERSON' AND "OBJECT_CLASS" = 'Face'.   3.Develop Python script to read IDs from local file and download pictures from the system. Use the below script, you can simply read the IDs from the excel file and call the URL in a loop, the program will download all the picture by giving PictureIDs into your local computer. import requests from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth import xlrd   # Give the location of the file loc = r'./demo.xlsx' wb = xlrd.open_workbook(loc) sheet = wb.sheet_by_index(0) sheet.cell_value(0, 0)   for i in range(sheet.nrows):     value = sheet.cell_value(i, 0)     print(value)     url = 'https://<Domain>/sap/sports/fnd/db/services/public/xs/pictures.xsjs?PICTURE_ID=' + value     print(url)     r = session.get(url, allow_redirects=True, auth=HTTPBasicAuth('<USER>', '<PASSWORD>'))     name = sheet.cell_value(i, 1)     name.rstrip() open(name + '.jpg', 'wb').write(r.content)   Conclusion Let's say you want to have all 30 players pictures from your professional team, you can do a bulk download by using Python in just 1-2 minutes without any manual work. ... View more

About Catapult Catapult is a sports performance analytics company, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, that provides performance technology to 2970 teams, across 39 sports, in 137 countries. The company is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. In the latest SAP Sports One version, you can connect to Catapult and import tracking data without using spreadsheets.   Prerequisites Client ID and Client Secret provided by Catapult. On the Catapult platform, athletes and activities are well maintained. Admin user of SAP Sports One.   Steps to configure Catapult For the integration to work properly, three configurations must be made: Catapult Account Settings. Player Mapping. Parameter Mapping.   Catapult Account Settings Go to “Admin” –> “Providers” –> “Tracking Provider Configuration”, select “Catapult” in the drop-down list. Choose the right URL, this depends on the customer’s location. Enter Client ID and Client Secret you get from Catapult into “User” and “Password”. Click “Test Connection”, if everything works well you will get a response in Status Message.   Player Mapping Go to “Provider-Player Management”, select “Catapult” and one Team in your club and click “Edit Mapping”. You can see all the Players from the selected team on the left side and select the player you want to map from the drop-down list on the right side. The players in the drop-down list are from Catapult platform. Click “Save” after you finish the mapping.   Parameter Mapping Go to “Provider-Parameter Management” and select “Catapult”. SAP Sports One will retrieve all the parameters maintained in Catapult on the left side. Click “Edit Configuration”, select a performance parameter you have maintained in SAP Sports One. You can also add a calculation to transform the value. For example, use “*3.6” to transform the values from m/s to km/h. Click “Save” after you finish the mapping.   Steps to use Catapult tracking data After the team finished the training session and data updated to Catapult platform, you can go to SAP Sports One and import the tracking data. Make sure “Catapult” is selected in “Synchronize with Providers” when you maintain the Training. Go to “Training” –> “Training Information” –> “Tracking”, click “Import Performance Data”-“Download from Providers”. Wait for a few seconds, there will be a popup window for you to select the corresponding session from Catapult. Map the Catapult Training Unit to SAP Sports One Training Unit. Click “Save”, moments later the tracking data will be uploaded to the training session.     Conclusion After you finish all the steps above, now you only need to click the "Download" button instead of using Spreadsheets to upload the tracking data. Thanks to this great feature, it used to be 10 minutes to finish the task, but now it only takes 1.   Troubleshooting 1.      Test Connection is failed. Confirm with Catapult the credentials and API URL.   2.      No response when I click “Download from Providers”. The possible reason is that you don't select “Catapult” as the provider or the date of training in SAP Sports One and Catapult platform does not match.   3.      The Performance Data is not correct. Double-check the Player and Parameter Mapping, make sure the mappings are correct.   ... View more

