For those of us who love sport, the Euros followed by the Olympics have given us a vintage summer. For those of us who love geeking out over data, even more so — because sport, like life itself, is ever more quantified, a world in which metrics are thoroughly analysed in the hope of finding an edge.
But while high-performance sport is hoping to learn from the geeks, there is also the possibility that the geeks may learn from sport. Sport is far more constrained than life, which helps social scientists looking for clear, sharp answers to vexing questions about how individuals and teams behave.
The economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta has been making this argument for many years, and recently published a working paper titled “The Beautiful Dataset”, surveying a wide landscape of economic topics that have been addressed using data from sport.