INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT KOZHIKODE

Post Graduate Programme in Management

Course Outline

Course Code and Course Title STRATEGIC ANALYTICS: INSIGHTS

FROM SPORT (SAIS)
Course type Compulsory/Elective
Pre-requisites (if any) None
Course Credit 3
Total no. of sessions 15
Session Duration 2 hours
Term V
Year and Batch 2020-’21, PGP-23
Sections (if any) N/A

Instructor(s) DEEPAK DHAYANITHY

Contact Details deepak@iimk.ac.in
Office +91-495-2809433
Consultation Hours Tue, Thu 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM with appointment

Introduction
Competitive sport and the sports industry embody the scrutiny of decisions endemic to management
across sectors and geographies. This context leads naturally to the challenge of identifying and driving
high impact analytics projects. To be successful, the manager should be able to recognize problem
structures, required information and data, possible solution approaches, assumptions, as well as be able
to quantify effects and synthesize. This is typically kicked off in organizations by socializing the
problem and solution approaches, identification of key metrics, stakeholders and experts, and then
project definition. It is the manager’s mantle to lead the strategic analytic initiative, challenge and
validate assumptions, ensure methodology remains on track (and time!), champion implementation,
share results, and market success stories.

Scope
Analytics is the process of deriving actionable insight from data. Retail and financial services
industries-led analytics has long attempted to drive decisions utilizing consumer data – thus addressing
key operational concerns1 of their business. The need of the hour is to engender a rigorous analytics
approach to strategic decisions as well.
Sport is unique in two respects. First, the industry offers us critical competition, resources, fans and
regulator data. Second, understanding strategy requires a strong grasp of the business fundamentals.
Given our exposure to sport via the media, and increasingly via academic literature as well, this basic
understanding is widespread amongst us. Sport appeals to a wide spectrum of age-groups, demography

1
For example, who do we lend to? At what terms and conditions?
and economic strata – thereby, the industry is of strong interest to broadcasters, media-planners and
marketers.
The Strategic Analytics: insights from Sport (SAIS) elective addresses high value, multi-dimensional,
business critical analytics problems – involving competition, resources, fans, consumers and
regulating bodies. SAIS will help students understand the linkages between a process, its data
environment, critical decisions faced, and how a systematic analytics approach can be taken to address
the strategic challenge. Rather than a technical focus on ‘how to build models’, SAIS focuses on how
to approach strategic decision-making using pertinent analytics methodologies, how to scope out
important strategic problems, appreciate methodology and how to interpret results.

Pedagogy
SAIS would be a student led course. Instructor will introduce the analytics context, problem, and
sample solution approaches. Sessions would be interactive with students expected to be well prepared
with session readings so as to make the class interactive.

Learning Outcomes/Course Objectives

SAIS’s learning outcomes are:
1. To gain working understanding of strategic analytics
2. To be equipped with the cognitive and methodological skills that are required to lead strategic
analytics projects
3. To prepare for careers in analytics, consulting, broadcasting, media planning, branding and
sport management

In turn, these are operationalized by discussing

1. Data and information requirement and availability
2. Framing of the analytics problem and solution approach
3. Methodology, assumptions, pitfalls, interpretation of results and
4. Applications to key strategic questions

Textbooks and Learning Materials

Text Book(s)

- None –

Reference Book(s)
1. Mathletics. Wayne L Winston. 2012. Princeton University Press (WLW)
2. 15 Sports Myths and Why They Are Wrong. Fort, Rodney; Winfrey, Jason. 2013. Stanford
Economics and Finance (RFWJ)
3. Economics of Sports. William S. Kern. 2000. WE Upjohn Institute of Employment Research
(WSK)
 4. Business of Sports Agents (2nd edition), Shropshire, Kenneth L., Davis, Timothy. 2013. Univ of
Pennsylvania Press (KLSDT) [http://site.ebrary.com/lib/iimk/reader.action?
docID=10748506&p00=sports&ppg=6]
5. Dolciani Mathematical Expositions, Volume 43: Mathematics and Sports. Joseph A. Gallian.
2010. Mathematical Association of America (JAG)
6. Economics of professional team sports. Paul Downward, Alistair Dawson. 2000. Routledge
(PDAD)

Additional Reading(s)
1. Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris
2. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis, 2003
3. Basketball On Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis (Paperback), Dean Oliver,
2003
4. Stumbling On Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in
Professional Sports (Hardcover), David Berri, 2009
5. Born to Run, Christopher McDougall, 2010

Technology and Software (if any)

 MS EXCEL
 STATA 11

Other Resources (Journals, Internet Websites) (if any)

 Sports Analytics related conferences
o MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Boston, US: 2011 – 2015
o Northeast Business and Economics Association Annual Conference
 Research journals
o Sport Management Review
o Sport Marketing Quarterly
o American Economic Review
o Managerial and Decision Economics
o Vikalpa: the journal for decision makers
o Review of Economic Studies
o Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
o Psychological Science
o Psychological Record
o Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
o Thinking and Reasoning
o Interfaces
Pedagogy Used/Learning Process
SAIS would be a student led course. Students are required to be well-prepared with the session
readings so as to enable vibrant classroom discussions. Students are encouraged to identify similarities
between decision problems – across sports as well as across industry sectors.

