Tennis at Wimbledon and Data Analytics are seemingly two different worlds. The tennis experience at Wimbledon has historically been steeped in tradition, with players dressed in all white, games played on grass courts, etc. However, Wimbledon has embraced digital technology adoption to engage with players, fans, and the press. Watson – IBM’s suite of enterprise-ready AI services, applications, and tooling has been ‘serving up the tradition with an innovative spin’ since 1990 at Wimbledon. The partnership has focussed on leveraging technology for game statistics and improving the game for individual players.
https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/all-england-lawn-tennis-club-ibm-ix/?lnk=wmblp
Since 1990, IBM has collected over 9.2 million data points related to Wimbledon. In 2021, Wimbledon reached 18 million fans through the digital platform. The focus of digital initiatives was to increase fan engagement and provide personalized content to millions of Wimbledon fans worldwide.
https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/all-england-lawn-tennis-club-ibm-ix/?lnk=wmblp
Some facts related to how Wimbledon leverages data & analytics:
Match Insights – These are AI-enabled facts about every singles match played at Wimbledon. The match insights combine advanced analytics and AI to fetch deeper insights into the matches played. In the analysis, Watson predicts each player’s Likelihood to Win, backed by reasoning and sharing the relevant Win Factors for each match.
‘Win Factors’ offers the fans an increased understanding of the factors affecting player performance- court surface, ATP/WTA rankings, a ratio of games won, head-to-head, recent performance, and yearly success.
‘Have Your Say’ is a new feature that allows fans to register their predictions for match outcomes, compare those with other predictions, and generate AI-powered ‘Likelihood to win’ probability.
IBM Power Index – IBM’s Watson uses advanced analytics and natural language processing to analyze performance data, mine media commentary, and gauge player momentum before and during Wimbledon to analyze player performance.
Besides 3rd party coverage, the Wimbledon team has targeted 28 million views on social platforms, 17 million on its digital platform, and 2.2 million through the personalized logged-in experience- ‘myWimbledon’ for deeper fan engagement.
https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/all-england-lawn-tennis-club-ibm-ix/?lnk=wmblp
AI Highlights uses AI to analyze crowd excitement, match action, gameplay stats, and player’s reactions and produces 2-minute highlight reels. This AI-driven process takes minutes instead of hours/ days earlier using the manual process.
https://www.weforum.org/videos/how-ai-is-changing-the-world-of-sport
The IBM Cloud infrastructure runs Wimbledon digital platforms that seamlessly handle the large volumes of traffic during championships that can increase by 55,000 times around the time of championships.
IBM Security on the cyber gateway blocked more than 40 million threats throughout the tournament in the past.
