Statistics (sport)

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Statistics are a central element of modern sport. They primarily serve to represent sporting achievements that have already been made. However, they are also used to analyze these services and to make predictions about services to be expected in the future.

The most popular forms of presentation of sports statistics are tables and rankings, as well as data sets with which the performance of individual athletes over the course of their careers is documented. The main prerequisite for the production of sports statistics is the quantification of athletic performance, i.e. the transformation of movements into numbers.

The importance of sports statistics differs considerably between individual sports, but also between individual countries. While there are only cautious approaches to compiling statistics for individual players in football , for example , and there are only a few options for adequately capturing the course of an individual game with statistical data, this option is used extensively in sports such as basketball , American football and baseball made. In the US sports statistics, play a prominent role in both the presentation and interpretation of achievements of teams and individual players as well as in the development of game tactics.

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Sports statistics exist in a variety of different basic formats:

Tables
are mainly used in leagues for team sports
Result lists
serve to hierarchize the services achieved in a single competition
Leaderboards
serve for the comparative presentation of performances that were achieved within a sport or discipline but not in the same competition (examples: world annual best lists in athletics or tennis world rankings)
Box scores
serve for the condensed representation of game progress in team sports, which are characterized by a large number of relatively short moves (examples: baseball, basketball, American football or cricket)
Player records
serve within team sports to display the performance of individual players, mostly as average values ​​per season (examples: points, assists and rebounds per game in basketball)

Intentions and functions

There are many reasons for the production of data in sport. In most sports, it would not be possible to decide on the winner of a competition without quantified data. A league operation in team sports without a table (i.e. the accumulation of the results of the individual game days) is inconceivable. In individual sports, especially in those that (such as athletics) allow an objective measurement of the performance achieved, statistics enable an exact comparison of performance across local and time boundaries. However, statistics are not only relevant for the implementation of sporting competitions, but also for their media representation and the perception of those interested in sport. Statistics enable a very compressed representation of the progress of sports competitions. This makes sporting achievements “consumable” without the person interested in sport having to “see” a sporting event (on site or on the television screen). The columns of numbers in the newspaper, on the Internet or in teletext are completely sufficient.

See also

literature

Web links