COURSE OUTLINE

COURSE: Analysis of Sports and Sportspersons

BATCH: BM 17-19, TERM V
INSTRUCTOR: UDAY DAMODARAN
CONTACT: Office 3178 (Room, First Floor of Admin Block)
Home 3478
(Free to meet anytime, but dropping in a mail before the
attempt to meet, will save you some bother!)

Introduction

Sports is big business; sports is also big recreation and an important anchor of pride for
communities and nations. Human beings spend a substantial amount of their time on
earth playing, watching and paying (directly or indirectly) to watch sports; they also
spend time and money betting on not only the outcomes of sporting events, but on almost
every move of a sporting event. Communities and nations spend money, time and other
resources building infrastructure for sports and in regulating sports activities. Sports also
throws up superstars; performers who create value and are valued.

This course takes a dive (not a very deep dive!) into this major economic and social
activity that human beings engage in. The course begins by looking at the nature of this
product, and the structure and regulation of the professional team sport industry. After
looking at approaches to valuation of players and other drivers of financial performance
of teams and leagues, the course moves on to the design of sports leagues and
tournaments. The bulk of the course focuses on the ‘production’ process itself: the
analysis of the performance of teams, players and adjudicators. In sports, the protagonists
are clearly identifiable, the competition direct and intense, the rules of competition very
clearly laid out and the focus is on outcomes that are very clearly defined. Therefore,
sports generate huge amounts of performance metrics that are amenable to structured
analysis. The course looks at how tools from economics, mathematics, statistics and
operations research can be used to define, analyze, predict and evaluate performance. The
course ends by looking at the markets for sports betting.

The course should therefore help in answering questions like: Should a city/ country host
a particular sports event: what are the costs and benefits? What brings in viewers to the
stadium/ TV? Which league is the most exciting? How do you arrive at alternate
measures to describe the performance of a sportsperson? Which team or player might
benefit from a recent change in regulation? Which team, or player, is/was the Greatest of
All Time (GOAT) in a sport? Who is the Most Valuable Player? What can we attribute a
particular sportsperson’s/ team’s performance; how do we differentiate skill from luck?
How can players be rated/ valued? How can we identify streaks of above/ below average
performance? Can there be a better model to predict in-game events/ outcomes? Which is
the optimal team composition? Are betting markets efficient; can there be profitable
strategies? Are referees unbiased and fair?
This course would be relevant to students looking at careers in managing sports and
sportspersons, in sports-centric media and in the burgeoning area of sports analytics and
is designed on the premise that professional managers can add value at every stage of
modern sports.

Learning Objectives and Rationale

At the end of this course you should:

1. Be able to design the contours of a league. The course helps you analyze factors
like competitive balance, resource requirements and availability, scheduling
challenges to arrive at designs of new leagues

2. Be able to create metrics, or use existing metrics, to describe and evaluate player/
team performance that help in coaching, rating. There are limitless possibilities to
describe various aspects of player/ team performance across various sports. The
course equips you to arrive at meaningful measures of performance

3. Be able to create models to predict sporting outcomes. The course trains you to
identify systematic factors, and to distinguish between luck and skill, use this
knowledge to predict outcomes.

4. Be able to analyze betting markets. The course helps you understand the working
of betting markets and detect possible patterns

Session-wise Plan

Session Topic

One Introduction: The product, producers, consumers, enablers

and Analysis

Reading: What is the sports product and who buys it? The
marketing of professional sports leagues, Mason DS,
European Journal of Marketing, Vol 33, Issue 3-4, 1999

Reading: Introduction to the Special Issue on Analytics in Sports,

Part I: General Sports Applications, Fry, MJ & Onlmann, JW,
Interfaces, Vol 42, No. 2, 2012

Two Analyzing Special Characteristics of the Industrial Organization

of Team Sports; Labor and Transfer Markets
 Reading: Alternative Measures of Competitive Balance in
Sports Leagues, Humphreys, BR, Journal of Sports Economics,
Vol 3, No.2

Three What Drives Financial Performance of Leagues and Teams?;

Player Compensation and Valuation
Reading: Deloitte Football Money League
Reading: An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis, Hakes
JK and Sauer RD, Journal of Economic Perspectives,
Vol 20, No.3, 2006