SAP has changed the face of many industries by allowing decision-makers within those fields to consider how data processing and analytics can benefit them. One of the less highlighted areas that SAP has made inroads into is the world of sport. Given the number of businesses relying on the processing of real-time data to enable them to make decisions, it's not that surprising that SAP has found a home here. From football companies that are using analytics to predict potential injuries or do opponent analysis, to boxers who are trying to ensure they maintain proper form, there's an extensive use for analytical processing in the sports industry. The Numbers Don't Lie SAP has seen a lot of new clients from the sports world, adding over 250 customers from the industry as active subscribers. Teams can leverage the portability of wearable devices streamlined to work alongside an SAP HANA data collection and storing utility. Trainers and athletes can then inspect the data after it's collected. They can then use the information there to inform their training regimen or to figure out where they can improve. It's estimated that over 7.7 million data points are collected during a single hour of soccer training. The Digital Athlete Framework How does SAP handle this streaming data? We already know that athletes use wearables to monitor their vitals and the number of calories they're burning. For individual athletes, this might be enough, but when you look at team-based games, a single athlete's data taken by itself is an island. For the team to succeed, it needs to combine these isolated collections of data into an overview of each player’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s by doing so that you get a sense of a collective strength of a team – the sort of rich data that fuels everything from a coach’s tactics to the odds of success offered up by gambling sites. SAP uses a system known as Digital Athlete that can connect to wearables on any member of a team, and collect this data, then stream it for processing and storage on their SAP system. The Digital Athlete Framework follows five major technology trends:     Smart Sensors: wearables and IoT devices are seamlessly connected to the system to collect and log data as it happens     Cloud Computing: The idea of an on-premise machine is old technology. SAP HANA uses cloud servers to ensure that data is always available from anywhere in the world     Real-Time Analytics: With the sheer volume of data produced, real-time analytics is the only way to ensure that the data gives timely insights     Hyperconnectivity: All athletes on a team can be connected simultaneously     Secure Data Storage: Security of information is always a concern, but with advanced security on the cloud, users can rest easy that their data remains safe. SAP HANA and Real-Time Analysis The thing that sets SAP apart from other systems is its approach to the analysis of data. Using a similar tactic to the kind used by enterprise-level Big Data analytics, SAP HANA processes streams of data as they come in to ascertain insights. This real-time approach means a coach or trainer can use data received from a game currently being played to adapt their strategies. The Digital Athlete approach is a new trend in the sports industry. Modern sports teams focus on both the game and the business aspect of operations. SAP offers a lot of tools to help those companies transform their business from a paper-based system to a fully digital one. With the rest of the industry adopting technology to make their lives easier, teams either need to get with the program or get left behind. ... View more

1 Introduction In the world of football, there is a role called scout. Scouts travel, trying to find the most suited football player for their teams. Every scout will have their own methodology and philosophy to find their wanted players. As a one-stand football club management platform, SAP Sports One provides modules to design personalized scouting templates so that these methodologies can be standardized. This article will introduce one methodology to scout goalkeepers, from Rui Oliveira, who is a scout and coach with more than 30 years of experience in top European Clubs, to see how we integrate his thoughts into SAP Sports One. 2 Goalkeeper Profile In Rui's opinion, to build a profile of a goalkeeper, he will consider following behaviors of a player: Motricity Volitional Behaviors Technical Behaviors - Offensive and defensive Tactical Behaviors - Offensive and defensive In each category, he will consider more indetail. Motricity Reaction Power Agility Coordination Volitional Behaviors Fearless Bold Disciplined Concentration Anxiety Control Positive Attitude Technical Behaviors - Offensive and defensive Offensive Ball Throw-in Long Pass Short Pass Defensive Saves on the Ground Saves in the Air 1v1 Situations Freekick Defense Tactical Behaviors - Offensive and defensive Offensive Offensive Positioning Putting Ball Back to Play Defensive Defensive Positioning Command/Guidance 3 Building Evaluation Categories We separted Rui's thoughts into categories. SAP Sports One offers a place to store these standardized items - Evaluation Categores (Catalogs - Evaluations - Evaluation Categories) 4 Building Evaluation Sheet (Evaluation Template) To use these categories, we need a Evaluation Sheet. A Evaluation Sheet is the combination of different Evaluation Categories. By combining different categories, we can build personalized templates that suits scouts' needs. (Catalogs - Evaluaations - Evaluation Sheet) Here I will build a Goalkeeper Profile template composed of all my goalkeeper categories. 5 Building Evaluation for Players We have prepared everything. Now it's time to go outside to watch the player play. With the Evaluation Sheet we know exactly what do we need and what do we want. (Player - Evaluations) 6 Conclusion What behaviors and skills to observe to understand if it is a talented player? Every scouts will have their own thoughts. SAP Sports One provides a flexible scouting evaluation solution that records different insights. Reference https://hub-soccer.com/courses/soccer-scouting-players-evaluation-model/ https://help.sap.com/viewer/fa508de51ca44608bf3fc57f8a5ea212/Latest/en-US/ea5fda455787420a9f7be2bb747501c4.html ... View more

