By Michael Cole - Chief Technology Officer, European Tour
The European Tour is unique in sport with 47 tournaments in 30 countries across five continents, often at new venues. This presents us with challenges on how to effectively and consistently deliver a world-class experience for players and spectators globally.
It is an important part of our role to bring data analytics to golf. Interrogating every aspect of a player’s game and how variables such as weather and course design affect performance are an important asset for players and fans alike. Golf is data-rich: so let’s make the most of it.
How are we improving our tournament data?
We are fortunate in that Golf provides a rich tapestry of data points, and in conjunction with 15th Club and our new project, ‘Waggle’, we’ll be able to analyse up to 140,000 data points per tournament. This is already helping us build on existing rich data and cognitive learnings to provide increasingly valuable insights to key stakeholders including pro-golfers, media, commercial partners and our fans. All this can be used as a basis for creating compelling content for audiences, and telling compelling stories.
To fully activate ‘Waggle’ we are actively seeking out experts at data collection, analytical processing, cognitive learning and predictive capabilities to join us in partnership and to help us drive the transformation of global golf,
What can we create from the data points?
One utilisation we’re really excited about is the dashboard ‘cockpit’ we’ve developed ahead of The 2018 Ryder Cup. This will give the captains rich performance analytics such as strokes gained, as well as data-driven widgets and statistics via the website for expert fans to spark conversations and debate.
The opportunity is to enhance the current way we deliver stats for players, fans and coaches (via portals and website tables) towards a fully-immersive and engaging ‘Performance Zone’ accessible by all stakeholders.
We are aiming to fully utilise over the 5.7 million data points collected per season based on variables such as distance to pin, club used, resulting lie and direction. This helps us create over 2.2 billion data combinations including yardages, lies, club types, course, pin positions, hole direction, weather and land conditions.
Not only can we provide enhanced statistical information, but also more sophisticated live intelligent insight for the broadcast and media commentary along with our loyal fan base. Provided in real-time, we can transform the way people think about golf, the way people watch golf and more importantly the way people engage with the sport, and that’s an exciting prospect!