Four Scheduling of Sports Tournaments/ Leagues; Goals, Constraints, Methods

Reading: Scheduling in sports: An annotated bibliography, Kendall, G;
Knust, S; Ribeiro CC and Urrutia S, Computers and Operations Research,
Vol 37, Issue 1, 2010

Five Fairness in Sports: Design of Rules, Adjudication

Reading: Fair Play as Respect for the Game, Butcher, R et al
Journal of the Philosophy of Sport,
Vol 25, Issue 1, 1998
Reading: The Varieties of Cheating- Comments on Ethical Analyses, in
Sports Loland, S
Sport in Society,
Vol 8, Issue 1, 2007
Reading: A fair method for resetting the target in interrupted one-day
cricket matches, Duckworth FC and Lewis AJ, Journal of the Operational
Research Society, Vol 49, Issue 3, 1998

Six Performance Rating of Teams and Players; Bradley-Terry Models,

Elo Ratings, AHP and Paired Comparisons
Reading: The methodology of officially recognized international sports
rating systems, Stefani, R. Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports,
Vol 7, 2011

Reading: On the Development of a Soccer Player Performance

Rating System for the English Premier League, McHale, IG;
Scarf, PA & Folker, DE Interfaces, Vol 42, No. 4, 2012

Seven, Separating Luck from Skill: Performance Analysis

Eight Of Players and Athletes
Reading: A Criterion for comparing and selecting batsmen
in limited overs cricket, Barr GDI and Kantor BS, Journal of
the Operational Research Society, Vol 55, Issue 12, 2004

Reading: Winning streaks in sports and the misperception

of Momentum, Vergin, R, Journal of
Nine Sports Prediction/ Forecasting
Reading: Searching for the GOAT of tennis win prediction
Kovalchik SA, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports,
Vol 12, Issue 3, 2018

Ten Sports Betting Markets

Reading: Market Efficiency and the Favurite-Longshot Bias:
The Baseball Betting Market, Woodland LM and Woodland BM,
The Journal of Finance, Vol 49, Issue 1, 1994

Evaluation

This course is a hands-on course that focuses on empiric data. The evaluation patter too
reflects this emphasis; students should demonstrate an ability to put to use the concepts
covered in the course

2 Quizzes (end of 4th and 8th sessions) 20%

End Term, normally open book 30%
4 Empiric Projects 50%

 There will be a letter grades for each component; for quizzes the marks will be
totaled up and grade given at component level
 Letter grade cut-off for quizzes, end-term will not be stricter than the following

Range 0-34 35-42 43-50 51-58 59-66 67-74 75-82 83-90 90-
100
Grade F D D+ C C+ B B+ A A+

 Final Grade will be a weighted average of component grades

Assessment Logic

The learning objectives enunciated at the beginning of this course outline seek to ensure
that your learning in this course can be put to use in the analysis of sports and
sportspersons. The assessment of this learning has been designed on the premise that this
learning, in turn, requires that you remember and understand concepts and ideas, know
how to apply them and be comfortable in being able to use them to analyze (deconstruct)
situations and design (evaluate and construct) solutions. The table below outlines a rough
mapping of the evaluation components to the dimensions of learning
Components Remembering Application of Analysis Evaluation and
and Understanding Synthesis
Understanding
Quizzes To assess To assess
retention and ability to
recollection of apply/ use
facts, concepts concepts and
from directed theories to
readings; to given data/
assess ability situations
to discuss and
explain
concepts
End Term To assess To assess ability to To assess
ability to analyze contextual ability to design
apply/ use situations in sports solutions and
concepts and build arguments
theories to to justify the
given data/ decision
situations
Empiric To assess ability to To assess
Projects critically analyze ability to
contextual design, plan
situations in sports solutions for
real life
situations; to
assess ability to
build up
arguments to
justify the
solution using
concepts and
theories

Effort

Estimated effort required to be expended on the course, outside the 15 class hours
Average reading of 1 hours per session x 10 sessions 10 hours
Preparatory Work for Quizzes and End Term 5 hours
Effort required, per person, for empiric projects 20 hours
Total 35 hours

Ethics/ Fair Play

If you indulge in any unethical practice (copying, plagiarism, etc) in any component,
small or big, it brings to question the assessment of you in every other component and
therefore you will be awarded an incomplete (‘I’) grade.