Microsoft announces customized analytics Sports Performance Platform based on Azure/Power BI

Data is an absolutely massive deal when it comes to anything – whether it be engineering, architecture, or – as Microsoft’s reminding us – even sports. Microsoft has launched the Sports Performance Platform, a new platform of software that’s giving players and coaches an opportunity to numerically analyze the performance of players and teams as a whole to turn coaching into a science.

The best way to see the Sports Performance Platform at work is through this video, made by the Seattle Reign FC – a football club that’s one of the first to take this technology to its limits and see just what kind of applications it has. The team at the Seattle Reign FC use the video to show off the program, an talk a bit about why it’s so important for the future of sports for teams to start integrating this kind of data.

Head coach of the team, Laura Harvey, says that this kind of technology is giving precise answers to questions about the fitness of players – something that was very much up to interpretation in many cases beforehand. The Sports Performance Platform gives teams those kinds of answers by plugging in data to a system built on Power BI and Azure, and crunching those numbers in a way that can be easily interpreted and used.

This is just the beginning, as many sports teams haven’t quite gotten their hands on this yet – but you can rest assured that it’ll catch on. With Microsoft already deeply embedded as a partner of the NFL, it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see American football teams getting their hands on tools like this going into the next season.