Every day, enormous amounts of data are produced by businesses and consumers, forming vast data sets, both structured and unstructured. Such sets are increasingly used to guide strategic decision making, by means of big data analytical processes.
Big data analytics helps businesses to become more effective, hereby generating more revenue and/or profit. Depending on the desired outcome of the analysis, analytical processes can be descriptive, prescriptive, diagnostic or predictive (Banerjee, Bandyopadhyay & Acharya, 2013).
However, besides organizational decision-making focussed on costs, revenues and ultimately shareholder value, big data analytics can be used to guide decision making regarding one of the more trivial questions buzzing around society the last couple of decades, such as: ‘Which footballer is actually the best: Christiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi?’.
For over 20 years, fans, experts, players and coaches have not reached consensus about which player may be called the greatest of all time. Both sides of the argument have embayed numerous arguments and statistics to solve this seemingly unsolvable question. However, by using big data analytics, Decroos, Bransen, Van Haaren & Davis (2019) have finally produced an undebatable and unambiguous answer to the question.
Using data mining and machine learning techniques, these researchers from the University of Leuven, Belgium, have been able to examine the statistics of both players more extensively than researcher had done before. By creating the VAEP (Valuing Actions by Estimating Probabilities) framework, the researchers were able to accurately determine the value of football player’s actions. Besides focussing on assists and goals, the researchers included three more elements in their analysis:
1) The value of the player’s action types (passes, crosses, dribbles etc)
2) The value of the player’s action type with regards to the game context
3) The possible effect of a player’s action on subsequent actions
Using these elements, the researchers were able to calculate the value of football players not only based on quantifiable statistics such as goals, assists and successful passes and dribbles, but also included the value these actions deliver. The analysis shows that Messi is superior in terms of action quantity and quality, which is shown in the table below.
Without the use of big data analytics techniques, an area that is imminently growing both in size and in capabilities, the debate between supporters of Messi and Ronaldo would possibly never been solved, and none of the two players could have been called greatest of all time with certainty. However, by means of the study by Decroos et al. (2019), the end of an era of discussion between who is the best is now marked.
Sources
Banerjee, A., Bandyopadhyay, T., & Acharya, P. (2013). Data analytics: Hyped up aspirations or true potential?. Vikalpa, 38(4), 1-12.
Decroos, T., Bransen, L., Van Haaren, J., & Davis, J. (2019, July). Actions speak louder than goals: Valuing player actions in soccer. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (pp. 1851-1861). ACM.
