Sports teams and administrators can use the enterprise resource planning multinational SAP Sports One unified platform to manage teams and players efficiently and use powerful analytical insights for performance optimisation, says SAP New Markets & Strategic Customers: Sport & Entertainment global head Bernhard Escherich.

Originally designed in partnership with the German national football team for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, it has since been adopted by a range of other sporting disciplines, including rugby, basketball, skiing and ice hockey.

“Most sports already generate a wealth of data from video feeds and equipment sensors, and we have partnered with several sports companies to generate player data from wearable devices. Our platform integrates all the data sources and allows for the real-time management of teams.”

Deployed in the cloud, the solution helps clubs and organisations digitalise sports performance management by coordinating administrative, training and team management, scouting and medical processes.

“SAP Sports One provides team management, training planning, player fitness, performance insights, scouting and penalty insights functionality [for] some of the world’s leading high-performance sports teams,” Escherich says.

The solution is built on the SAP HANA platform, with data analysis and processing taking place in real time to equip coaching, medical and administrative staff with in-the-moment insight into various performance areas.

Additionally, the company’s innovations in other industries have been incorporated into the Sports One platform, he adds.

“We have embedded powerful tools to understand the relationships between data sets, apply geospatial analysis of data, and present the findings in ways that are relevant to the person using the data. “This ensures that users get the information that is most important to them and their job functions,” he says.

As the sports industry is increasingly professionalised, administrators face many of the same challenges other industries encounter: procurement, talent management and retention, performance management, marketing, and customer relationship management, says SAP Africa chief technology adviser Simon Carpenter.

Through the deep analytics embedded in the platform, team managers can identify patterns that point to exhaustion or excessive workload, which may be precursors to injury. With this insight, more informed decisions can be made about how players are managed for optimal performance, he notes.

In a recent project with the Volvo Ocean Race, the SAP Leonardo Internet of Things Edge technology was used to track sailors’ fitness levels and exhaustion during the race, so that the crew could optimise their performance based on the data collected, he adds.

“Physical and mental exhaustion are significant threats to crews during the eight-month race – considered to be one of the toughest sports events in the world – and, by using technology, we take the guesswork out of the crew’s fatigue, reaction to the weather, stress levels and other biometric measurement data.

The explosion in data use in sports has created compelling new opportunities to provide fans with deeper levels of insight and engagement, he emphasises.

“The sports industry is moving away from ‘gut feel’ to a science-based approach built on accurate data. We can generate deep, accurate insights for any component of sports,” concludes Carpenter.