The link between sports performance and business performance

Chiraag Paul is the founder and CEO of Proem Sports, a pioneer in off-field sports analytics in India and Asia. Paul has also represented and played for top-division clubs in England, Brazil, and India. During Paul's visit to the Hyderabad campus, Deepak Agrawal, Associate Director of the ISB Applied Statistics and Computing Lab, caught up with him.

One of the major things that drives a club or a sport, in general, is the people who watch it. I was fortunate to understand that there was a divide between what the fans want and how the board within a league or a club makes decisions. Around this point, we started developing the idea of bringing analytics into sports, to take decision-making on the right path. 

Different industries outside the world of sports and entertainment use analytics to drive decisions anyway. Why can’t the sports industry start making business decisions based on analytics? Players have to be equally involved when it comes to clubs making decisions. We can bring in analytics and help clubs decide who these sponsors should be, thinking less about the tenure or the monetary benefits from that relationship and more about how the fans connect to that brand. 

By using off-field analytics to drive decisions, the players also come to understand what leads to commercial value By using off-field analytics to drive decisions, the players also come to understand what leads to commercial value some clubs and leagues base their economic and commercial decisions or marketing plans purely on analytics. 

India stands in a very good position when it comes to the value that sports businesses can derive from analytics. Sports is an industry where if you can bring in one customer, i.e., a fan, he or she is likely to stay with you for the rest of their lives. Today a lot of the fan following, especially in cricket, is based on where the players are. 

With any other sort of on-field analytics, a lot of the research and development has to go into solving one problem for one sport. From the perspective of fan engagement, there is a lot of celebrity influence in the sports business currently. Over time, once they start understanding the sport and the team, they move on from being a fan of the celebrity to being a fan of the club or the sport. 

However, the sport itself is so entertaining that over time, it started driving value and getting packed houses without the help of celebrities. Over the years, the stadium attendance and following of the clubs or the leagues came to be based not so much on the celebrity footballer but also on the team itself. Over a while, the loyalty is moving on from just celebrity to the game and the club. 

Sports is an industry where if you can bring in one fan, he or she is likely to stay with you for the rest of their lives. Proem wants to be able to influence the world of sport so that people make better decisions. So having the technical knowledge when it comes to the different coding languages would be great but asking relevant questions is crucial, apart from the passion that we spoke about before. 

Interacting with a CEO or Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the owner of a club or a league, and saying that we need to be looking at the issues from this perspective and not this perspective — requires a level of confidence. From a sports analytics perspective, there are a lot of things that this country has yet to adapt. 

What would be the last piece of advice that you would give to sports associations, regulators, leagues, clubs, and students? Where Proem Sports comes in and helps is this form of analytics. Clubs and leagues ever so often look for short-term results. For a long time, people believed that getting into the sports industry was a passion statement, or that it was a part-time job.

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