Analysis of the evolving digital trends in the sports industry

Abstract

Digitisation has played a pivotal role in enabling life to move towards a new direction in every step. With the advent of computers in 1950s, every sector has ever since tried to incorporate some level of digitalisation to improve efficiency and accuracy in their working space. Digitalisation was quite evident in the latter half of the 20th century when the Digital Revolution (or the Third Industrial Revolution) took place. There appeared a tectonic shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technologies to digital electronics. A similar shift can be seen prominently in the sports industry. The traditional professionally played sports has been redefined with the emergence of technology. Digital advancements have played a pivotal role in changing how every stakeholder interacts with the sports industry in multiple ways. Due to the diversity of the stakeholders involved — Sporting organisations, National/Regional team players, Media, Fans and supporters, Government, and other private sponsors, it becomes a key challenge for everyone to respond and adapt to any changes in the sports experience. Keeping this in mind, it is important to assess various pain points and leverage technologies that would be easier to adapt and would simultaneously enhance the sporting experience. Over the years, the sports industry has gone through various changes towards professionalization and commercialization. In this document, we would try to understand how various technologies have been introduced to the sporting environment and how they have affected the overall experience. Firstly, we aim to investigate all the multiple facets involved in and around the sports industry, how each of those segments evolved over the years, and what instigated the change. An important aspect is to capture how agile the sports industry has been towards upcoming technologies and how quickly each sport has been able to implement the same. Additionally, by putting together the historical trends with the upcoming technologies, our objective would be to encapsulate the future of the sports industry and key driving factors. After gaining an industry overview and understanding theevolution it has undergone, we aim to focus on two specific sports and how these two sports segments leveraged the digital era to build their recognition. A deep dive into different segments, such as the collection of data required to strategize, judging criteria and rules, and the change in fan experience, will be done. To get a deeper understanding into the technological interpolations, the scope of this document entails details of two major team sports — Football and Cricket. The aim of this study will be to determine the interlocked area between sports and technology, how external and internal factors contributed to triggering it and what the industry would shape into given the rapid rise of technologies with high computational power and accuracy. Apart from the physical changes, we try to analyse the cultural changes and the resistance faced to undergo the digitalisation of any process. By assimilating knowledge about the industry, we expect to be able to build a framework or a roadmap of the future scope of the industry.