Competitive Advantages and Pro Sports

Competitive Advantages & Pro-Sports

The usage of analytics in the professional sports world is more common today than it was in years past. The most famous of story of the use of analytics is the story of coach Billy Bean of the Oakland Athletics and how he used this system for the over all improvement of the team. Analytics were used to dissect and rebuild the team in all aspects. They used it to take into account who was their opponent, where they playing and what were were the conditions on a particular day. This analytical approach helped to design a better, winning team.

The analytical approach takes into consideration four different forms of criteria for a sustainable competitive advantage. These four criteria are:

1. Are they Valuable? Do they enable a team to devise strategies that improve game efficiency or effectiveness?

2. Are they Rare? How many other teams or players possess this talent or skill level?

3. Are they Imperfectly Imitable? Being imperfectly imitable means that the player or plays used are impossible or extremely difficult for other teams to duplicate.

4. Are they Non-Substitutable? Do they (the player) have a talent, an edge that no other player has?

When all four of these criteria are met, then a team can be said to have a sustainable competitive advantage. In other words, the team will have an advantage in the marketplace of professional sports which will last until the criteria are no longer met completely. As a result, a team would be able to win more games, have a larger fan base, be more effective as a team and earn higher profits all around.

Every sport does use analytics in some way or the other to gain a competitive edge over their opponents. One no longer can just rely on skill, spirit and gut instinct to win games these days, every coach and manager does need more than that to make winning plays.

This system can be best used in evaluating the resources one has and creating a winning team, not just by relying on reputation, experience and gut feel but using analytics to support your decision.

Recruitment

Ask any well qualified recruiter, what their steps would be, had they to build a team from scratch to deliver a high stakes mammoth project. One would not be surprised, by the approach they might take out here, even in today's world. They still would go about by checking out what the requirements are (Roles, Responsibilities, and Level of experience) and go about searching for individuals in the open market to fill up those needs.

This approach was being implemented first in the world of recruitment, where the agency would consider all the different factors required to make the team a success (end goal) and come out with a team, that's