The Association of Tennis Professionals, ATP, has partnered with Infosys to launch a new statistical way to measure the best performing ATP World Tour players.
The new ATP Stats Leaderboards makes use of Infosys’ data analytics capabilities to bring together recorded stats from various professionals on the tour today to rank them in three categories, Serving, Returning and Under Pressure, and even allows users to compare current players with greats from the past. The three categories can be broken down by surface, by year, by past 52 weeks or by career.
“These new statistics offer players, fans and media interesting new insights into how our athletes are rating in three key areas against their peers on the ATP World Tour,” said Chris Kermode, ATP Executive Chairman. “There is huge potential to understand our sport better through the development of new statistics, and we look forward to further advances coming soon in this area through our partnership with Infosys.”
The project uses the Infosys Information Platform, an opensource data analytics platform, and brings together the vast amount of data collected by the ATP over the years to give fans a concise rating of players on the tour today. The ranking are determined through various big data models combining several metrics including the number of double faults during a game, number of aces, the percentage of points won on an opponent’s serve and the number of successfully converted break points, to give a measure of how players are performing currently and in comparison to previous parts of the season.
“The uniqueness of our partnership with the ATP World Tour lies in being able to challenge the traditional models, and experiment and embrace technology to create a compelling experience for fans across the globe,” said U B Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer at Infosys. “We firmly believe that technology can amplify our ability to create this unique differentiation and we will continue to find newer avenues to elevate the fan experience.”
While this would be considered a novel concept for the game of tennis, the use of big data and advanced analytics tools is not new for the world of sports entertainment. Accenture Digital has been using its data analytics capabilities to predict the outcome of the Six Nations and the recent Rugby World Cup.
The company has been a technology partner of the Six Nations for five years now, and this year introduced an Oculus Rift beta virtual reality headset and development kit as part of the on-going marketing strategies to demonstrate its capabilities. The company claims to process more than 1.9 million rows of data during every match, and also developed parameters for 1800 algorithms to bring the data, dating back to 2006, to life. After each match, approximately 180,000 on-field actions were added to the increasing data store to refine the decision making capabilities.