Where to find the latest SAP Sports One functionality updates for Chief Scouts? ... View more

Introduction In the performance world of football, obviously there are always someone in some aspects who are better than the others, because they are talent enough, or training hard enough, or both - and vice versa. If the coach can identify these top players in certain aspects, then he can put the best suitable players to best suitable positions - speedy player? Penetrate! Muscle beast? Take Duels! How do we know who are the better ones? Performance test can tell.  SAP Sports One provides a classification methods to let the coaches know who are the top/flop performancers.   First Look Here is a bar chart in SAP Sports One, illustrating the performance of players in a 30m sprint test. Some of the bars are green, which means the player had a better performance, or simply ran faster in this test. Obviously the red bars means he used longer seconds to finish the 30m test. Here comes our attention. There are 3 standard lines - top, average and flop. Who set the position of these standard lines?   Search in Book Fortunately the answer isn't hard to find. In "SAP Sports One User Guide", there are descriptions below: A top value is smaller than the average minus standard deviation. A flop value is larger than the average plus standard deviation. In instances where the performance parameter results are better the larger they are, the flop vallue is smaller than the average minus standard deviation.   Verification Is that description true? I will have a test about it. Thanks to the downloading functionality of SAP Sports One performance test, I can get the detailed result in excel easily. With some small calculation in excel. We get the flop = 4.43, top = 4.04, avg = 4.24. Two words: it matches. Players who ran less than the top standard time will be classified as top. Then above average, below average, and flop.     Why Group Like This? Using the average plus/minus stdev way generates a normal distribution, thus will distribute the data in a more even manner, players with close results will be grouped together.   I Want to Group on My Own! Yes you can do it. Just go to the Performance Parameters Catalogs!   Conclusion SAP Sports One provides a versatile way to group your performance test results. By default, it is grouped by normal distribution, so that players with close results will be grouped together. It also offers flexbility to group on your own. ... View more