Evaluation Components/Assessment of Student Learning

This section should focus on the various assessment/evaluation methods to be used, weights, and a
description about how the assessment would be done. In particular, why such assessment methods are
used.

Assessment Tool Percentage Description

Quizzes 0 End term would evaluate the students’
Midterm Exam 0 understanding of sport analytic concepts
End term Exam 35 and application of appropriate tools and
techniques toward addressing strategic
questions facing the decision maker
Class Preparation and 25 Students are expected to prepare by going
Participation – CP (class through the readings assigned for the
preparation in-class tests per session, and actively participating in the
session outline and classroom classroom deliberations. Instructor will
instructions) conduct quick in-class tests pertaining the
readings/ cases marked with ‘[!]’.
Project 40 This facilitates students to demonstrate the
ability to integrate the information and the
skills accumulated in their course with the
applied research in the respective areas.
This also gives them a chance to show
their skills in oral and writing
communication.

Session Plan
This section gives the detail regarding the topics to be covered, time required to cover each topic, the
module under which it fall, etc. Please note that some cases and readings of the session plan here are
marked with a ‘[!]’. These cases and readings would be focus of 5 minute in-class tests that will be
administered by the instructor. Best 7 scores of these tests would go into determining class preparation
(CP) scores.

S. Module Topic Reading material / Cases

N
1 Introduction Moneyball effect 1. CASE: Billy Beane at Oakland As – A – SPM53A-
and course overview PDF-ENG [!]
2. CASE: Billy Beane at Oakland As – B – SPM53B-
PDF-ENG
3. Chapters from ‘Keeping up with the Quants’,

2 Competing in sport Adjudicator and
& business of sport player
effectiveness
Davenport and Kim. HBR press book
1. Chapter one: – 7716BC 978-1-6252-7709-1
2. Chapter two:– 7694BC 978-1-6252-7693-3
3. Chapter three:– 7696BC 978-1-6252-7697-7
4. Chapter five:– 7718BC 978-1-6252-7711-4
1. Collins H & Evans R. 2011. Sport-decision aids and
the “CSI” effect: why cricket uses Hawk-eye well and
tennis uses it badly. Public Understanding of Science,
21(8): 904-921.
2. Shivakumar R. 2018. What technology says about
decision-making: evidence from cricket’s Decision
Review System (DRS). Journal of Sports Economics,
19 (3): 315 – 331 [!]

3 Business of Sport Resources 3. Whitaker K. 2013. Does a ‘coattail effect’ influence

selection the valuation of players in the Major League Baseball
draft? MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference,
Boston, US.
4. Jensen JA. 2016. Sponsorship revenue forecasting for
sports organizations: a survival analysis approach.
MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Boston, US.
5. Chan TCY & Fearing DS. 2013. The value of
flexibility in baseball roster construction. MIT Sloan
Sports Analytics Conference, Boston, US. [!]
6. WLW – 27, 33, 46

4 Competing in Sport Player 1. Rosales J & Spratt S. 2015. Who is responsible for a
effectiveness – 1 called strike? MIT Sloan Sports Analytics
Conference, Boston, US.
Project Kick off
2. Pope DG & Schweitzer E. 2011. Is Tiger Woods loss
averse? Persistent bias in the face of experience,
competition and high stakes. American Economic
Review, 101 (Feb ’11)
3. WLW – 3, 4, 5, 7

5 Business of Sport Prejudiced and 1. Buraimo B, Forrest D & Simmons R. 2009. The 12th
fixed man?: refereeing bias in English and German soccer.
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 173 (2). [!]
2. Scoppa V. 2008. Are subjective evaluations biased by
social factors or connections? An econometric
analysis of soccer referee decisions. Empirical
 Economics 35 (123-140).
3. Hagemann N, Strauss B & LeiBing J. 2008. When the
referee sees red…Psychological Science, 19 (8).
4. WLW – 34, 35, 36
6 Competing in Sport Leader/Player 1. Berry CR and Fowler A. 2019. How much do coaches
effectiveness – 2 matter? Sloan Sports Analytics Conference –
Research papers Finalist.
2. Lucey P, Bialkowski A, Monfort M, Carr P &
Mathews I. 2015. “Quality versus Quantity”: improve
shot prediction in soccer using strategic features from
spatiotemporal data. Sloan Sports Analytics
Conference – Research paper Finalist. [!]
3. Fernandez J, Bornn L and Cervone D. 2019.
Decomposing the immeasurable sport: a deep learning
expected possession value framework for soccer.
SSAC 2019 Research papers finalist.
4. Hochstedler J. 2018. Finding the open receiver: a
quantitative geospatial analysis of quarter-back
decision-making, SSAC 2018 Research papers
finalist.
5. WLW – 28, 29, 30.
7 Business of Sport Scheduling Using Graph theory to draw up schedules

