Statistics (sport)
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.
to form
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
- Jim Albert, Jay Bennett: Curve Ball. Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game . New York 2003, ISBN 0-387-00193-X
- Jim Albert 2005, Jay Bennett, James J. Cochran (eds.): Anthology of Statistics in Sports , Philadelphia, ISBN 0-89871-587-3
- Christoph Amend et al. a .: Screen dominion . In: Die Zeit , No. 3/2005
- Jay Bennett (ed.): Statistics in Sport . New York 1998, ISBN 0-340-70072-6
- Oliver Geden: The secret of tables and table tennis . ( Memento of October 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: The Parliament , 46/2004
- Dean Oliver: Basketball on Paper. Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis . Dulles, 2004, ISBN 1-57488-688-6
- Alan Schwarz: The Numbers Game. Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics . New York 2004, ISBN 0-312-32222-4
- Tobias Werron: Quantification in the world of sport. In: Social Systems , 2/2005
Web links
- Statistics in Sports section of the American Statistical Association
- Statistics page of the International Athletics Federation (IAAF)
- National Basketball Association (NBA) statistics page
- Major League Baseball (MLB) Statistics Page
- National Football League (NFL) statistics page
- Statistics page with results from all sports from A – Z