“It’s the little details that are vital, little things make big things happen.” John Wooden

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that sports summarise life in a short time of 60 mins or so. Sports give us so many life lessons if we look closely. Sports boost us, energize us, keep us motivated and convey so much more about values, hard work, discipline, patience, and victory & defeat. 

The way sports attract passion, fan following, and participation from people of all walks of life is mesmerizing. Football, for that matter, is such a popular game globally, with Euro 2020 being the current favorite. 

Inline with this, we can see many technopreneurs are using the latest technologies and advanced computing to improve the experience of the game for fans, sportspersons, athletes, trainers, and even broadcasters, for that matter.

A sports visual tracking technology company, Matchday.ai, provides high-tech computer vision and AI-based solutions catered to broadcasters, pro athletes, semi-professional and amateur athletes, and sports teams/franchisees. IIIT-Hyderabad is the official technology partner for Matchday.ai. IIIT-H is ranked among the top 3 universities in Asia for AI research.

“We provide caches/athletes/broadcasters with deep data and insights using CV and DL on broadcast videos in Football, Badminton and Cricket.” says Ganesh Yaparla, Founder and Harsha Vardhan Kommana, Co-Founder, at Matchday.ai. 

The idea behind Matchday.ai is to use Artificial Intelligence to mine deep data from sports videos in real-time automatically.

The engine collects 50,000 data points per match in a real-time automated manner without any manual intervention. 

The team consists of hardcore computer vision engineers who are combing their love for sports and technology to create a state of the art visual tracking systems for multiple sports.

The sports data analytics market is a huge market opportunity with an expected growth of $ 4.5 billons. Performance analytics is a fast-growing segment, especially when athletes are leaning towards data to gain a competitive edge. However, these data collections are primitive, and at present, there is hardly any data available for sports. With Matchday.ai data collection techniques, the amount of data collected across multiple matches and sports will bring a paradigm shift in the field of sports. 

Today, data in badminton is non-existential. Matchday.ai made the first and only data collection engine for badminton which, apart from collection wins, loss, and match statistics, also collect stats like average rally length, average distance covered by the player, total points won%, shuttle return points, shot type, reaction time, etc. Pullela Gopichand himself is very excited by what this data can do to the game.

Another example is football; during a match, traditionally, the data collection focuses on a player, while the Matchday.ai algorithm focuses on all the players involved collecting several real-time data points that can be shared across with athletes anywhere anytime. Some of the data points include basic statistics, historical matches with data accessibility to 3rd parties

There are challenges that come on board while implementing any solution. 

• Data Variation - From lighting, camera angles, and positions difference across sports, there is a huge variation in data.  
• Implementation - The ability to compute data without latency and provide a robust framework considering consumer behavior can be tricky.
• Domain Defined - With a huge knowledge gap surfacing across different ways of data collection and its application throughout multiple sports, it is challenging to perform data annotation. 

Sports is no longer just a fun or leisure activity; it is a serious business with a lot of monetary investment, and not to forget, the emotional stakes are high. Therefore, the nitty-gritty of the games matters a lot, and hence every move shall be closely monitored and scrutinized. Such tech innovations using AI increase the reliability and transparency of the game and cut down any bias, enriching the overall experience around the game.