1. Goossens, Dries & Spieksma, Frits. 2009. Scheduling

the Belgian Soccer League. Interfaces 39 (2) p109-
118 [!]
2. Kurt M, Karwan M, Pandey NK & Cunningham K.
2015. Alleviating competitive imbalance in NFL
schedules: an integer programming approach. MIT
Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Boston, US.
3. Bornn L, Ward P and Norman D. 2019. Training
schedule confounds the relationship between acute,
chronic workload ratio and injury. SSAC 2019
Research papers finalist.
4. JAG – VI Scheduling

8 Competing in Sport In-game decision 1. Poling, Alan; Edwards, Timothy L.; Weeden, Marc;
making – hot Foster, T. Mary. 2011. The Matching Law.
hand Psychological Record 61 (2), 313-322 [!]
2. Romanowich, Paul; Bourret, Jason; Vollmer,
 Timothy. 2007. Further analysis of the matching law
to describe two- and three-point shot allocation by
professional basketball players. Journal of Applied
Behavior Analysis 40 (2), 311-315
3. WLW – 31, 32, 37

9 Competing in Sport Hot hand 1. Green B. & Zwiebel J. 2016. The hot-hand fallacy:
contd… cognitive mistakes or equilibrium adjustments?
Evidence from major league baseball. MIT Sloan
Sports Analytics Conference, Boston, US.
2. Alter AL & Oppenheimer DM. 2006. From a fixation
on sports to an exploration of mechanism: the past,
present and future of Hot Hand research. Thinking &
Reasoning, 12 (4), 431-444.
3. Attali Y. 2013. Perceived hotness affects behavior or
basketball players and coaches. Psychological Science
24 (7), 1151-1156.

10 Competing in sport/ Brand 1. CASE: Maria Sharapova: Marketing a Champion – A

Business of Sport management in – 9-507-065
sports 2. CASE: Maria Sharapova: Marketing a Champion – B
– 9-507-066
Project Update 3. CASE: Magic Johnson: Endorsement after…? – 9-
592-057

11 Competing in sport/ Football (Soccer) 1. Foster BA and Binns MD. 2019. Analytics for the
Business of Sport Finance front office: valuing protections on NBA draft picks.
SSAC 2019 Research paper finals.
2. Other readings to be provided in due course

12 Business of Sport Stadium 1. Ibarra P & Lenz PE. 2016. Using digital signals to
attendance and measure audience brand engagement at major sports
television events: the 2015 MLB season. MIT Sloan Sports
demand Analytics Conference, Boston, US.
2. Funk DC, Beaton K, Anthony A. & Pritchard M.
2009. Measuring the Motives of Sport Event
Attendance: Bridging the Academic- Practitioner
Divide to Understanding Behavior. Sport Marketing
Quarterly, 18 (3), 126-138 [!]
3. Buraimo, Babatunde. 2008. Stadium attendance and
television audience demand in English league
football. Managerial & Decision Economics, 28 (6),
513-523
4. Byon KK, Zhang JJ, Connaughton DP. 2010.
Dimensions of general market demand associated
 with professional sports: development of a scale.
Sport Management Review 13.
5. Xu J, Fader P & Veeraraghavan S. 2015. Evaluating
the effectiveness of dynamic pricing strategies on
MLB single-game ticket revenue. MIT Sloan Sports
Analytics Conference, Boston, US.
6. Pagels, J. 2016. Competition from sports hurts TV
ratings: how to shift league calendars to optimize
viewership. MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference,
Boston, US.

13 Business of Sport Long-term 1. Hayward P & Patrick T. 2008. How good is a

contracts, Baseball Owner’s memory? The importance of career
memory and statistics versus recent performance in salary
moral hazard negotiations. Northeast Business & Economics
Association 35th Annual Conference.
2. Sen A & Rice BJ. 2011. Moral hazard in long-term
guaranteed contracts: theory and evidence from the
NBA. SSAC Research papers Finalist.
3. WSK – 2, 3, 4

14 Competing in Sport/ Bargaining, 4. Graham C. 2015. Diamonds on the line: profits

Business of Sport playing with through investment gaming. MIT Sloan Sports
money Analytics Conference, Boston, US.
5. Kumar DU & Ranjan K. 2012. Pricing of Players in
the IPL. Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. –
IMB379
6. Rastogi SK. & Deodhar SY. 2009. Player Pricing and
Valuation of Cricketing Attributes: Exploring the IPL
Twenty20 Vision. Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision
Makers, 34 (2), 15-23.
7. Case study of Impact Index
(http://www.wisdenindia.com/impactindexcricket/inde
x.php)
8. PDAD – 7
9. WLW – 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44
10. KLSDT

15 Project Project presentations

presentations&
conclusion 1. Goldreich D & Pomorski L. 2011. “Initiating
Bargaining”. Review of Economic Studies 78(4),
1299-1328. [!]
2. CASE: Earlam College Basketball: Turnaround
 strategy – 9-718-497
3. CASE: TSG Hoffenheim: Football in the age of
analytics – 9-616-010
4. CASE: John Hancock Financial Services: Sports
Sponsorship – 9-588-051

Additional Instructions (if any)

Students will forms teams, of a maximum of four (4), in which they will work for their SAIS project.
Regular updates of the projects have to be presented to the course instructor. Project marks would be
awarded on the basis of regular, high quality project work output.