Complex Sport Analytics

This book is the first to combine principles from analytics, complex systems theory, multi-disciplinary diagnostics and sport performance analysis. It considers athletes, teams, and sport organizations in individual and team games as complex systems, and demonstrates how complexity studies can enrich analytics and give us a more sophisticated understanding of the causalities of winning and losing in sports.

Part I introduces the basic categories of analytics and their uses in elite sport. Part II presents an original conception of sport analytics both as a complex of different kinds of processes and as a complexity-adapted view of human systems acting in sport performance and management. Part III considers the main principles of complex sport analytics, expanding the prism of complexity to include all levels of a sport organization from athletes, coaches and trainers to top decision makers, and suggests practical applications and simulations for cases of both individual and team sports.

This is illuminating reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner working in sport analytics, performance analysis, coaching science or sport management.

Felix Lebed is Senior Lecturer and Head of the M.Ed. degree program in the Physical Education Department at Kaye Academic College of Education, Israel. His deep knowledge of sport games is based on personal experience as a handball and volleyball player and coach, as well as more than 30 years’ experience as an interdisciplinary scholar and lecturer. Dr Lebed also served as the Senior Supervisor of the Soviet national handball teams’ Olympic preparation. In addition to his diverse academic activities, he now provides services to sport organizations and elite teams as a strategic analyst and consultant