Jesse Owens wore his first pair of athletic shoes 83 years ago in Berlin during Olympic Games where he won four gold medals. The shoes were made by Adidas specially for him. Since then, the best athletes started to look for the best sports-wear and other big brands came up looking for performance improvement and to avoid injuries. Berlin Olympic Games was also the first one to be televised in black and white . The connection between technology, athletes and fans never stopped, only the way it’s done changed. Nowadays, not only the best sports-wear are available, but also software to assist staff and players, like SAP does with the SAP Sports One and to allow fans to get the best experience, other solutions are offered, like SAP Event Ticketing, SAP Customer Checkout, ERPs and CRMs making a smart arena/stadium concept. The way the communication is done also changed, we still have the television, but with a fancier broadcasting and other possibilities like social media and streaming. More than half of the global population is connected, some of our challenges are: how can sports change the training, the distribution, offer a better match, a great fan experience and of course, how to monetize? Sports and technology were always connected and this connection increases every day. Sports is also about working hard, strategy and methodology. Did you know for example that the paper “The New New Product Development Game” from Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published in 1986, based on Rugby movements and strategy inspired Scrum methodology? The old sequential approach to developing was not so effective anymore and companies in Japan and the United States started using an holistic method, as in rugby, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field. This holistic approach has six characteristics: built-in instability, self-organizing project teams, overlapping development phases, "multi-learning," subtle control, and organizational transfer of learning. The six pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, forming a fast and flexible process for new product development. And if we think about automobilism, sometimes an overtake looks so easy. But do you know what was the probability of success? Did the driver take the safest option, or, did he/she surprise his/her opponent and risked everything? Technology can tell you the probability of success. Sports are changing, some habits are changing, the way we play, the way we watch, the way the products are consumed is changing and technology is always available as a tool to support the whole ecosystem.  I can tell you another good example, did you know that the prize for eSports gaming tournaments is now on the same level(or even higher) compared to traditional sports? Take, for example, the 'Fortnite' World Cup. The first prize winner, Kyle Giersdorf, known online as Bugha,  got $3 million, more than the amount paid by Wimbledon Open. All the topics above and much more was part of the Sports & Tech event last week in São Paulo at InovaBra. Anderson Schmitt and me represented SAP as speakers, our presentation was “Reinventando a experiência do fã com o uso da tecnologia”.  Beth Romero, journalist, was the presenter, Giuliano Passini from ALMARUGBY, Filipe Scoton from Amazon Web Services, Sergio Verde Selva from DAZN and Pedro Daniel from Ernst & Young joined as speakers. Congratulations to all, including the organizers, for InovaBra por opening their space and hosting this great event and also for the qualified audience present there! What a team, what a wonderful network and what an event! *** See other blogs related to Sports & Entertainment world in my blog page: mateus.grings#content:blogposts   ... View more

During my last business trip to Germany I had the chance to visit the beautiful SAP Arena at Mannheim to watch an Ice hockey match. The match was great, but not only the match, the whole experience was wonderful. It’s amazing to see SAP technology present in the whole journey, I mean, before, during and after the event. In this blog I am going to share some examples about how SAP technology helped to make my experience the best. Let’s start! What happened before the match? My preparation started two days before the match, getting more information about the event with the Adler Mannheim Fan App, powered by SAP. By the way, this App is served by SAP solutions as backend like SAP Customer Checkout, SAP Event Ticketing and SAP Hana as the database. This is a nice example about how to connect and stay closer to customers and fans taking advantage from digitalization. One day later I selected the seats and bought the tickets using SAP Event Ticketing, this is the ticketing solution used at SAP Arena, doesn’t matter if you are going to a sports event or to a concert. When I arrived in the SAP Arena the atmosphere was really cool, the fans were very motivated and looking forward to the start of the match. I arrived early, so, I had time to buy some souvenirs at the Fan shop. I got the Fan APP again, displayed my Fan ID and the cashier, using SAP Customer Checkout(CCO) solution scanned it, this way I earned some points in the loyalty program. I saw some fans buying and paying using points accumulated. The same CCO solution is used there in all the restaurants, so, the service works very well avoiding big queues. During the time I was in the Arena I also used the Fan App to send my localization to a friend, so, he found me very fast, the whole Arena is mapped by the App. It’s show time! The match was exciting, Adler Mannheim played very well and won again! Here they have another weapon, SAP Sports One, which helps them do focus on their best. The software digitalizes the performance management, helping them to store and coordinate their administrative tasks, training and team management, scouting and medical processes. And what happened after the match? My experience was so great, that Adler Mannheim got a new fan, there is no doubt in my heart! See you soon! *** See other blogs related to Sports & Entertainment world in my blog page: mateus.grings#content:blogposts ... View more