Bundesliga Match Facts: Powered by AWS
Bundesliga is a professional association football league in Germany. The Bundesliga comprises 18 teams and operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the 2-second division league. Fifty-six clubs have competed in the Bundesliga since its founding. It is one of the top national leagues, ranked third in Europe according to UEFA’s league coefficient. Two of the most famous clubs who play this league are Bayern Munich and Borrusia Dortmund.
Sports and Stats Go Hand in Hand
And we’re here talking about one of the most popular sport in the World, English football or as USA claims as Soccer. Similar to other sports like Cricket, Hockey, NFL, etc maintains a record of stats for each game detailing team and player performance. Team managers use this information to make some of the tactics, such as what position they should play, what their weaknesses are, etc. In the world of statistics, there are some other interesting questions that can be answered as well.
In this era, sports have taken an unmistakable position in the public. An expansive number of individuals watch athletes on TV, and some see live games in the stadium. The statistical analysis of sports as an important part of society. Sports and statistics are used to compare and rank athletes and to set salaries too.
It can be difficult to estimate or calculate human-performance. Stats also play a major role in telling whether a specific player can possibly perform better or worse in essential circumstances or not.
Statistics in Sports is a valuable resource for sports analysts, students, teachers, and even sports fans.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Million of customers-including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies-are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster.
AWS and Bundesliga
It hasn’t been a long time since Bundesliga announced that they will cooperate with AWS services to deliver Real-Time Game Analysis with “Bundesliga Match Facts Powered by AWS”. The German Football League has become the world’s first football league to establish cooperation with AWS.
As the league’s official technology provider, the company will deliver innovations in the areas of match data acquisition and processing in order to further enhance the presentation quality of the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2. With the help of technology supplied by AWS, the overall experience will be decisively enriched in the following areas.
How will this help in enriching the overall experience?
- Advanced statistics will be available in real-time during live match coverage and highlights clips on all digital platforms.
- This will provide detailed insights into the match action as it happens.
- Utilizing the services of AWS, the right information can be delivered to all fans anytime, anywhere, on any device.
- Provide real-time predictions on when a goal is likely to be scored, identify potential goal-scoring opportunities, and highlight how teams are playing tactically.
“As the league with the highest average number of goals per game, and the highest stadium attendance globally, the Bundesliga is one of the most entertaining sports leagues in the world,” — Andy Isherwood, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
They featured their Match Facts first on May 26, 2020, featuring Borrusia Dortmund vs Bayern Munich on broadcast television in over 200 countries. They came up with two new statistics, Average Positions and Expected Goals (xGoals). It helps giving better, deeper insights into a team’s intended playing style based on the real-time analysis performed of data captured from tracking players’ locations on the field, and the probability of a player scoring a goal.
Bundesliga Match Facts are generated by gathering data from the live game video feeds that are streamed into AWS for analysis, and then provided back to broadcast viewers around the world in real-time as statistics.
Two New Bundesliga Match Facts powered by AWS
- Average Positions: It provides the fans to see the positioning of a team’s players on the pitch and gain insight into the team’s intended playing style. It also provides the player’s average location on the field, which is then displayed in real-time. It also allows viewers to identify the current momentum on the field and understand tactical changes. It will also help pinpoint if a team is setting up in an attacking or defending style, pressing up the middle, or utilizing the wings.
- xGoals: It provides the fans to actually see the probability of a player scoring a goal when shooting from any position on the field. The goal probability is calculated in real-time for every shot to give viewers insight into the difficulty of a shot and the likelihood of a goal. To calculate the precision of xGoals, machine learning models were trained by analyzing 40,000 historical shots on goal in addition to an array of features derived from positional data, including distance to the goal, angle to goal, player speed, etc.
Tech Insider
Being a football fan, I always wonder while watching a match that how did he score that was or how difficult was it to score that particular goal, or at how many places this midfielder is switching to, throughout the game and so. But with the naked eye and assumptions, it isn’t always clear that was the goal pretty easy or how the players made it easy in front of a strong defense or “Park the Bus” tactic. Now, with Machine Learning, Statistics, Technology, what is there that we can’t predict in the football world (Not always correct though!).
The main services of AWS that are being used to provide these Match Facts are Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Lambda, AWS Fargate, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS, Amazon Glacier.
Deutsche Football Liga (DFL) is responsible for the organization and marketing of Germany’s professional soccer league, Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2. In every match, DFL collects more than 3.6 million data points for deeper insights into what’s happening on the playing field.
It all starts with Data!
To bring Match Facts to life, several checks and processes happen before, during, and after a match. Various stakeholders are involved in data acquisition, data processing, graphics, content creation, and live commentary. With having up to 20 cameras for automatic optical tracking of player and ball positions over the stadium, nearly all the match events, such as shots at goals, passes made, shots at goals, are documented live and sent to the DFL systems for remote verification. Humans categorize events with additional situation-specific information. For example: What kind of foul that really was, type of shot taken, etc.
In the end, all the raw data is ingested into the Bundesliga Match facts system on AWS to calculate the xGoals values, which are then distributed worldwide for broadcasting. In the case of the official Bundesliga app and website, Match Facts are continuously displayed on end-user devices as soon as possible.
To understand more about xGoals: https://www.bundesliga.com/en/bundesliga/news/expected-goals-xg-model-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-useful-sportec-solutions-3177
To have a look at the inside infrastructure: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/the-tech-behind-the-bundesliga-match-facts-xgoals-how-machine-learning-is-driving-data-driven-insights-in-soccer/
