N matches and counting… it’s that time of year again when the football fever brings nations together, touching the hearts of its citizens and excitement takes over our daily lives for an entire month…!

Will a proven strategy along with passion, skill, endurance, training and preparation with the right players, a seasoned coach who can bring in-game intuition into play and perhaps a bit of luck be enough to determine the winner? While these are all the right ingredients, teams need to be able to differentiate in this high stakes business to score big.

Just like in the business world, sports is rapidly changing. Relying on outdated, offline and disparate systems, pre- and post-event analysis is no longer sufficient to win. Also in sports, where fractions of seconds can make a difference, digital transformation is taking hold. Enhancing player preparation, optimizing training drills, real-time, in-game challenger analysis and even penalty shootout predictions requires real-time data and analytics to be delivered to coaches throughout all phases of a tournament.

It is therefore no surprise that the German football team has once again teamed up with SAP to drive innovation and provide it the winning advantage with SAP’s in-memory big data platform delivered to coaches and players on mobile devices. But not only in football or in tournaments of this size are analytics (aka “sabermetrics”) taking hold. Data driven sports performance and analytics solutions are being implemented in leading clubs and sports academies across the world. Clariba, as the #1SAP Analytics partner in MENA has recently engaged with the leading sports academy in the MENA region to do just that – delivering the platform for winning athletes! Stay tuned for an update…

For now, back to exciting games at Euro 2016 - may the best team win!

Marc
#BeClariba

PS: Interesting read - http://bit.ly/24NEw81